What more could he be hiding?
From the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency:
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Amid growing concern over the fate and conditions of inmates engaged in a lengthy hunger strike at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Tuesday said he would not permit U.N. investigators to interview detainees there.
Rumsfeld depicted the strike, in which about half of the estimated 540 detainees at the prison have so far reportedly taken part since July, as a deliberate effort to attract media attention. He stressed that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will continue to have unlimited access to the prisoners, some of whom have been held for four years without trial.
"(T)here are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that," Rumsfeld told reporters during a press conference at the Pentagon. "So it's clearly a technique to try to the get the attention of you folks, and they're successful," he added.
International pressure to open the camp to U.N. investigators has intensified due to reports by some detainees' lawyers of protracted hunger strikes sparked by the failure of prison authorities to follow through on alleged commitments to improve camp conditions. These include complying with Geneva Convention standards and implementing a 16-month-old ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to permit inmates to appeal their status to an independent court that is not under the Pentagon's control.
The prison authorities have reportedly responded to the strikes by force-feeding weakened inmates by strapping them to tables and inserting long tubes through their nasal passages.
According to recently declassified statements by detainees to their attorneys, feeding procedures amount to torture and are being carried out in a sadistic manner.
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