Hunger Strike? We'll Tie You Down And Force You To Eat... Damn It!

Guantanamo Force-Feeding Tactics Are Called Torture

Lawyers for a captive at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say their client was tortured to coerce him into abandoning a lengthy hunger strike, and they contend that tactics used to force-feed detainees explicitly violate a new federal law that bars cruel or degrading treatment of people in U.S. custody.

In a 13-page filing released yesterday, the lawyers say U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay used harsh and unnecessary tactics to break a hunger strike that at one point included more than 100 detainees. Invoking a new law principally written by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the lawyers said the military illegally made the force-feeding process painful and humiliating to coerce cooperation from the detainees.

The new procedures were instituted in early January. They include strapping detainees to a chair, forcing a tube down their throats, feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water, and leaving them in the chair for as long as two hours to keep them from purging the food, according to detainee accounts and military officials. Detainees told their attorneys that the tactics, first reported last month in the New York Times, caused them to urinate and defecate on themselves and that the insertion and removal of the feeding tube was painful.

Mohammad Bawazir, a Yemeni detainee who was the subject of Friday's filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, told his lawyers he began his hunger strike in August and was determined to die in Cuba but stopped resisting the force-feeding last year when he decided it was futile. Bawazir's attorneys said he had been allowing the feedings -- through a tube that was left in at all times -- but the tactics changed dramatically on Jan. 11, when the military strapped Bawazir to a chair and forced a much larger tube into his nose and down his throat, causing him "unbearable pain."

During the 1970s psychiatric facilities used 4-point restraints to force patients to take medications. This was ruled an unconstitutional method of "treatment" because it amounted to coercion and an unethical form of torture except in the most extreme cases where danger to self or others was involved... even then the rules were changed to prohibit prolonged restraint or continuous involuntary medicating.

How then can putting someone into restraints and forcing a naso-gastric tube down their gullet to force-feed sustanence be considered even remotely legal or humane? We don't treat psychiatric patients or sick animals this way, but the detainees at Gitmo are considered less than human and not entitled to basic rights?