At Guantanamo, Dying Is Not Permitted

[Judi Lynn]

At Guantanamo, Dying Is Not Permitted
A TIME Investigation: The Supreme Court handed the prisoners at Gitmo a victory, but authorities there continue to use harsh methods to break one of their most common methods of protest — the hunger strike
By ADAM ZAGORIN

Posted Friday, Jun. 30, 2006
The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won a major victory this week when the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration's planned military tribunals. But for many prisoners at the detention facility, the protests haven't stopped. Hunger strikes persist, in what Guantanamo commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris, Jr. has called "asymmetric warfare" — a means to attract attention to their increasingly controversial detention. As a result, the camp's administrators have sought to keep prisoners alive at all cost — because a prisoner's death (as the U.S. found out three weeks ago, when three Gitmo inmates committed suicide) can be a major embarrassment for the U.S. and add fuel to widespread demands for the facility to be shut down.

Civil-liberties advocates point out that Guantanamo's 460 inmates have few other means to make their voices heard, given that most have been detained for more than four years without even being charged with a crime. Indeed, though the U.S. has condemned the hunger strikers at Gitmo, just last year the White House hailed a hunger-striking Iranian dissident for showing "that he is willing to die for his right to express his opinion."

At Gitmo, however, dead prisoners are something the U.S. military wishes devoutly to avoid. So force-feeding has been standard policy at the camp ever since hunger strikes began in early 2002. The facility's top physicians have also told TIME that prisoners who resist are subjected to especially harsh methods. In one case, according to medical records obtained by TIME, a 20-year old named Yusuf al-Shehri, jailed since he was 16, was regularly strapped into a specially designed feeding chair that immobilizes the body at the legs, arms, shoulders and head. Then a plastic tube that is 50% larger, and more painful to insert, than the commonly used variety was inserted up through his nose and down his throat, carrying a nutritional formula into his stomach.

Thousands of people, of course, endure some form of voluntary intra-nasal feeding every day in hospital settings. But when force-feeding is involuntary and the recipient is in a state of high anxiety, the muscles tense up and the procedure can trigger nausea, bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting. "We are humane and compassionate,"; Guantanamo commander Harris told TIME, "but if we tell a detainee to do something, we expect the detainee to do it." As a note scrawled in al-Shehri's medical records put it: "{The prisoner} was informed that dying is not permitted."
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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1209530,00.html?promoid=rss_nation

[Kagemusha]

1. The US tried to take back the 'asymetrical warfare' line but...

it lives on after its apparent death as the living dead...