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February 22, 2006
Force-Feeding at Guantánamo Is Now Acknowledged
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/international/middleeast/22gitmo.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — The military commander responsible for the American
detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, confirmed Tuesday that officials
there last month turned to more aggressive methods to deter prisoners who
were carrying out long-term hunger strikes to protest their incarceration.
The commander, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, head of the United States Southern
Command, said soldiers at Guantánamo began strapping some of the detainees
into "restraint chairs" to force-feed them and isolate them from one another
after finding that some were deliberately vomiting or siphoning out the
liquid they had been fed.
"It was causing problems because some of these hard-core guys were getting
worse," General Craddock said at a breakfast meeting with reporters.
Explaining the use of the restraint chairs, he added, "The way around that
is you have to make sure that purging doesn't happen."
After The New York Times reported Feb. 9 that the military had begun using
restraint chairs and other harsh methods, military spokesmen insisted that
the procedures for dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo had not
changed. They also said they could not confirm that the chairs had been
used.
On Tuesday, General Craddock said he had reviewed the use of the restraint
chairs, as had senior officials at the Department of Defense, and they
concluded that the practice was "not inhumane." General Craddock left no
doubt, however, that commanders had decided to try to make life less
comfortable for the hunger strikers, and that the measures were seen as
successful.
"Pretty soon it wasn't convenient, and they decided it wasn't worth it," he
said of the hunger strikers. "A lot of the detainees said: 'I don't want to
put up with this. This is too much of a hassle.' "
A spokesman for the Southern Command, Lt. Col. James Marshall, said that
restraint chairs had been used in the feeding of 35 of the detainees so far,
and that 3 were still being fed that way. He said the number of prisoners
refusing to eat had fallen from 41 on Dec. 15 — when the restraint chairs
were first used on a trial basis — to 5, according to a military spokesman.
Military officials have said the tough measures were necessary to keep
detainees from dying. But while many of the strikers lost between 15 and 20
percent of their normal body weight, only a few were thought to be in
immediate medical danger, two officers familiar with the strike said.
Lawyers for the detainees and several human rights groups have assailed the
new methods used against the hunger strikers as inhumane, and as unjustified
by the reported medical condition of the prisoners.
According to newly declassified interview notes, several detainees who had
been on hunger strikes told their lawyers during visits late last month that
the military had begun using harsher methods more widely in the second week
of January. One Yemeni detainee, Emad Hassan, described the chair to lawyers
in interviews on Jan. 24 and 25.
"The head is immobilized by a strap so it can't be moved, their hands are
cuffed to the chair and the legs are shackled," the notes quote Mr. Hassan
as saying. "They ask, 'Are you going to eat or not?' and if not, they insert
the tube. People have been urinating and defecating on themselves in these
feedings and vomiting and bleeding. They ask to be allowed to go to the
bathroom, but they will not let them go. They have sometimes put diapers on
them."
Another former hunger striker, Isa al-Murbati of Bahrain, described a
similar experience to his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, in an interview on
Jan. 28.
On Jan. 10, he said, a lieutenant came to his isolation cell and told him
that if he did not agree to eat solid food, he would be strapped into the
chair and force-fed. After he refused to comply, he said, soldiers picked
him up by the throat, threw him to the floor and strapped him to the
restraint chair.
Like Mr. Hassan, Mr. Murbati said he had been fed two large bags of liquid
formula, which were forced into his stomach very quickly. "He felt pain like
a 'knife in the stomach' " Mr. Colangelo-Bryan said.
Detainees said the Guantánamo medical staff also began inserting and
removing the long plastic feeding tubes that were threaded through the
detainees' nasal passages and into their stomachs at every feeding, a
practice that caused sharp pain and frequent bleeding, they said. Until
then, doctors there said, they had been allowing the hunger strikers to
leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce discomfort.
Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the
prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false
stories as propaganda.
In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David J.
Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantánamo, Capt.
John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding
any detainees but "providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary
basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral
nourishment."
General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger
strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of
their feeding tubes.
Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try
to break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and
causing stress for the medical staff.
That effort was stepped up, one official said, in January, when Captain
Edmondson left Guantánamo for a new post after receiving a Legion of Merit
Medal for "inspiring leadership and exemplary performance."
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington for this article, and Tim Golden from
New York.
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