A long-running hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay gained several participants in recent weeks amid complaints over conditions at a new unit of the prison. All were being force-fed through tubes, Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, said Monday.
How many is "all?" Somewhere between 13 and 40, depending on the DOJ's story or the statements of defense attorneys.
"My wish is to die," 27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer. "We are living in a dying situation."
Suicide is almost always a desperate act by someone who feels helpless and hopeless.
"I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell," says Omar Deghayes, a British refugee and Guantánamo Bay prisoner. "I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?"
The Nation
The 13 (or 40) detainees now on hunger strikes represent the highest number to undergo the force-feeding regimen on an extended basis since early 2006, when the military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners into "restraint chairs" while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils.
"We don't have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights," one hunger striker, Majid al Joudi, told a military physician, according to medical records made public recently under a federal court order. "If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting."
International Herald Tribune.
Hunger strikes have been part of life at Guantánamo almost since the detention center opened in January 2002.
They reached a peak in September 2005, when more than 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers, having refused at least nine consecutive meals, military records show. As the strikes persisted, some detainees being force-fed continued to lose weight by vomiting or siphoning out their stomachs with the feedings tubes. But by early February 2002, shortly after the military began using restraint chairs during the forced feedings, the number of hunger strikers plunged to three.
The number of hunger strikers shot up briefly to 86 last May after three detainees attempted suicide and a riot broke out as the guards searched for contraband. Yet even then, no more than 7 strikers endured the restraint chair regimen.
Three long-term hunger strikers hanged themselves June 10. After July, no more than 3 detainees subjected themselves to extended forced feeding.
From its inception, Guantánamo has relied on a soldier-speak that is replete with half-truths and distortions. In 2002 there was a ripple of concern at the number of Guantánamo detainees trying to take their own lives. The military then announced that suicide attempts had radically declined. It took a foreign journalist to expose the truth: The very word "suicide" had been replaced by the authorities with the term Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior (SIB)--and there were still plenty of SIBs. The military was lying by semantics.
Asymmetric warfare
In his introduction to the 1987 edition of Orwell's 1984, Ben Pimlott suggested Orwell's prophecy was wrong because his predictions had not come about by 1984. However, in his own appendix to Ninety-Eighty Four, Orwell wrote, "it was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak [Standard English] by about the year 2050". So there's still plenty of time and evidence that it's on the way.
When three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay military detention center hanged themselves, reports David Rose of The Observer, the center's commander said it was "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us".
The dead men, he said, had "no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own". A defence department spokesman said there was no need to regret these deaths because, "These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg," and the Pentagon reclassified hanging as "manipulative self-injurious behaviours". Online Opinion.
Force Feeding
Newly issued Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of restraint chairs, some detainees suffered sharp weight losses. A handful of those prisoners lost more than 30 pounds, or about 14 kilograms, in a matter of weeks, the records show. By comparison, the current hunger strike - in which 12 of the 13 were being force-fed as of Friday - seems almost symbolic.
For instance, the medical records for Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, show that when he was hospitalized Feb. 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 percent of his body weight.
To get an idea of what force-feeding has been like in the past, check out this editorial in the Washington Post which describes the author's experience of being "force-fed" in Stalinist Russia to illustrate what it might be like to receive a "force-feeding" in Guantanamo:
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.
Military officials have described the restraint-chair regimen as unpleasant but necessary. They originally said prisoners needed to be restrained while digesting, so they could not purge what they were fed.
Now, the rationale has changed: The restraints are generally applied "for safety of the detainee and medical staff," records show, and they are kept on for as little as 15 minutes at a time, rather than the two hours commonly used before. Afterwards, the prisoners are moved to a "dry room," and monitored to make sure they do not vomit.
Even so, some detainees describe the experience as painful, even gruesome.
One Sudanese detainee, Sami al Hajj, a 38-year-old former cameraman for the Arab television network Al Jazeera, described feeling at one point that he could not bear the tube for another instant. "I said I would begin to scream unless they took it out," he wrote in a recent diary entry given to his lawyer. "They finally did."
The World Medical Association specifically prohibits force-feeding in the Declarations of Tokyo and Malta, to which the American Medical Association is a signatory.
Excerpt from The Lancet, October 2006. PDF.
Descriptions of the suicides of 3 inmates at Guantanamo as "a good PR move" and "an act of war" by the US administration clearly shows a complete lack of insight and humanity into the medical aspects.
Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair.
"These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly," he said.
"There's no end in sight. They're not being brought before any independent judges. They're not being charged and convicted for any crime."
That view was supported by British Muslim Moazzam Begg who spent three years in Guantanamo. He said of the camp's inmates: "They're in a worse situation than convicted criminals and it's an act of desperation."
Rear Admiral Harris differed: "They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," he said.
"They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."
As long ago as 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte said, "It has always been recognised that torture produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything they think the interrogator wishes to know." Today the US Army's interrogation manual reads, "Use of torture and other illegal methods is a poor technique that yields unreliable results". So, it seems, torture is called something else.
It's all Humpty Dumpty's fault, insisting, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less".