Hunger strike expanding despite repression at Guantánamo prison camp

In October 2005, after as many as 150 prisoners, or more than a third of the prison’s population, had joined a long-running hunger strike, the prison authorities ordered a ruthless force-feeding crackdown. Hunger strikers were strapped to restraint chairs, and feeding tubes were forcefully inserted through the prisoners’ nostrils without anesthetic, often while the prisoner struggled to remove the tube. Prison guards lacking the requisite medical training used tubes “with the bile and the blood still on the tube from the previous detainee,” according to one lawyer who spoke with the victims of this procedure.

The number of strikers dropped precipitously in the face of this vindictive policy.

That a hunger strike could now expand under conditions where prisoners can expect this treatment can only reflect the desperation of the Guantánamo inmates, who have been placed outside the protection of both international and US federal law. Many of the inmates, some of whom were captured as teenagers, are in their fifth year of incarceration, and in the five-year history of the camp, only 10 prisoners have ever been charged with a crime.

“My wish is to die,” 27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer. “We are living in a dying situation.”

The newly expanded Guantánamo Bay prison houses almost 400 individuals, most swept up in the initial stages of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and carried away by US soldiers. The prison’s name has become synonymous with torture, humiliation, religious persecution, sexual abuse, and the abrogation of the most basic democratic rights associated with the so-called “war on terror.”

The brutal force-feeding practices at Guantánamo have been widely documented and roundly denounced by numerous human rights watch groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International (AI), the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, the UN Human Rights Commission, and Physicians for Human Rights.

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