Words of Iqbal

An article by Press tv on the condition of detainees in Guantanamo bay

First death ‘a matter of time’ as Gitmo hunger strike continues
Mon May 6, 2013 5:46AM
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With the first strikers beginning three months ago, several of the Guantanamo Bay hunger strikers are now in failing health, and while the military is trying to downplay that, and is trying to ameliorate the situation with force-feedings, experts say that the first deaths are now just “a matter of time.”

23 are now being force-fed, a process sparking criticism of its human rights implications, and four of the detainees are now shackled permanently to beds in the hospital wing, too weak to move.

“They won’t let us live in peace and now they won’t let us die in peace,” complained Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held since 2002 on allegations that he once received personal religious instruction from Osama bin Laden. He has never had a trial and has been repeatedly abused in custody.

For the first two months of the strike, prisoners were in a communal detention center, though in April troops attacked the center and forced the strikers into solitary confinement, nominally for security reasons.

The military insists it is providing top notch medical treatment to the detainees, and “will not allow them to commit suicide,” nor will they change any of the policies that prompted the strikes in the first place.

While they have done a remarkable job of keeping the crisis mostly out of the American press for the past few months, however, there is no way they can keep a hunger strike going permanently while force-feeding the captives, and when the detainees do start dying it may well force the administration to seriously reconsider its policies. Antiwar
HIGHLIGHTS
As President Barack Obama pledged to press for Guantanamo’s closure last week, detainees described how it has gone back to the draconian regime of the Bush administration. The Independent

“Defense lawyers have tried to engage in constructive dialogue but we have been met with resistance and silence,” explained U.S. Army Captain Jason Wright, a lawyer who described seeing his client Obaidullah, now a 115lb “bag of bones” , a few days ago as “extremely distressing.”

“I have pain in waist, dizziness. I cannot sleep well. I fell [sic] hopeless. I cannot exercise. My muscle become weaker in the last 50 days. I have thrown up five times,” wrote Obaidullah, a 32-year-old Afghan who has never been charged despite 11 years imprisonment. The Independent

“When I walked into the room he was demonstrably changed. He said, ‘They won’t treat us with dignity, they are treating us like dogs’. There is an urgency. It is clear that if this hunger strike continues there will be deaths. These men are going to die in this prison for nothing. It is an absolute outrage,” said Capt Wright. The Independent

The Guantanamo inmates started the hunger strike in early February when the prison’s guard force improperly handled their Qur’ans during searches and also as a protest to their indefinite detention.

The detainees are offered a meal or a liquid nutritional supplement, and, if they refuse, they are strapped into a chair. A nurse then passes a tube through their noses and down into their stomachs; for one to two hours, they are fed a drip of Ensure while a Navy corpsman watches. Those who have experienced force-feeding have described it as painful. Washington Post

The U.S. military itself has confirmed that at least 40 "medical personnel" have arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in order to expand a force-feeding operation designed to counter the ongoing hunger strike by more than 100 prisoners.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and a United Nations (UN) working group on arbitrary detention, the indefinite detention of individuals, “most of whom have not been charged, goes beyond a minimally reasonable period of time” and “constitutes a flagrant violation of international human rights law”. The Dissenter

Amnesty International was among several human rights organizations to describe the situation at the camp in Cuba as “at crisis point” this week while UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez condemned the continued detention as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”
AT/HJ
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