Coming into office Obama pledged to close Guantanamo within one year. This torturous timeline notes that in January 2013, the White House shut down the office working on closing the prison.
Today's Washington Post reports on the spreading hunger strike at Guantanamo. The pentagon claims only 39 detainees are hunger striking, with 11 being force fed through their noses in a painful process that involves
strapping the detainee down and passing a liquid nutritional supplement through a tube that is run from the nose into the stomach.
The real number of hunger strikers is
much greater:
A Saudi prisoner said that 130 prisoners are currently participating in the hunger strike that began eight weeks ago against the abuses of the soldiers in United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay . . . Shaker Aamer confirmed [to] his lawyer Clive Stafford [Smith] that last Friday the 66 prisoners at the so called Camp V joined the protest movement, and there are increasingly more prisoners involved.
While searches of the Koran prompted the first hunger strikes, the facts that the Obama administration has evidently abandoned its plan to close Guantanamo and that the vast majority of detainees have been held for years without charge or trial (despite that almost 100 have actually been cleared for release) are certainly making detainees even more desperate. Or as
The New Yorker's Amy Davidson
put it:
. . . people are refusing to eat because of frustration about this story having no end at all.
The Red Cross said in statement:
“The ICRC believes past and current tensions at Guantanamo to be the direct result of the uncertainty faced by detainees,” Schorno said in a statement.
David Remes, attorney for a number of detainees, puts it in even
blunter terms:
“These men, including many of my clients, say they are determined to leave Guantanamo one way or the other — alive or . . . in a box,” Remes said.
And Remes would know having represented Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, an early hunger striker, whose tragic death after years of indefinite detention
Laura Poitras documented in the New York Times.
Like so many prisoners at Guantanamo Latif was never charged with a crime. Davidson gives a rundown of the numbers:
. . . there are six times as many prisoners on hunger strikes as there are those who have actual charges lodged against them.
It should not take 130 people starving themselves for the public to speak up against the indefinite detention at Guantanamo. Hunger strikes are protests usually reserved for challenging recalcitrant dictatorships not representative democracies. The fact that so many detainees feel so hopeless with their indefinite detention that a hunger strike is their only option should be a wake up call to the administration that leaving Guantanamo open with detainees in legal limbo for years on end is far from policy consistent with our democratic principles.