Detainees seek court order to preserve newly-discovered videos of force-feeding

14 May 2014
Detainees seek court order to preserve newly-discovered videos of force-feeding

Hunger-striking detainees in Guantánamo Bay have asked a federal US court not to allow the prison authorities to destroy footage of them being force-fed.

The existence of the recordings - captured by the military - emerged during the course of litigation in Washington DC’s Federal District court attempting to prevent abusive force-feeding.

The renewed legal challenge to the practice was launched after Reprieve’s initial force-feeding case, Aamer v. Obama, in which the DC Court of Appeals cleared the way for these cases. In this litigation, detainees revealed a host of abuses during feeding, including being left to defecate in restraint chairs, the gratuitous insertion and extraction of long feeding tubes, and speeds of force-feeding that grossly exceed accepted medical procedures.

The tapes are likely to show Guantánamo’s ‘Forcible Cell Extraction’ (FCE) team transporting hunger-striking detainees who refuse (or are too weak) to walk to the force-feeding chair. This process, in which a team of military police in riot gear storm a prisoner’s cell and ‘subdue’ him, has long been criticized as abusive. In 2003, USAF Spc. Sean Baker suffered permanent brain damage during a cell extraction training exercise. He was playing the role of the detainee.

More:
http://www.reprieve.org.uk/press/2014_05_14_guantanamo_preserve_video_force_feeding/