Tag: Hunger Strike

Guantánamo Bay hunger strike worsens [Article]

Vladimir Bukovsky in the Washington Post in 2005 wrote this article called Torture’s Long Shadow, in which he explains what force feeding is:

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man — my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully.

This is what they’re doing to the prisoners on hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay, held under suspicion of being terrorists, without being charged or tried, for the last 10 years:

There are 103 prisoners on hunger strike, with 31 being force-fed by military authorities and one in hospital. Since then, not a single prisoner has stopped their strike, and now 36 of the detainees are being force-fed to keep them alive, with five of them being hospitalised. 

Hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay [Article]

Guantanamo’s hunger strike story is not in the media. As Amy Davidson points out in the New Yorker, the US Administration seems intent on hiding the fact that 1 in 5 of the 166 inmates of the illegal prison are on a hunger strike. More than half of the inmates have been cleared for release (there is no evidence to legally hold them in prison), yet are being held without reason.

The numbers strike one as all wrong—not incorrect, that is, but proof that something has gone very wrong at Guantánamo. The right numbers—the ones one would expect from a prison run by a country of laws—are a hundred and sixty-six facing trials, and zero held for no good reason. ……….. Taking a dozen prisoners a day to a room where they are force-fed with tubes stuck into their noses should not be part of the normal routine at Guantánamo, or at any American prison.