Number of force-fed Gitmo hunger strikers rises to 29
Iran Press TV
Tue May 14, 2013 8:37AM GMT
While the number of hunger strikers being force-fed at US military’s Guantanamo detention and torture camp has climbed to 29, new details reveal that prison commanders rather than medical doctors decide who undergoes the torturous procedure.
Deputy Director of the prison’s public affairs office, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House, announced on Monday that the number of Guantanamo captives being force-fed has increased to 29 with five of them remaining under watch in the prison hospital but not currently suffering from “life-threatening conditions,” RT reported.
Moreover, in a separate report, RT further reveals that authorities at the military detention center have revised the way they force-feed the hunger strikers, requiring them to wear “masks” over their mouths while being shackled to a restraint chair for up to two hours.
Nasal tubes are then jammed up the nose of the protesting inmates until a liquid supplement reaches their stomachs.
The tubes, 61cm in length or longer, “stay in the prisoners’ nostrils until a chest X-ray or a test dose of water show that the nutritional supplement has reached the prisoner’s stomach.”
“The shocking procedure doesn’t stop there,” according to the report. “Detainees are then sent to a ‘dry cell’ with no running water while they undergo supervision to make sure they don’t vomit. If they regurgitate their supplement, they’re sent right back to the restraint chair.”
What is even more disturbing about the extremely painful practice, condemned by the UN as torture, is that the “final decision regarding who will be force-fed is left up to Guantanamo Commander John Smith - not physicians,” the report adds.
Details of the "chair restraint system clinical protocol" were released in a newly revised document titled Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Guantanamo hunger strikers by the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has oversight over the joint task force that operates the infamous US military prison camp in Cuba.
According to the document, “In the event a detainee refrains from eating or drinking to the point where it is determined by the medical assessment that continued fasting will result in a threat to life or seriously jeopardize health, and involuntary feeding is required, no direct action will be taken without the knowledge and written approval of Commander.
Thus, while doctors remain present at the force-feeding site, they are merely there to carry out the military’s commands.
Giving Commander Smith such extreme power to decide who gets force-fed “violates core ethical values of the medical profession,” American Medical Association President Dr. Jeremy Lazarus wrote in a letter to US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel last month.
“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Lazarus added. “The AMA has long endorsed the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, which is unequivocal on the point: ‘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.’”
The development comes as Guantanamo prison authorities put the number of hunger striking inmates there at 100, contradicting reports by a number of inmate lawyers, who have put the figure at 130 or more, out of the 166 captives that are indefinitely being held at the camp without charges or a legal trial.
MFB/MFB
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