Guantanamo Bay Hunger Strike: 'The Situation Is An Emergency'

[Cali_Democrat]

"The situation is an emergency," Pardiss Kebriaei, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told HuffPost Live host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin.

Kebriaei visited Guantanamo last week and reported that the situation at the prison is critical:

"There are people in critical condition. The men that I sat across from and met have lost over 30 and 40 pounds. They were incredibly weak. They told me of other people in the prison who are skeletal, skin and bones, who can barely move. What the military had been doing as a response had been to move people from the communal camps...to a solitary confinement facility when they were falling ill and losing consciousness. And at that point starting force feeding, which is basically how the authorities are saving life at Guantanamo right now. There's a critical situation going on right now."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/guantanamo-bay-hunger-str_n_3094782.html

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. Here's where the detailed report re torture, including torture at Gitmo, can be found:

http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/684407/constitution-project-report-on-detainee-treatment.pdf

Finding #16

For detainee hunger strikers, DOD operating procedures called for practices and actions by medical professionals that were contrary to established medical and professional ethical standards, including improper coercive involuntary feedings early in the course of hunger strikes that, when resisted, were accomplished by physically forced nasogastric tube feedings of detainees who were completely restrained.

Recommendations
(1) Forced feeding of detainees is a form of abuse and must end.
(2) The United States should adopt standards of care, policies and procedures regarding detainees engaged in hunger strikes that are in keeping with established medical professional ethical and care standards set forth as guidelines for the management of
hunger strikers in the 1991 World Medical Association Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikes (revised 1992 and 2006), including affirmation that force-feeding is prohibited.

[sabrina 1]

3. Horrific story that will go down history when all the smoke clears. Innocent people removed from

their homes and countries forcibly, simply because our 'leader' need to fill our gulag to justify his phony 'war on terror'. They have never been charged with a crime, many are already dead, some tortured to death. Imagine being picked up on the street in your country by strangers in uniform armed with scary weapons, placed in shackles, strange orange suits, blindfolded, hauled like an animal onto a plane and flown to strange land many of you never even heard of. Then imagine being tortured every single day, refused access to your family who do not know what happened to you, for year upon endless year. Imagine being spat on, stripped naked, humiliated by these strange people whose language you do not speak, isolated from all human contact, and having no idea why these strange, cruel people are doing this to you.

Imagine the heart break of your family when they finally learn where you are and have no hope of ever getting to hug you again. 'Indefinite detention' Forever! No charges, you were in your own country minding your own business.

After seven or eight years you pick up information here and there and you realize some of what is going on. You are in despair, life is not worth living, you decide to use what is left of your life to get some attention for your plight but they won't even allow you that dignity.

Hell on earth. We have created hell on earth for human beings.

This upsets me so much I stopped writing about it during the Bush years for a while, could not read the stories of the few who did get out.

This should enrage every single American who claims they live in the 'land of the free and the home of the brave'. I see little bravery here.

I see whining about why we won't stop talking about these atrocities so we can grieve for our own. I see no reason why we can't grieve for all victims of terror.

That institution is a terrorist institution. If we are fighting terror the first thing we should do is shut that place down and start prosecuting those responsible for it.

As Byrd once said 'I weep for my country'

[AnotherMcIntosh]

4. The people involved with this are truly dispicable.

[WillyT]

2. Check This Out As Well:

From Democracy Now

Link: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/4/12/victoria_brittain_shadow_lives_the_forgotten_women_of_the_war_on_terror