Lawyer Seeks Halt to Guantanamo Methods

[Judi Lynn]

Lawyer Seeks Halt to Guantanamo Methods
By BEN FOX
Associated Press Writer

February 28, 2006, 4:54 PM EST

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A lawyer defending a Guantanamo Bay prisoner said Tuesday he has asked a federal judge to immediately ban the use of restraint chairs and other aggressive methods to force-feed hunger strikers at the detention center, alleging they violate a new U.S. ban on torture.

Defense attorney Rick Murphy said his client, Muhammed Bawazir of Yemen, was subjected to a "daily ritual of pain and humiliation" to halt his participation in the hunger strike at the U.S. military base in eastern Cuba, where some 490 men suspected of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban are held.

In papers filed Monday in federal court in Washington, Murphy said the use of restraints, larger nasal feeding tubes and other practices at Guantanamo violates the McCain Amendment, which prohibits torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners. The law, adopted in December, was sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain, who was a POW for almost five years in North Vietnam and was tortured.

The Department of Defense says it uses methods to feed the strikers that are the same as those allowed in U.S. civilian prisons.
(snip)

Attorneys for several prisoners have alleged the military sought to end the strike in January by taking more aggressive measures against detainees, including the use of a special restraint chair and the use of thicker feeding tubes that are repeatedly removed and reinserted instead of being allowed them to remain in place between forced meals.
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http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-guantanamo-hunger-strike,0,7100320.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

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From an article posted by a DU'er:

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Guantanamo: American Gulag
by Thomas Wilner


When I met with Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said, "They tortured us to make us stop." At first, he said, they punished him by taking away his "comfort items" one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto "the chair." The officer warned that recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. "We're going to break this hunger strike," the officer told him.

Fawzi said he heard the prisoner next door screaming and warning him to give up the strike. He decided that he wasn't "on strike to be tortured." He said those who continued on the hunger strike not only were strapped in "the chair" but were left there for hours; he believes that guards fed them not only nutrients but also diuretics and laxatives to force them to defecate and urinate on themselves in the chair.
(snip/...)

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0226-20.htm

[acmejack]

1. If you can read this and not feel ill you are a better man than I

I weep for my Country, I was once proud of America. I stood tall and wore my uniform with great pride. I truly believed that I did indeed represent the greatest nation on Earth. Now I find myself a merely a person living in the most despised piece of real estate on the face of this planet. What has happened to us?

[Judi Lynn]

2. Guantanamo Force-Feeding Tactics Are Called Torture

Guantanamo Force-Feeding Tactics Are Called Torture

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 1, 2006; Page A08

Lawyers for a captive at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say their client was tortured to coerce him into abandoning a lengthy hunger strike, and they contend that tactics used to force-feed detainees explicitly violate a new federal law that bars cruel or degrading treatment of people in U.S. custody.

In a 13-page filing released yesterday, the lawyers say U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay used harsh and unnecessary tactics to break a hunger strike that at one point included more than 100 detainees. Invoking a new law principally written by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the lawyers said the military illegally made the force-feeding process painful and humiliating to coerce cooperation from the detainees.

The new procedures were instituted in early January. They include strapping detainees to a chair, forcing a tube down their throats, feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water, and leaving them in the chair for as long as two hours to keep them from purging the food, according to detainee accounts and military officials. Detainees told their attorneys that the tactics, first reported last month in the New York Times, caused them to urinate and defecate on themselves and that the insertion and removal of the feeding tube was painful.

Mohammad Bawazir, a Yemeni detainee who was the subject of Friday's filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, told his lawyers he began his hunger strike in August and was determined to die in Cuba but stopped resisting the force-feeding last year when he decided it was futile. Bawazir's attorneys said he had been allowing the feedings -- through a tube that was left in at all times -- but the tactics changed dramatically on Jan. 11, when the military strapped Bawazir to a chair and forced a much larger tube into his nose and down his throat, causing him "unbearable pain."
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801344.html