Hunger
Strike Expanding
Despite Repression
At Guantánamo Prison Camp
By Tom Carter
12 April, 2007
World
Socialist Web
Despite
the threat of retaliation by prison guards, several more Guantánamo
prisoners recently joined an ongoing hunger strike, according to an
April 8 article in the New York Times. US authorities acknowledge that
13 prisoners are now on hunger strike, though lawyers who have recently
visited the prison put the number as high as 40.
In October 2005, after as
many as 150 prisoners, or more than a third of the prison’s population,
had joined a long-running hunger strike, the prison authorities ordered
a ruthless force-feeding crackdown. Hunger strikers were strapped to
restraint chairs, and feeding tubes were forcefully inserted through
the prisoners’ nostrils without anesthetic, often while the prisoner
struggled to remove the tube. Prison guards lacking the requisite medical
training used tubes “with the bile and the blood still on the
tube from the previous detainee,” according to one lawyer who
spoke with the victims of this procedure.
The number of strikers dropped
precipitously in the face of this vindictive policy.
That a hunger strike could
now expand under conditions where prisoners can expect this treatment
can only reflect the desperation of the Guantánamo inmates, who
have been placed outside the protection of both international and US
federal law. Many of the inmates, some of whom were captured as teenagers,
are in their fifth year of incarceration, and in the five-year history
of the camp, only 10 prisoners have ever been charged with a crime.
“My wish is to die,”
27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer.
“We are living in a dying situation.”
The newly expanded Guantánamo
Bay prison houses almost 400 individuals, most swept up in the initial
stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and carried away by US
soldiers. The prison’s name has become synonymous with torture,
humiliation, religious persecution, sexual abuse, and the abrogation
of the most basic democratic rights associated with the so-called “war
on terror.”
The brutal force-feeding
practices at Guantánamo have been widely documented and roundly
denounced by numerous human rights watch groups, including the American
Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International (AI), the Center for Constitutional
Rights, Human Rights First, the UN Human Rights Commission, and Physicians
for Human Rights.
A recent AI report cited
one prisoner who described how “three times, the tube had been
inserted the wrong way so that it went into his lungs; he said he frequently
vomited after being force-fed and was not given clean clothes.”
“Guards have allegedly
subjected hunger-striking detainees in one block to further punitive
treatment,” the report continued, “such as pepper spraying
them or turning the air-conditioning up high.”
Sami al-Hajj, a 38-year-old
former cameraman for the Al-Jazeera news agency, described the terror
and pain that accompanied the prolonged presence of the feeding tube
in his throat in a diary entry he gave to his lawyer: “I said
I would begin to scream unless they took it out.... They finally did.”
Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand,
a Guantánamo spokesman, acknowledged in statements to the press
that all of the current hunger strikers are being force-fed though feeding
tubes inserted through the nose. Some have been relocated to a special
“feeding block” outfitted with restraint chairs designed
for the more determined hunger strikers.
Guantánamo officials
have defended the practice of force-feeding as “safe and humane.”
According to lawyers for
the inmates, the renewed hunger strike is largely a response to the
opening in December 2006 of a $38 million concrete-walled facility dubbed
“Camp 6,” which features tiny, sealed, windowless cells
for each inmate. Many inmates who were formerly housed in primitive
cages next to other inmates now find themselves arbitrarily placed in
solitary confinement in Camp 6, deprived of all contact with other inmates
and the outside world.
According to the recent AI
report, prisoners at Camp 6, which houses 160 inmates, are kept locked
in their sealed cells for 22 hours a day and are only allowed two hours
of exercise in mesh cages each day. Bright fluorescent lights are kept
on at all times, temperatures are kept low, contact between prisoners
is forbidden, virtually no personal items are allowed, and female guards
watch prisoners while they shower and use the toilet.
Under these conditions, it
is no surprise that the mental health of the prisoners deteriorates
rapidly and prisoners are willing to take more reckless and desperate
actions to call attention to their situation.
“They’re just
sitting on a powder keg down there,” lawyer Sabin Willett told
the Times. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”
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