Guantanamo's sinister re-branding of force-feeding

By Harkirit Boparai

The PR team at Guantanamo Bay have been engaging in a campaign of smoke and mirrors of late to try and cover up the abuse that still remains at Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, detainees such as our client Emad Hassan are still suffering the same abuse, at the hands of the same authorities, that they have been for the past 12 years.

Rather than use a widely-recognised term that describes the peaceful protest being made by the detainees, the authorities at Guantanamo have decided to come up with (what they hope is) a sterile and innocuous-sounding term:  “long term non-religious fast”. This change in terminology was revealed through a Freedom of Information request for a document entitled: “Medical management of detainees with weight loss”. The third time Standard Operating Procedures around strikers have changed in the last year, this comes just a few months after the US stopped releasing figures of those on hunger strike. "It's (the strikers') desire to draw attention to themselves, and so we're not going to help them do that", the head of the PR team at the camp said. 

“Medical management” or “medical intervention” is the term the authorities use to describe the brutal practice of force-feeding (in the past also referred to as ‘enteral feeding’), which was demonstrated in a Reprieve video with Yasiin Bay (aka Mos Def) last year. The rate at which detainees are fed has recently led to comparisons with waterboarding, and accusations have been levelled at participating doctors of complicity in torture. Indeed, the 2006 Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers states:

“Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable. Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the forced feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting”.

Semantic adjustments are commonplace attempts by the administration to try and tone down the brutality of abuse at Guantanamo. For example, the acronym FCE stands for ‘forcible cell extraction’, and describes the process of around four troops rushing into a cell, taking a limb of a ‘non-compliant’ detainee (hunger striker)  and dragging them to their force-feeding session. These feedings take place in a ‘restraint chair’, described repeatedly by our clients as a ‘torture chair’. Solitary confinement is referred to as a ‘single cell operation’.

Reprieve is currently bringing litigation on behalf of Emad, who has been force-fed more than 5,000 times since 2007, despite being cleared for release since 2009. Letters from Emad describe how the force-feeding has got progressively worse, becoming more and more violent, to the point where Emad was force-fed in front of other detainees in order to deter them.

Outside of Guantanamo Bay, hunger strikers are often praised as heroes: the suffragettes were  force-fed, and Mahatma Ghandi said that "under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness”. However, for those men being held in Guantanamo Bay striking peacefully, like Emad, such recognition will only come once litigation successfully proves the brutality that the authorities are trying to obscure, and Obama fulfils his promise of shutting down the facility once and for all.

 http://www.reprieve.org.uk/blog/guantanamo_sinister_rebranding_of_force_feeding/