Tag: Guantanamo Bay

Navy nurse refuses to force-feed Guantánamo captive

Detainee’s lawyer says her client described the Navy medical officer’s refusal as an act of conscientious objection.

Miami Herald

Carol Rosenberg

In the first known rebellion against Guantánamo’s force-feeding policy, a Navy medical officer recently refused to continue managing tube-feedings of prison hunger strikers and was reassigned to “alternative duties.”

A prison camp spokesman, Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, would not provide precise details but said Monday night that the episode had “no impact to medical support operations at the base.”

“There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry out the enteral feeding of a detainee,” he said in an email. “The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership.”

Word of the refusal reached the outside world last week in a call from prisoner Abu Wael Dhiab to attorney Cori Crider of the London-based legal defense group Reprieve. Dhiab, a hunger striker, described how a nurse in the Navy medical corps abruptly refused to “force-feed us” sometime before the Fourth of July — and disappeared from detention center duty. . . [Full Text]

One Conscientious Objector at Gitmo Is Great – But It’s Not Enough

Vice News

Natasha Lennard

The international medical community has long maintained an ethical line against force-feeding. As infectious disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz has written, “Without question, it is the most painful procedure doctors routinely inflict on conscious patients… The procedure is, in a word, barbaric.”

Yet in Guantanamo Bay, it is daily procedure for a reported 18 hunger striking detainees. Every day medical professionals watch strapped-down inmates gasp, gag, and choke with streaming eyes as rubber tubes are snaked through sensitive nasal passages into empty stomachs. Despite urging from institutions including the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, Gitmo prison medical staff continue to participate, all of them just following orders. All but one. [Full text]

Physicians for Human Rights Criticizes Court Decision to Allow Force-Feeding

News Release

Physicians for Human Rights

New York, NY – 02/11/2014 A federal court today declined to stop force-feeding of Guantánamo detainees, allowing the inhuman and degrading practice to continue.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to issue a preliminary injunction to halt force-feeding, a type of intervention that violates core medical ethics and constitutes ill-treatment.

“The rights of men being held in Guantánamo are being completely ignored, and the hunger strike is the only option they have left to protest their indefinite detention, which has lasted more than 11 years without charges for some of them,” said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical advisor. “By allowing the cruel and degrading practice of force-feeding to continue, the court has essentially authorized the continuation of an abusive tactic that violates human rights and fundamental medical ethics.”

The detainees being forced-fed are being held in indefinite detention, which is in itself a violation of human rights. A preliminary injunction would have at least stopped force-feeding, which constitutes ill-treatment and could rise to the level of torture. A call for injunctive relief for ill-treatment or torture should be granted under both international standards and the 8th Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

While the court did not immediately stop force-feeding by issuing an injunction, two of the three judges said the detainees did have a right to challenge the practice in court, paving the way for a continuing legal battle over the issue. The judges also pointed that that “force-feeding is a painful and invasive process that raises serious ethical concerns.” The legal challenge was filed on behalf of three detainees.

Health professionals participated in cruelty and torture

Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts Say Health Professionals Designed and Participated in Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment and Torture of Detainees

New York, NY — An independent panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts today charged that U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm. The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (see attached) concludes that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that U.S. military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody.

These practices included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report. Although the DoD has taken steps to address some of these practices in recent years, including instituting a committee to review medical ethics concerns at Guantanamo Bay Prison, the Task Force says the changed roles for health professionals and anemic ethical standards adopted within the military remain in place. [Full report]