Is force feeding a hunger striker torture?
I remember Bobby Sands, back in the days of the IRA bombings in London, and how he became a martyr to the cause of northern independence in Ireland, when he died during a hunger strike.
Now the Voice of America has an article of force feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay. Persons' on the receiving end of this "treatment" have stated hunger strikers were restrained and had large feeding tubes forced down their noses and throats, causing them a great deal of pain.
....Lawyers for a detainee at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba say the military's method of force-feeding hunger strikers amounts to torture. A legal move is now underway to stop the force feeding.
I'm finding myself conflicted. On one hand these people don't have any legal rights where they are, and now even their human right to a peaceful (if not fatal) protest has been taken away. On the other side of the fence, the United States has some responsibility for the heath and welfare of their Prisoners of War (I'm not sure they have POW status tho)....
I just wonder if the forced feeding of these detainees isn't so much for the prisons benefit, but rather for the ongoing information gathering by the US Military - but I'm prepared to be swayed on this if you can offer a good arguement.
What bothers me is that Guantanamo Bay has been used for a specific reason. Detainees are not afforded the rights of any citizen under US Law. Detainees can be held indefinately without charge, and information extraction (torture?) is ongoing without any end in sight.
But what bothers me more is our willingness to do and say nothing about the whole issue.
Comments are welcome - please!
4 comments:
How would you feel if it was your nose and throat they were ramming the feeding tube down ... one presumes things need to get quite bad before a person decides to starve themselves?
For me, it was the only way to answer that question.
One of the things I admire most about peaceful civil disobedience, is that the whole process seems to have a "dignity" of its own.
I'm not sure that hunger strikes are on the same "page", but having someone shove a tube down their throat - forcably feeding them, does nothing but remove that persons dignity further.
I wonder if we would think of highly of Ghandi if he was forcably fed during his hunger strikes for a unified India....
Aye, and I wonder what we'd think if the other side had a Guantanamo Bay and was doing the same to American and British soldiers.
What intrigues me is this inability to imagine the boot on the other shoe ... it's as if the world in general wilfully ignores this idea.
If more people imagined events in this manner, perhaps reading the news of the world wouldn't be quite so sad. Did you read about the 'identity soup' the extreme right are handing out in france and belgium ... it has pork in it, meaning that the homeless and hungry muslims and jews can't eat it.
And then there's the jailing of the british author who denied the holocaust in the same country that shouted about 'freedom of speech' over the cartoons ...
I wonder if the "good" Germans felt the same way when the Nazi's started picking on the Jews in the late 30's....
The parallels are disturbing.
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