Hunger strikers tortured at Guantanamo. UN report calls for closing U.S. prison

The report calls for the closing of the prison and release or due process trials of the 517 detainees.

Prepared by five special human rights envoys, the report charges that the force-feeding causes excruciating pain and constitutes torture. The authors also found that brutality in the transport of the prisoners and several methods of interrogation also meet the definition of torture.

“We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government,” said Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture. “We concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.”

The UN team declined the Bush administration’s offer of a tour of Guantanamo because the Pentagon refused to allow them to question any of the detainees about their treatment. Thus the report focuses on the testimony of the few detainees who have been released.

One detainee, a Kuwaiti named Fawszi al-Odah, said he stopped his five-month hunger strike this month when he heard the screams of a fellow prisoner as guards rammed a feeding tube up his nose. Al-Odah reported that in December guards started taking clothes, shoes and blankets away from 85 hunger strikers. He charged that guards mixed Ex-Lax with the liquid formula force-fed to 40 other strikers, causing them to defecate on themselves.

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