Force-feeding of Gitmo hunger strikers violates both international law and medical ethics

This is how your tax dollars are being spent.

From the New Standard:
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Attorneys representing a disputed number of inmates engaged in a months-long hunger strike at the US-run prison camp in Guantanamo Bay are slamming the Pentagon's handling of the protest. Instead of meeting the desperate demands of the more than 200 prisoners who lawyers claim have been engaged in the act of civil disobedience, the military’s response has been to deny the attorneys access to their clients’ medical records and to force-feed the striking detainees in violation of international medical standards.

Inmates at the Guantanamo camps have intermittently engaged in hunger strikes since 2002, the year the detention center was established, but this latest protest, which began in August 2005, is the most widespread and prolonged.

Tina Foster, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a nonprofit legal organization that represents many of the detainees held at Guantanamo, told The NewStandard that the Department of Defense has "allowed the situation to become so dire that detainees are now under the impression that the only thing that will get world attention is their death."

CCR says that at least 200 prisoners have been involved in this hunger strike, but that delays in the information released from the detention center make it difficult to pinpoint the exact number.

Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy M. Martin, director of public affairs of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay, said the highest number of prisoners to have taken part in the hunger strike was 131, with 26 currently still not eating. He told TNS that medical personnel at the prison are providing "enteral nutrition," or tube-feeding, to 22 of the strikers.

Last week, Julia Tarver, an attorney representing ten detainees at Guantanamo, obtained judicial permission to publicly release her clients’ statements. She said her clients who are currently hunger striking described the conditions under which they were force-fed as "torture." They said their captors physically restrained them from head to toe and forcibly shoved large tubes up their noses and down into their stomachs without providing anesthesia or sedative. According to Tarver’s statement, the detainees said they vomited blood as a result of the force-feeding.

According to Tarver’s notes, in the presence of Guantanamo physicians, prison guards took tubes from one detainee and "with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee.When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes."

In her statement, Tarver added, "Detainees complying with the nasal tube-feeding were doing so only because they believed it had been ordered by a US court – a belief that is simply untrue."

Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially. -- World Medical Association

In fact, in a Wednesday ruling that resulted from an emergency petition by attorneys of Guantanamo detainees, US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered that the government inform counsel at least 24 hours before force-feeding inmates.
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