Guantanamo Bay’s medical team is now force-feeding 41 of the 166 prisoners at the US detention facility. With four detainees in hospital, the strike shows no signs of abating a month after President Obama again pledged to close the base.
The latest press release from
the facility reported the rise in the number of inmates receiving
enteral feeds, up from the previous 39. The report also claims
that the four prisoners currently undergoing treatment in a
detainee hospital are not in critical condition.
The practice of force-feeding
the prisoners as a way of avoiding the political ramifications of
their death has been condemned as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading
treatment,” which is
illegal under international law.
Human Rights Watch (HRW)
brought the issue to the attention of the US government back in
May in a joint letter to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. The
rights group detailed the demeaning process by which a detainee
is “strapped into a chair
with restraints on his legs, arms, body, and sometimes head,
immobilizing him.”
“I can’t describe how
painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it
made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t.
There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never
experienced such pain before,” hunger-striker Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel
told HRW, relating the horrors of Gitmo’s force-feeding
room.
President Barack Obama’s pledge last month to work to close
the facility has apparently fallen by the wayside, with no steps
taken thus far. He also promised to end the ban on sending
prisoners who had been cleared for transfer back to Yemen, one of
the main obstacles impeding the closure of the camp.
On Monday, a Republican
representative proposed legislation that would effectively force
Obama to keep the facility open. The wording in the 2014 defense
authorization bill also prohibits the transfer of Guantanamo
inmates to the US or countries like Yemen, and would channel
$247.4 million of state funds to constructions costs.
The legislation was slammed by
Democrats as “a ridiculous waste of money” when the US
Military is making cuts to its budget.
The
prisoners at Guantanamo published a plea at the end of May for
the physicians overseeing their detention at the camp to be
changed. They argued that the current personnel are not impartial
to the wishes of the US government.
The letter was signed by nine of the Gitmo prisoners, as well as
the lawyers of several others.
Prisoners at Guantanamo began their hunger strike four months ago
as a desperate attempt to attract international attention to
their plight. Some of the inmates have been held without a trial
for over a decade, and many have expressed fears they will spend
the rest of their lives in their cells in Guantanamo.
This article originally appeared on: RT