Keith Barratt’s column The Sanitized Horrors of Guantánamo Bay begins simply:
“The United States and Iran share an expression of public opinion, one that still causes considerable distress to the majority of British:
[In 1997] the people of Hartford, Connecticut, dedicated a monument to Bobby Sands and the other Irish Republican Army hunger strikers…. The monument stands in a traffic circle known as “Bobby Sands Circle,” at the bottom of Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park. The Iranian government named a street in Tehran after Bobby Sands. (It was formerly Winston Churchill Street.) It runs alongside the British embassy.
I presume that this part of Northern Ireland’s history, involving the death through a hunger strike of the IRA detainee is known to most readers.”
In the piece, Keith provides a graphic and historical description of the forced feeding procedure used to keep hunger striking prisoners alive. The desire to spare these prisoners is often political, not solely humanitarian, as governments don’t want the public relations nightmare and political repercussions the hunger strikers’ deaths will cause.
Barratt documents how the forced feeding techniques are now being used on those held in Guantánamo Bay.
The New York Times of February 9, 2006, includes this information:
United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said. In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into “restraint chairs,” sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes.
Warning: Although forced feeding may sound somehow benign and lifesaving, Barratt’s description cuts to the bone of what really is entailed.
What do you think? Barbaric torture or humanitarian rescue?
The Sanitized Horrors of Guantánamo Bay had a previous incarnation as an ePluribus Media/Kos cross post, but has been edited and fact checked for inclusion as an ePluribus Journal column.
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I look at it like I look at a lot of the fallout from war. If the war is justified AND it is a matter of life or death for the nation, then many of the horrors of war are mitigated.
Since many of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are innocent it means every deprivation or harassment they endure is unjustifiable.
However, if the year was 1944 and the camp was filled with SS German or Japanese soldiers, it would justify their detention and some strong-arm tactics to keep order and security for the guards. If the enemy might get a propaganda boost out of a hunger strike, force-feeding them could be justified.
It may be a cruel and unusual process, but the alternative is death, and that creates a different standard.
As it happens, since as many as 60% of the inmates have no connection to bin-Laden or any allegiance to the Taliban, we can’t even justify detaining them.
And the least of our perception problem is that we forcefully keep some prisoners alive.
fighters of that same era, individuals who objected to Germanys’ activities, would the Germans be justified in torturing them?
The fact that some deaths are from using the chair, itself, has become the worst of what we consider lifesaving techs. Everything surrounding this war is at the most disgusting, let alone the fact that we torture ppl…..What have we become? …and this is the 21 century? It has become the 17 century in my opinion and we have degraded ourselves by letting this occur for even one time let alone more often that naught.
I think it is yet another example of the abundance of overcaution habit Washington has fallen into.
Though after so many years, it is clear that crowds bearing torches and pitchforks overflowing the Metro DC area is, to say the least, not a high probability, they persist in churning out this Goebbels-Orwell mongrel mash.
The human beings being tortured are not prisoners, they are not detainees, they are kidnap victims.
People who object to their country being invaded and occupied by a horde of foreign gunmen are not insurgents. They are victims of crimes against humanity, they are people defending their homes.
Torture is not misconduct, abuse, strong arm tactics or fraternity pranks or intensive interrogation techniques. It is torture.
If anyone has any doubt or question in their mind about whether something constitutes torture or not, here’s a simple and foolproof test you can try at home:
Would it be torture if it were done, under any circumstances, to my child?
And probably the most important thing Americans in particular, at this time in history should know about torture was detailed very eloquently by Miss Naomi Klein, but I lost the link again: Torture, the purpose of torture has nothing to do with the victim. He is not the target. You are.
The purpose of torture is to send a clear message to you, and all who listen outside the chamber.
It would be interesting to do a historical analysis about hunger strikes and forced feeding. Another example when our government did it was when Alice Paul and others were jailed for their protest to get a sufferage amendment. Seems that the use of hunger strikes as a form of protest for those who have been incarcerated is mostly linked to political prisoners. That puts the question of whether or not its torture in a whole other context. Seeing that their imprisonment itself could be considered torture.