Charlie Savage reports, in the NYTimes:
WASHINGTON — A hunger strike by detainees who have been held for years without trial at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has grown to involve at least 25 prisoners, the Defense Department disclosed Wednesday.
That number includes eight who are being force-fed a nutritional supplement through a hose snaked into their nose while they are restrained in a chair.
There have long been about half a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo who refuse to eat and have been kept alive by force-feeding. But the number refusing meals among the population of 166 inmates has recently surged….
Lawyers representing some of the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, who communicate with them during visits to the island and by phone, say that the number is significantly higher than the official count. The military says it is using criteria developed by the civilian Bureau of Prisons, which generally counts a prisoner who refuses nine straight meals as a hunger striker.
The origins of the hunger strike are disputed. David H. Remes, a lawyer for several Yemeni detainees who were cleared for repatriation years ago but remain imprisoned because of poor security conditions in Yemen, said he was recently told by clients that prison officials had started searching Korans, which inmates considered to be religious desecration, in a way they had not done since 2006.
A group of lawyers representing detainees, including Mr. Remes, sent letters on March 4 and March 14 to military officials raising alarm about the strike and asking for attention to alleviate its underlying causes, citing the purported Koran searches and, in the March 14 letter, a wider set of “regressive practices at the prison taking place in recent months, which our clients have described as a return to an older regime at Guantánamo that was widely identified with the mistreatment of detainees.” …
Both Mr. Remes and military officials largely agreed, however, that a significant factor in the recent unrest was the collapse of hopes that the United States government would at some point let them go….
At Guantanamo, America’s Looking Like A <em>Real</em> Empire…Post + Comments (26)