An article in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, which I will get to in section III, led me to look into the practice and history of force feeding prisoners.
I.
Warren Lilly was arrested in 2002 for beating his wife and sentenced in 2003 to ten years in prison. In 2004 he began a hunger strike "to protest, he said, the high rates of incarceration of blacks, nonviolent offenders and the mentally ill," according to a June 18, 2009 article by Bill Lueders at Isthmus. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections began a practice of force-feeding him via nasogastric tube.
This year, Dodge County Judge Andrew Bissonnette ordered the practice stopped.
Most significantly, Judge Bissonnette argues that the DOC cannot continue what it's doing to Lilly because of how cruel it's become.
While forced feeding is always "painful and dangerous," the judge notes that for the first couple of years Lilly's feedings took only about 10 minutes each and prompted no resistance. In February 2007, this grew to 20-30 minutes, and eventually to two hours or more. On occasion, Lilly has also been Maced and Tasered.
Bissonnette speculates that "DOC staff have intentionally tried to ratchet up the intrusiveness and the difficulty and the discomfort experienced by Mr. Lilly in carrying out his self-imposed hunger strike."
-- snip --
Bissonnette's decision ties the DOC's treatment to the larger issue of torture. He evokes the national debate over waterboarding and suggests the DOC decided to use the restraint chair on Lilly for long periods after seeing news accounts of this being done to hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo, in violation of medical ethics and the Geneva Convention. Certainly, he concludes, there's "no evidence [it's done] anything positive for Mr. Lilly's health."
Video that Judge Bissonette watched of Mr. Lilly being force-fed may be viewed here.
II.
<sp>In 1913 the British parliament passed the so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act. Prior to the act, British prisons had been force feeding suffragettes on hunger strike. The Cat-and-Mouse act ended the practice, instead allowing women on hunger strike free when they were too weak from hunger to protest, to be re-arrested when they regained their strength. The Cat-and-Mouse Act was passed because the force-feeding of women was an embarrassment to the government.
In a smuggled letter, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst described how the warders held her down and forced her mouth open with a steel gag. Her gums bled, and she vomited most of the liquid up afterwards.
Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women's Social and Political Union in the UK, was horrified by the screams of women being force-fed in HM Prison Holloway during hunger strikes in which she participated. In her autobiography, she wrote: "Holloway became a place of horror and torment. Sickening scenes of violence took place almost every hour of the day, as the doctors went from cell to cell performing their hideous office. ... I shall never while I live forget the suffering I experienced during the days when those cries were ringing in my ears." When prison officials tried to enter her cell, Pankhurst, in order to avoid being force-fed, raised a clay jug over her head and announced: "If any of you dares so much as to take one step inside this cell I shall defend myself."
As a side note, the Cat-and-Mouse Act backfired. It turned out that releasing and re-arresting women who wanted the vote was more public and no more acceptable to the British citizenry than was the force feeding.
III.
Luke Mitchell writes in the current issue of Harper's:
As of this writing, at least thirty men are being force-fed at Guantánamo. They are being force-fed despite the departure of the administration that instituted force-feeding, despite the current administration’s order to shut down Guantánamo, and despite its even more specific order requiring prisoners there to be treated within the bounds of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which—by every interpretation but that of the U.S. government—clearly forbids force-feeding.
Most of these prisoners are not facing imminent death. In fact, force-feeding is itself a risky "treatment" that can cause infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and other complications. The feedings begin very soon after prisoners begin a hunger strike, and continue daily—with military guards strapping them to restraint chairs, usually for several hours at a time—until the prisoners agree to end the strike. This hunger striker is not an emaciated Bobby Sands lying near death after many weeks of starvation. He is a strong man bound to a chair and covered in his own vomit.
In two footnotes, Mitchell adds:
The conventions forbid "humiliating and degrading treatment," and doctors who advise the Red Cross, which in turn has considerable oversight in interpreting the conventions, have repeatedly made clear that force-feeding is humiliating and degrading. See, for instance, the judgment of Red Cross adviser Hernán Reyes, in a 1998 policy review: "Doctors should never be party to actual coercive feeding, with prisoners being tied down and intravenous drips or oesophageal tubes being forced into them. Such actions can be considered a form of torture, and under no circumstances should doctors participate in them, on the pretext of ‘saving the hunger striker’s life.’"
-- snip --
Dr. William Winkenwerder, who served as Bush’s assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and was therefore responsible for the force-feeding policy at Guantánamo, explained this peremptory approach to me three years ago with an almost poignant question: "If we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?"
IV.
President Obama has declared that America does not torture -- an overly careful use of verb tense. However, even granting the present tense, and that the President's claim is strictly about the current moment, the claim is false. According to the Red Cross report, force-feeding is never justified, is always torture. I am inclined to agree with the Red Cross. However, we need get into no debates about the morality of allowing a hunger-striker to die. It is inarguable that force-feeding a hunger striker who is not on the verge of death is a form of torture, and nothing other than a form of torture.
A final quote from Mitchell's article:
David Remes, an attorney who represents fifteen detainees at Guantánamo, wrote in an April petition to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that one of his clients, Farhan Abdul Latif, had been suffering in particular. When the nasogastric tube "is threaded though his nostril into his stomach," it "feels like a nail going into his nostril, and like a knife going down his throat." Latif had in recent months resorted to covering himself with his own excrement in order "to avoid force-feeding and that, when he was finally force-fed, the tube was inserted through the excrement covering his nostrils."
The practice of force-feeding people at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons around the world must end.