Guantanamo Detainees on Hunger Strike Tortured and Violently Force-Fed by Guards, Medical

For the past three months, over 100 detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay have been on a hunger strike protesting their conditions at the prison and their indefinite detentions. The United States is holding about 500 detainees at Guantanamo. Some prisoners have now been held for almost four years without charge.

The hunger strike began in the first week of August. At its height in mid-September, 131 detainees were participating. In newly declassified documents, made public by their defense attorneys, detainees on the strike claim that they were mistreated by U.S soldiers. The detainees say that they were violently force-fed with large, dirty feeding tubes and that the soldiers taunted them, saying that the treatment was intended to force them to end the strike.

* Julia Tarver, attorney with the New York City-based law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and cooperating counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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