FEEDING TORTURE
Criticism grows of Obama’s willingness to force-feed prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who are on a hunger strike
In 2009, u.S. president Barack Obama told the world his country was against torture. Waterboarding was unethical and it was no excuse to say it saved lives, the president indicated.
“I believe that waterboarding was torture and whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake,” he said.
Now, Mr. Obama stands accused of using torture — to save lives by forcefeeding inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
“It is certainly cruel treatment and I think it can rise to the level of torture,” said Wells dixon, senior staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional rights in New york who represents eight detainees at the u.S. prison camp.
“you have individuals who are completely strapped down, tubes shoved down their throats, force-fed for hours and treated very, very roughly. This is not just an effort to keep them alive; it’s to punish them.”
Mr. Obama is not the first politician to face the dilemma of what to do with prisoners on hunger strike: risk creating martyrs by letting them die; or force-feed them, despite public outrage and medical and legal challenges.
But with at least 105 detainees now on hunger strike at Guantanamo — up from just a couple in March — the pressure is increasingly on the president to act.
Last week, dianne Feinstein, the democratic Senate intelligence committee chairwoman, said the practice appears to contravene international norms. Force-feeding has also been condemned by the medical profession, worldwide and in the united States. Hunger striking has a long history. In eighth-century Ireland it was used as a shaming method of conflict resolution. Villagers would camp out on the doorsteps of people who had wronged them, by failing to repay a loan, for instance.
In 1917, Thomas Ashe, an Irish republican Brotherhood prisoner, died after being force-fed. His death led the British government to free other hunger strikers. The Irish republican Army used hunger strikes in the 1980s.
The tactic was also adopted by suffragettes in Britain and the u.S. in the early 20th century in their fight for women’s suffrage.
The roots of the Guantanamo protest go back to February, when prison guards reportedly began aggressive searching cells. Some detainees complained their Korans were being searched and called for the practice to stop. Authorities denied mishandling the holy books.
George Annas, professor of health law, bioethics and human rights at Boston university, said after the appointment of a new commander at Guantanamo, prisoners said “conditions have worsened and that their treatment is less respectful.”
More importantly, inmates who had been there for 11 years felt hopelessness at a future in which they remained imprisoned without charge.
“Frustration is verging on desperation over the continued political impasse that has left them in limbo where so many of them are cleared for release,” he said.
Prof. Annas believes the Obama administration is in breach of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment and violence to life and person.”
“There is no question that putting a person in a restraint chair, inserting a tube in them, and feeding them against their will is inhumane and degrading,” he said.
The Center for Constitutional rights says 133 of the 166 prisoners at Gitmo are on hunger strike — higher than other reports — and 44 are being force-fed.
david Frakt, a military law expert and former lawyer for two Guantanamo detainees, considers force-feeding inhuman and inconsistent with u.S obligations under international law.
“Both the World Medical Association and American Medical Association have categorized force-feeding without informed consent of the patient as a form of human rights abuse, if not torture. And I concur with that,” he said.
Mr. Frakt believes the Obama administration lives by the policy “the blow-back from allowing a detainee to die would be greater than the blowback from force-feedings.”
The World Medical Association’s Malta declaration explicitly states the forced feeding of hunger strikers is unethical and never justified.
In April, dr. Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, wrote to Chuck Hagel, the u.S. defence secretary, reiterating it violated medical ethics to force-feed mentally competent adults who refuse food and life-saving treatment.
One hunger striker, Shaker Aamer, a Saudi Arabian citizen and British resident who has been cleared for release twice but is still at Guantanamo, told the head of the charity reprieve this month, “I do not want to be force-fed. I don’t want to die either, but this is a living death here in Guantanamo, so if I have to risk death for a principle, that is what I want to do.
“I am not yet being force-fed. The new procedure is to wait until people are really badly off and have physically harmed themselves, perhaps permanently, before force-feeding, which then just keeps us barely alive, as a husk of a human being.”
Last week, Ms. Feinstein wrote to the Pentagon, saying, “Hunger strikes are a long-known form of non-violent protest aimed at bringing attention to a cause, rather than an attempt of suicide … I urge you to re-evaluate the force-feeding policies at Guantanamo Bay and to put in place the most humane policies possible.”
u.S. courts have often ruled on the legality of force-feeding where an inmate’s life is in danger.
This year, an appeals court in New york upheld the right of prison authorities to force-feed a prisoner, even though he claimed his refusal to eat was a form of protest, not a suicide attempt.
The state’s interest in protecting the health of inmates “outweighs an individual inmate’s right to make personal choices about what nourishment to accept,” the court said. The european Court of Human rights has also ruled force-feeding a prisoner may not be inhumane treatment.
But it has found the practice was “torture” in certain instances where excessive force was used or the practice was intended to stop a protest, rather than be a medical necessity.
Still, even Mr. Obama has acknowledged force-feeding inmates makes the u.S. look bad.
“Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are?” he asked in May.
“Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?”
Analysts argue the only way to stop the hunger strikes is to free the prisoners and close Guantanamo.
Mr. dixon said Mr. Obama had the power to close Guantanamo, but he did not want to upset the u.S. Congress.
“That’s really the only way this hunger strike will be resolved,” he said.