BBC: UN concern at Guantanamo feeding

UN concern at Guantanamo feeding

There are credible allegations that Guantanamo hunger strikers are being force-fed in a cruel manner, the UN special rapporteur on torture has said.

Manfred Nowak's comments came after it emerged that the number of detainees refusing food at the prison camp had more than doubled since 25 December.
...
But a Pentagon official said there was no evidence that they had been treated in an inappropriate way.

Mr Nowak has not been to Guantanamo, and turned down an invitation to the camp because the US refused to give him unrestricted access to the detainees.

He told the BBC that he had received reports that some hunger strikers had had thick pipes inserted through the nose and forced down into the stomach.

more at link http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4569626.stm

..."because the US refused to give him unrestricted access to the detainees."

Those with nothing to hide, hide nothing.

Yet NOT at Guatanamo? Please! These are the prisoners with a menu including "rice pilaf," right?

He thinks it's a very humorous situation..you can buy his 'Club Gitmo' t-shirts at his web site...maybe he'll feature one with a detainee being force fed with an NG tube. That's a pretty picture. Force feeing on the front and vomiting and bleeding on the back. He encourages pictures of the confrontations, feeling people might engage in, when they see dittoheads wearing his lovely orange shirts. You know if he doesn't go to jail for his oxycontin shopping, he should go for inflammatory, intentional distress to humanity.

or what's left of it.

These people should be tried or released.

Just another manifestation of a lawless presidency run amok.

And where is the US mass media?

The United States is denying allegations that its methods of force-feeding hunger strikers at the Guantamano Bay military base constitute torture. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, says visiting lawyers have made well-substantiated allegations of cruelty.

It is alleged prison guards, rather than doctors, have been inserting tubes into prisoners' noses and forcing them down into their stomachs, causing vomiting and bleeding.

A spokesman for the Pentagon, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Maka, has denied this is happening.
"They suppose that these people are being left bleeding - I know of no instance of that," he said.

"There's been no reports of that. There's no credible evidence produced by any investigation of that fact.
"So what I'm telling you is that I do not believe his allegation."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200512/s1540061.htm

for the detainees at Paul Weiss Rifkind

JULIA TARVER: You know, the government, in the hearing we had last week, dismissed these allegations as mere storytelling, an accusation from them that I found rather insulting, because I, myself, was there. I saw my clients' condition. I saw them with the tubes up their noses. We had independent interviews with more than one client, who had had no way to contact each other in between, who told us precisely the same horrific tales.

After all, the story came out about 2 months ago.

grim description. He didn't mince words.

Sounded godawful then, sounds just as fiendish still. I'm CERTAIN this is the absolute truth. It would be very easy to verify if only _Bush's administration would let someone in to check.

Guantanamo Hunger Strikers Say Feeding Tubes Employed as Punishment

By Ben Fox Associated Press Writer
Published: Oct 19, 2005


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Prisoners on hunger strike at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay say troops force-fed them with dirty feeding tubes that have been violently inserted and withdrawn as punishment, according to declassified notes released by defense attorneys Wednesday.

The repeated removal and insertion of the tubes has caused striking prisoners to vomit "substantial amounts of blood," and to experience intense pain that they have equated with torture, the lawyers reported to a federal judge after visiting their clients at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba.

Prisoners said they were taunted by troops who said the treatment was intended to persuade them to end the hunger strike that began Aug. 9, the lawyers wrote in affidavits filed as part of a lawsuit seeking greater access to inmates at the high-security jail for terror suspects.

Yousef al Shehri, 21, of Saudi Arabia, told his lawyers that guards removed a nasal feeding tube from one prisoner and reinserted it into another without cleaning it first.

"These large tubes ... were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture," attorney Julia Tarver, whose firm represents 10 Saudi detainees, said in an affidavit. "They were forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into their stomachs."
(snip/...)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/3762043.html

I have no reason to doubt the stories of forced feedings, and prisoner abuse. What have we become? What has worship of Dubya led us to? I no longer recognize the country I was born in 62 years ago.

He is only stating his beliefs, not pursuing actual facts.

...it fills in a lot of the gaps this edited version has:

Friday, 30 December 2005, 15:04 GMT

UN concern at Guantanamo feeding

There are credible allegations that Guantanamo hunger strikers are being force-fed in a cruel manner, the UN special rapporteur on torture has said.

Manfred Nowak's comments came after it emerged that the number of detainees refusing food at the prison camp had more than doubled since 25 December. Some 84 inmates are now refusing food, according to the US military.

But a Pentagon official said there was no evidence that they had been treated in an inappropriate way.

'Bleeding'

Mr Nowak has not been to Guantanamo, and turned down an invitation to the camp because the US refused to give him unrestricted access to the detainees.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4569626.stm>
(more at link above)

Welcome aboard, Mr. Maka. How the f#ck do you sleep at night?

...and everything to gain if their lies convince just a few percentage of the sheeple.

This is the idea behind much of Bushcos absurd PR. They target the uninformed and incurious....you know...morans.

/Am I allowed to borrow from Blazing Saddles twice in one day?

Surprise! Total exoneration.

Could someone please tell me again quick how the military is an honorable profession, one that any young man or woman in the United States should seriously consider as a career option? Because I forget sometimes when I stop listening to the U.S. media for a moment or two.

Which brings up my second gripe: Why is it that the U.S. only has to worry about reporting on this stuff from the BBC and other overseas media outlets? Why don't any major U.S. media outlets tackle this? Instead, we get another John Stossel load of bullshit using carefully screened and edited statistics to "prove" that more guns make for less crime.