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.
ePMedia Contributors include: Sue in KY, JeninRI, Standingup, and Stoy
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