Guantanamo Now Calls Hunger Strikes “Long-Term Non-Religious Fasts”

Officials at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have come up with an ingeniously misleading new term to describe hunger strikes at the prison: “long-term non-religious fasts.”

The rebranding appears in a 24-page document with the equally ingeniously misleading title, “Medical Management of Detainees With Weight Loss.” The standard operating procedure (SOP) document was exclusively obtained by VICE News Monday afternoon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"Preventing [redacted] is important to maintaining good order and discipline in the detention environment, and in protecting detainee health," the document says. "The procedures outlined in this SOP will be protected from release to detainees and other personnel, including [Joint Task Force (JTF)] staff and visitors without a need to know."

The document advises Guantanamo’s Joint Medical Group (JMG) on how to treat prisoners who engage in hunger strikes (a.k.a. long-term non-religious fasts). The SOP was implemented this past December, which was also when Gitmo public-affairs officers stopped providing the media with daily statistics on the number of prisoners who were engaged in hunger strikes and being subjected to force-feedings.

“In the event a detainee refrains from eating or drinking to the point where it is determined by medical assessment that continued fasting will result in a threat to his life or seriously jeopardize his health, JMG medical personnel will make reasonable efforts to obtain voluntary consent for medical treatment,” the protocol states. “If consent cannot be obtained from the detainee, medical procedures necessary to preserve health and life shall be implemented without his consent…. When involuntary feeding/fluid hydration is medically required, the JMG Senior Medical Officer (SMO) will inform the JMG Commander. When the SMO and JMG Commander reach concurrence, they will inform the JTF Commander and request written approval to administer involuntary feeding/fluid hydration.”


https://news.vice.com/articles/guantanamo-now-calls-hunger-strikes-long-term-non-religious-fasts


Guantánamo hunger-strikers endure 'water cure' torture, federal court



Hunger-striking Guantánamo detainees are being subjected to a form of torture known as the “water cure” that was widely used in the Spanish Inquisition, lawyers are claiming, in the first legal challenge to force-feeding at the military base brought before a US federal court.

By his lawyers’ reckoning, Hassan has been force-fed more than 5,000 times during that period, in conditions they allege are abusive, illegal under international law, and a form of torture. The motion calls for a preliminary injunction that would put an immediate halt on the practice pending full review.


He has been held without charge for almost 12 years in Guantánamo, despite the fact that he was cleared for release in 2009.



techniques include:

• using feeding tubes that are too big to be inserted into the prisoner’s nostrils without causing great pain;

• insisting on inserting and removing the tube for each feed, rather than leaving it in for prolonged periods, causing repeated agony twice a day;

• restraining Hassan in what he and other detainees call the “torture chair” in which his hands, legs, waist, shoulders and head are strapped down tightly;

• giving the prisoners a laxative drug at the same time as feeding, causing them to defecate while in the restraint chair and then leaving them in their own filth.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/11/guantnamo-hunger-strike-water-cure-torture