Detainees: Military is waiting longer before force-feeding hunger strikers

WASHINGTON — U.S. military officials at the Guantanamo Bay prison recently hardened their approach to hunger-striking prisoners, detainees have told their lawyers, and are allowing protesters to physically deteriorate beyond a point that previously prompted medical intervention to force-feed them.

The claim comes during two significant developments for the military commissions at Guantanamo this week, including a Supreme Court decision on Tuesday not to hear an appeal in a much-watched case. Together, the events are renewing attention on the wartime prison operation that President George W. Bush opened in 2002, that President Barack Obama tried without success to close and that President Donald Trump has so far left alone.

Of the 41 men remaining at the prison, 10 were charged or convicted in the commissions system and the rest are being held in indefinite wartime detention without trial. That group includes about five men who have gone on hunger strikes to protest, detainee lawyers say.

For years, the military has forcibly fed chronic protesters when their weight dropped too much. Detainees who refuse to drink a nutritional supplement have been strapped into a restraint chair and had the supplement poured through their noses and into their stomachs via nasogastric tubes.

But around Sept. 19, guards stopped taking hunger-striking detainees to feeding stations, said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for the international human rights organization Reprieve. He said this change was reported by two Reprieve clients who had been subjected to tube feedings, and corroborated by several other clients.

David Remes, who represents another hunger striker, said his client had been on such a strike since August but had not been tube-fed despite losing significant weight. The client also told him that other protesters were no longer being force-fed.

Another prisoner on a lengthy hunger strike — who was hospitalized in July, though he eats a small amount of solid food each day to accompany pain medication — told his lawyer on Sept. 21 that a prison official told him a day earlier that he would not be forcibly tube-fed, either, according to the lawyer, Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

A fifth detainee whom other prisoners have identified as a hunger striker does not have a lawyer.