Force-Feeding an End to Guantanamo Dissent

Report for UN calls the practice akin to `torture'

By Michelle Shephard

04/08/06 "Toronto Star " -- -- Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—The Pentagon says its goal is simple.

The lives of detainees held as suspected terrorists will be preserved, and the U.S. military takes great pride in the fact that no one has died since this internment camp opened four years ago.

Detainees have tried. There have been suicide attempts and more than 100 of the 490 detainees still here have stopped eating at various times to protest being held without charges.

Now just four prisoners are continuing their hunger strike; three are being fed through tubes inserted in their noses extending down to their stomachs. If they refuse, they will be shackled and the tube will be inserted anyway.

What officials won't say publicly, but concede privately, is that it's not just the lives of the detainees they're fighting to preserve — it's a fight for Guantanamo itself.

Calls to close down the prison at the U.S. naval base in Cuba that holds "enemy combatants" outside the protections of international conventions and U.S. laws continue to get louder.

The United Nations recently joined the fray after an 18-month investigation and urged Washington last month to close the detention facility and bring the prisoners to trial on U.S. territory.

And while there's condemnation over the force-feeding of detainees (the UN says the practice is akin to torture), if a detainee were to die here, the Bush administration knows the fallout would be disastrous for the Republican government.

"The worst case would be to have someone go from zero to hero," one official said this week, on condition of anonymity.

"We don't want a Bobby Sands."

Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, became an internationally recognized name in the early 1980s when he died after 66 days of a hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze prison. His death bolstered the group's ranks and more than 75,000 people attended his funeral.

Access to the base's detainees is restricted.

No outside organization, except the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make its observations public, have been permitted to speak with detainees.

But some former hunger strikers have spoken through their lawyers.

Detainee Fawzi Al Odah, who left Kuwait in 2001 to teach in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was arrested in the fall of 2001, after he says a tribal leader invited him to dinner, then sold him into captivity.

He went on a hunger strike in August last year and after three weeks fainted in his cell, his lawyer Thomas Wilner wrote last month in the Miami Herald. Following his collapse, Odah was fed through a tube. When he tried to pull it out, he was strapped to a stretcher.

"When I met Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin," Wilner said.

Odah, and 79 other hunger strikers gave up their protest in January when Guantanamo acquired "restraint chairs." Recalcitrant detainees would be strapped in the chairs, sometimes for hours, to prevent them from removing their tubes or inducing vomiting.

The Pentagon confirmed the chairs were in use but denied force-feeding was inhumane. "Well, yes, we know that Al Qaeda is trained in trying to make wild accusations and so forth," White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said in February.

"But the president has made it very clear what the policy is, and we expect the policy to be followed. And he's made it very clear that we do not condone torture, and we do not engage in torture."

The policy to tube-feed detainees appears to contradict what's set out in Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration to which the United Sates is bound through its membership with the American Medical Association.

It states: "Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the doctor 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."

Former commander of the base Maj.-Gen. Jay Hood told a group of civilian doctors, psychologists and ethicists who visited the camp's medical facility in October 2005 that doctors had been "screened, before coming to Guantanamo, "to ensure they do not have ethical objections to assisted feeding," according to an account of that visit in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Doctors here are following a Pentagon directive that instructs them to force-feed.

"There is a moral question,'" the assistant secretary of defence for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder, told The New York Times in a recent interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Winkenwerder said after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the conclusion it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

That ethical dilemma, and ultimately the question of whether a detainee can kill himself, now falls to the U.S. federal courts.

On March 10, 250 physicians from around the world condemned the force-feeding in a letter that appeared in the British medical journal Lancet.

Physicians who signed the letter included former military doctors, psychiatrists and South African physician John Kalk, who refused to force-feed hunger strikers in Johannesburg jails during the apartheid years.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
 

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