Many Guantanamo detainees on hunger strike

More than a dozen detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are on hunger strike to protest their treatment and are being force-fed, a media report said on Monday quoting military officials and lawyers for detainees.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers told the New York Times that their clients’ actions were driven by harsh conditions in a new security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

There are 13 detainees now on hunger strike. They are monitored closely. Their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and guards at Guantanamo has continued even as the military has tightened its control, the Times said.

“We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” one hunger striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military physician, the report said quoting medical records released recently. “If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting.”

A military spokesman at Guantanamo, Cmdr. Robert Durand of the Navy, the Times said, played down the significance of the current hunger strike, describing the prisoners’ complaints as “propaganda.”

But the paper says newly released Pentagon documents show that during earlier hunger strikes, before the use of restraint chairs, some detainees suffered sharp weight losses.

By comparison, the current hunger strike in which 12 of the 13 were being force-fed as of Friday seems almost symbolic. For instance, the medical records for Joudi, a 36-year-old Saudi, show that when he was hospitalised on February 10, he had been fasting for 31 days and had lost more than 15 per cent of his body weight.

©2007Times Internet Limited

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