| Wonder why only four are engaged in hunger strikes, per the previous article? Here's why. |
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers. The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.
Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center. Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. He said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.
| He could have pointed out that Stalin never really cared if a hunger striker died. |
| A nasogastric feeding tube is not brutal, nor is it inhumane. It is not brutal to insert, and it isn't inhumane to pump a few hundred ml's of feeding solution into a prisoner. |
Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health. "There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"
Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves. "The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.
| Correct. |
| They also don't want the lil' darlings to die, which means, according to them, the only choice we have is to cave completely. |
After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains. "This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."
Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."
Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.
Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.
In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Mr. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients. Mr. Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives.
Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.
Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.
"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-Ã -vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."
| Except that they haven't become more extreme, they're just using the tools they already had. |
Mr. Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Mr. Wilner said.
| That would defeat the purpose of feeding, so I doubt that's true. |
Mr. Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Mr. Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day.
| "Okay, Tyrone, turn off the 'scream tape'. He's cooperating now." |
| Wotta buncha wussies. |
