As many of you are aware at Gitmo as well as elsewhere prisoners are subjected to cruel and degrading treatment on a regular basis in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, long-standing army regulations as well as other international treaties that prohibit clear Geneva violations ("grave war crimes") as well.
At Gitmo prisoners have been on a hunger strike to protest the cruel and degrading treatment that they are systematically subjected to because they can no longer stand the mental torture. So what do the medical personel at Gitmo do about this - not what you might expect. They are in fact further torturing prisoners. More below the fold.
I am personally so disgusted by this that I can not even relate it into words and I hope you are as well.
The fact that we cannot and refuse to treat people like human beings and respect their human rights is an absolute disgrace. Part of the torture has been to use "medical treatment" as a method to torture prisoners from forced, violent insertion of cathetors to sexual assault "under the color of law", to sodomy "under the color of law" to stabbing people with needles over and over again, because the medical personal kept "missing the vain", to forced injections of foreign substances it is become an American travesty.
Here is a new story on prisoners who are being tortured to death by their systematic cruel treatment being subjected to even more torture.
Daily Kos
Prisoners on hunger strike at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay say troops force-fed them with dirty feeding tubes that have been violently inserted and withdrawn as punishment, according to declassified notes released Wednesday by defense attorneys.
The repeated removal and insertion of the tubes has caused striking prisoners to vomit blood and to experience intense pain that they have equated with torture, the lawyers reported to a federal judge after visiting their clients at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba.
Prisoners said they were taunted by troops who said the treatment was intended to persuade them to end the hunger strike that began Aug. 9, the lawyers wrote in affidavits filed as part of a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking greater access to inmates at the high-security jail for terror suspects.
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Yousef al Shehri, 21, of Saudi Arabia, told his lawyers that guards removed a nasal feeding tube from one prisoner and reinserted it into another without cleaning it first.
"These large tubes ... were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture," attorney Julia Tarver, whose firm represents 10 Saudi detainees, said in an affidavit. "They were forcibly shoved up the detainees' noses and down into their stomachs."
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Defense lawyers who have visited the prison in recent weeks say their clients have lost substantial weight, appeared listless and depressed -- and have insisted they will maintain the protest until conditions improve or they are released. A judge has not yet ruled on their request for increased access to the detainees and their medical records.
Notes of meetings between attorneys and their clients at the detention center are classified until they have been reviewed by the military and cleared for release.
Joshua Colangelo-Ryan, a lawyer for six men from Bahrain, said one of his clients, Isa al Murbati, has lost about 50 pounds as a result of the hunger strike.
"There's nothing in my mind that he intends to stop the hunger strike," said Colangelo-Ryan, who returned from Guantanamo on Monday.
Tarver, who returned from the base on Oct. 2, said two of her clients were being force-fed and were unable to walk. "It's quite a drastic situation," she said.
For those who are not familiar with the hunger strike here is an Amnesty report on the hunger strike.
Amnesty
Several detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are critically ill, according to lawyers who have recently visited the detention camp. Amnesty International is also concerned at reports that the camp's facilities are unable to cope with the medical crisis.
"The US military appears to be systematically downplaying the hunger strike in order to avoid international criticism," said Susan Lee, Americas Director at Amnesty International. "In July they denied the existence of a hunger strike two weeks after it had started. Now they seem to be understating the number of detainees involved and the gravity of the medical condition of several of the detainees. This policy once again demonstrates the lack of transparency around all US detention practices and policies in the `war on terror'".
As many as 210 people are said to be taking part in the current hunger strike in Guantánamo Bay, although the US Department of Defense has put the figure as low as 36. Detainees' lawyers put this low figure down to the criteria used to determine who is technically on hunger strike. The US military defines a hunger strike as the refusal of nine consecutive meals within a 72 hour period. Reports from lawyers suggest that detainees are accepting one meal in this timeframe, but then flushing the meal down the toilet to avoid being force-fed through nasal gastric tubes.
"We are particularly concerned about the health of detainees who may have escaped this narrow definition of a hunger-striker. They may not be receiving any medical treatment," said Susan Lee. "We urge that independent medical experts be given access to detainees."
New details are emerging of the earlier hunger strike in Guantánamo, which took place over the summer. Lawyers report that a number of detainees collapsed in their cells and vomited blood.
"Faced with a worsening situation of its own making, the US government should close Guantánamo Bay and either charge and try the detainees in line with international law, or release them," said Susan Lee.
One of the key points that detainees say drove them to hunger strike was the lack of access to a court to challenge their detention. They said beatings and other ill-treatment were another reason. Amnesty International has long campaigned for access to courts for Guantanamo detainees, as well as an end to torture and ill-treatment.
In a worrying development, lawyers working with the Center for Constitutional Rights who are representing a number of the hunger strikers say they are being denied access to the detention camp hospital. Their clients are taken from their sick beds, some so weak they cannot sit up, and moved to cells for interviews with their lawyers.
"Not only should the US administration release full details of this hunger strike and keep detainees' families informed on their health, it should open up Guantánamo and all other 'war on terror' detention facilities to independent scrutiny," said Susan Lee.
An unknown number of detainees resumed an earlier hunger strike around 12 August because camp authorities had not kept promises that conditions in the camp would be improved, according to reports.
During the first hunger strike, which took place over the summer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico denied any knowledge of it despite consistent reports from lawyers.
Amnesty International believes the conditions in Guantánamo Bay amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The organisation is campaigning to stop torture and ill-treatment in the "war on terror".
This is clearly a disgraceful situation and I hope everyone will continue to speak out about the torture problem that we have in our detention camps.
While photographs are no longer taken cruel & degrading treatment continues to be inflicted on anyone declared, by God only knows who, to be an "illegal/unlawful combatant" or "enemy combatant".
For a definition of torture I refer you to this summary of the history of torture.
Torture is the infliction of severe physical or psychological pain as an expression of cruelty, a means of intimidation, deterrent or punishment, or as a tool for the extraction of information or confessions. Although the most obvious dimension of torture is that it achieves its goal through physical pain (or threat of pain), in fact many of its most devastating effects come from the psychological effect of the extremes inflicted upon its victims.
Although torture is usually thought of in terms of its physical impact (pain and damage), the psychological impact is often greater and tends to remain with the victim long after the actual activity is discontinued.
The process of psychological torture is designed to invade and destroy the belief of a victim in their validity as a human being, to destroy presumptions of privacy, intimacy, and inviolability assumed by the victim, and to destroy their unspoken trust that these things can save them. Beyond merely invading the victim's mental and physical independence on a one-to-one level, such acts are made further damaging via public humiliation, incessant repetition, depersonalization, and sadistic glee.
The CIA, in its "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983" (reprinted in the April 1997 issue of Harper's Magazine), summed up the theory of coercion thusly:
"The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in reverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, or to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships or repeated frustrations."
Psychologically, torture often places the victim in a state where the mind works against the best interests of the individual, due to the inducement of such emotions as shame, worthlessness, dependency, and a feeling of a lack of uniqueness. These and other mental stresses can lead to a mutated, fragmented, or discredited personality and belief structure. Even the victim's normal bodily needs and functions (e.g. sleep, sustenance, excretion, etc.) can be changed and made to be construed as self-degrading, animalistic, and dehumanizing.
Torture robs the victim of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped. The self ("I") is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. They lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alienated -- unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others.
Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of the fiction of power. It is about reprogramming the victim to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the abuser. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. The abused also swallows whole and assimilates the torturer's negative view of him and often, as a result, is rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating.
Depression and anxiety are very common. These are forms and manifestations of self-directed aggression. The sufferer rages at his own victimhood and resulting multiple dysfunction. He feels shamed by his new disabilities and responsible, or even guilty, somehow, for his predicament and the dire consequences borne by his nearest and dearest. His sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled.
Inevitably, in the aftermath of torture, its victims feel helpless and powerless. This loss of control over one's life and body is manifested physically in impotence, attention deficits, and insomnia. This is often exacerbated by the disbelief many torture victims encounter, especially if they are unable to produce scars, or other "objective" proof of their ordeal. Language cannot communicate such an intensely private experience as pain.
Kenneth Pope in "Torture", a chapter he wrote for the "Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: Sex Similarities and Differences and the Impact of Society on Gender", quotes Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman:
"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
We have been a leader on human rights historically and we can again if these practices are halted and human rights respected. I can't understate enough how important it is to take the position that EVERYONE is entitled to have their human rights upheld.
We have no moral authority to speak out on human rights abuses elsewhere and the fact is every human being deserves to have his or her basic human dignity respected.
It is also not helpful for some "human rights" groups to play down what some have called "torture light" practices, because the prisoner is of the wrong skin color or the wrong gender.
Infringing on the personal dignity and bodily integrity of individuals by the state should be considered off limits in all cases and the state must be restrained in its ability to violate individuals of any status.
This is all about human rights and our Constitutional protections and it is something that our framers fought for and died for and it is something that apparently we must fight for again.
If we do not extend human rights protections to all then, in fact, we have no authority to critize those who also violate human rights whether it is against American troops or anyone else. If we dumb down "humane" treatment then we have no basis on which to object to the dumbing down of "humane" treatment by others.
Practices like stripping prisoners for interrogation, forced cross-gender nudity in detention and interrogation operations, not providing proper medical care, denying the basic necessities of life, not giving prisoners a private toilet and forcing them to use a hole in the ground (like at Gitmo), denying them access to light of any kind, freezing them, violently striking them, subjecting them to unnecessary "medical inspections", etc. should all be considered off limits and all of these practices offend our national character and values and should be prohibited in all cases.
This situation obviously continues to be a problem and I hope you will speak out with me against the continuing torture/ill-treatment that unarmed, secured detainees are unnecessarily subjected to. Frontline just did a report for PBS and I hope you will watch it and they showed clear evidence and interviewed interrogators and high level administration officials and the fact is these practices DO NOT PRODUCE ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE - IT DOES NOT WORK.