Whatâs
Wrong Today:
Our military prison
at Guantanamo Bay is experiencing a moral crisis. Not because the US is holding
166 prisoners, 86 of whom were cleared years ago for transfer back to their
home countries by a military tribunal, but because 100 of them are now engaging
in a hunger strike. From todayâs NYT:
of Tuesday morning, 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo were officially
deemed by the military to be participating, with 21 âapprovedâ to be fed the
nutritional supplement Ensure through tubes inserted through their noses.
Nearly 40 Navy
nurses, corpsmen and specialists have arrived at the military prison at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, to augment the efforts of the local medical personnel and help carry
out the force-feedings of inmates.
The militaryâs
response to the hunger strike has revived complaints by medical ethics groups
that contend that mentally competent prisoners should not be force-fed if they decide
not to eat.
Last week, the
president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus, wrote
a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that any doctor who
participated in forcing a prisoner to eat against his will was violating:
profession…Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical
intervention, including life-sustaining interventions.
Dr. Lazarus also
noted that the AMA endorses the World Medical
Associationâs Tokyo Declaration, a 1975 statement forbidding doctors to use
their medical knowledge to facilitate torture. The statement says that if a
prisoner makes âan unimpaired and rational judgmentâ to refuse nourishment, âhe
or she shall not be fed artificially.â
The militaryâs
policy, however, is that it can and should preserve the life of a detainee by
forcing him to eat if necessary. Lt. Col. Samuel House, prison spokesman, said:
will not allow a detainee to starve themselves to death, and we will continue
to treat each person humanely…Detainees have the right to peacefully protest,
but we have the responsibility to ensure that they conduct their protest safely
and humanely…Detainees are given a choice: eat the hot meal, drink the
supplement or be enteral fed.â
Enteral feeding means
feeding via feeding tube.
For the past three months,
a majority of the 166 men imprisoned at GuantĂĄnamo Bay have been on hunger
strike. Men have lost as much as 40 pounds. Some are too weak to move.
The hunger strike expanded
among prisoners after a raid
this month in which guards confined protesting detainees to their cells.
Prisoners, through
their lawyers, cite a search for contraband on Feb. 6, during which they say
Korans were handled in a way they found offensive. The military says the Koran
search followed routine procedures.
The
Daily Beast reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sent a letter to
President Obama urging him to renew efforts to remove the 86 detainees cleared
for transfer, which she stressed has taken on greater urgency because of the
hunger strike.
As she wrote to the
president, Red Cross monitors who have visited with the men at GuantĂĄnamo
informed her that the prisonersâ desperation was at an âunprecedentedâ level.
So, why are these men
enduring a life-threatening protest? It seemingly stems from the Obama Administrationâs
inability to end indefinite detention
without charge or trial, which, for most of Guantanamoâs remaining 166
prisoners, has entered its 12th year. This looks particularly unjust
for those 86 men the Obama Administration has cleared for release from Guantanamo.
The most direct
limitation on Mr. Obamaâs ability to successfully close the prison is
self-inflicted: a ban by the US on transfers
to Yemen, which 90 of the men at Guantanamo call home. The ban was
imposed following an attempted attack in 2009 by the so-called Underwear Bomber.
Mr. Obama must make a
political calculation: Is expedient to ignore the hunger strike? To ignore his promise
to close Guantanamo? To ignore the findings of his military tribunal that 86
people could be released?
But, in doing so, he
would be ignoring a more serious moral calculation: The moral calculus involves what Americaâs culpability will be if and
when we see several deaths in Guantanamo.
From the Daily Beastâs
Baher Azmy:
Ba Odah tells us that after more than six years on long-term hunger strike and
thousands of humiliating force-feeding sessions, he now weighs just 90 pounds…Ghaleb
Al-Bihani is a diabetic who knows his protest carries particular life-and-death
implications because of his illness but sees no other choice.
The
Guardian reported about UK resident Shaker
Aamer, the last British resident being kept at the center. Aamer said that
authorities will soon see fatalities as a result of the current action: “I
cannot give you numbers and names, but people are dying here,” said Aamer,
who is also refusing food.
Aamer has
been cleared for release twice, but is still behind bars after 11 years. He has
never been charged or faced trial but the US refuses to allow him to return to
the UK, despite official protests by the British government.
The Times reports that Ramzi Kassem,
a City University of New York law professor who represents several detainees,
had talked to his Yemeni client,
Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, who Kassem quoted as saying:
not want to kill myself. My religion prohibits suicide. But I will not eat or
drink until I die, if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place. We
want to get out of this place. It is as though this government wishes to
smother us in this injustice, to kill us slowly here, indirectly, without
trying us or executing us.
Non-violent protests
work. In this case, the moral high ground has been ceded to the non-violent participants,
despite of the âhumanitarianâ efforts of the military captors at Guantanamo and
despite any possible terror affiliation by some prisoners.
How can we regain the moral
high ground here? No option chosen by Mr. Obama will be universally supported, here or abroad.
President Obama will one
day open a presidential library of his own. Will his legacy like Mr. Bushâs,
include a human rights travesty at Guantanamo?
Could his legacy become
worse than Mr. Bushâs?
What should Mr. Obama
do in this case?
not to sound like Obama’s bitch, but congress prevented his closing Guantanamo, and more recently folks like McCain helped prevent to release of Yemenis.