Feeding tubes, Scotch tape and water bottles have all become improvised weapons in an ongoing clash at Guantanamo Bay between guards and detainees on a prolonged hunger strike.
Forty-three of the 166 detainees held at the Guantanamo terrorism-detention complex are refusing food in protest of their prolonged legal limbo. On Monday, one of the hunger strikers, through his lawyers, penned a striking op-ed describing what he considers "painful, degrading and unnecessary" force-feeding and catheterization he received from the military command at the detention center. And over the weekend, detainees protested the command's attempt to move them into different cells by turning broomsticks, water bottles and Scotch tape into makeshift weapons.
Detainees have been force-fed during hunger strikes several times in the detention center's 12-year existence. But for the first time, a detainee currently undergoing the treatment has provided a real-time account of the procedure.
On a hunger strike since Feb. 11, Yemeni detainee Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel described being tied down to his bed by a Guantanamo "quick reaction force" of eight military police officers. Moqbel, communicating by phones to his lawyers from the U.K. human-rights group Reprieve, who then transcribed his account for the New York Times, says he has had feeding tubes forcibly administered into his nose, stomach and wrist; and a catheter inserted into his penis, since the guards did not loosen his restraints for bathroom access.
"I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose," Moqbel writes. "I can't describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way." At one point, he claims the tube was inserted "18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual."
The U.S. military disputes aspects of Moqbel's story. Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman, says there is no record of Moqbel's catheterization. Breasseaele says Moqbel was indeed force-fed through an IV, but says that Moqbel's claims "that there is not enough qualified medical personnel; that it's done by anything other than in the most professional means; and that he's removed by folks in riot gear simply just does not jibe with the facts." Beyond that, Breasseale says he will not comment on statements by individual detainees.
Clive Stafford Smith, the founder and director of Reprieve, says that so far, the organization does not expect its access to its client Moqbal limited as the result of the detainee's op-ed.
"Access to the prisoners at this moment is vital because of the imminent danger that some will be in danger of death in the hungerstrike," Stafford Smith emails Danger Room, "so I certainly hope that the authorities will do everything they can to facilitate urgent, consistent and constant communication with us as their lawyers."
The military command at Guantanamo claims it has to force-feed the hunger-striking detainees, since to do otherwise "would be inhumane," an official told the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg. But while strapping detainees to gurneys, inserting them with feeding tubes, and possible catheterization are options available to the military command -- which Moqbal considers the equivalent of weaponry -- detainees' options are more constrained.
On Saturday, the U.S. military command in charge of the detention center reported trying to move detainees living communally in Guantanamo's Camp VI facility into single-occupancy cells, after the detainees allegedly "cover[ed] surveillance cameras, windows, and glass partitions." Guards attempting to move the detainees into the smaller cells "resisted with improvised weapons." Danger Room has learned that those "weapons" included broken broomsticks and crude batons constructed from plastic water bottles and Scotch tape.
It is unclear how the hunger strike will end. Detainees and their attorneys say it's arisen out of hopelessness that the Obama administration will ever actually close the facility. The political obstacles to shuttering it remain -- and even if Obama overcame them, his plans involve continuing to detain the Guantanamo population elsewhere. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch tweeted that the hunger strike "shows desperation to quit detention without trial or end." A federal judge today declined to get the courts involved on behalf of the hunger strikers.
There may be more "improvised weapons" to come before the strike actually ends -- to say nothing of before detainees die at Guantanamo Bay or go free.
