More prisoners join hunger strike

Some 84 prisoners at the prison camp on the U.S. Navy’s base at Guantanamo Bay are now on a hunger strike. More than half of those refusing food joined the hunger strike on Dec. 25 as millions of people in the U.S. were feasting over the holidays. The prisoners are on the hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention and the inhumane treatment there.

There are about 500 inmates at the camp, all male. Many were captured in Afghanistan and some in Iraq. The U.S. has refused to label them prisoners, calling them instead “enemy combatants” and claiming they are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.

A ruling denying the prisoners protection under the Geneva Conventions was handed down unanimously by a three-judge panel and deprives them of due process. They are judged by military tribunals that are highly secretive.

The number of prisoners participating in hunger strikes has fluctuated and peaked this year at 131. Now, the U.S. is saying that 32 of the prisoners are being force-fed through nasal tubes. The large feeding tubes, described as the thickness of a finger, are seen by the prisoners as objects of torture.

“They were forcibly shoved up the detainees’ noses and down into their stomachs,” lawyers for detainees reported to a federal judge in August. “No anesthesia or sedative was provided.” One prisoner said a Navy doctor had put a tube in his nose and down his throat and “kept moving the tube up and down” until he finally “started violently throwing up blood.” (Guardian [Britain], Oct. 21, 2005)

Their grievances are being ignored despite the growing world anger over the indefinite detention and abuse. Muslims the world over have been particularly outraged over reports of the desecration of the Islamic holy book, the Qur’an.

The prisoners’ fate is still up in the air as the Bush administration looks to continue its racist “war against terror,” which is nothing more than an imperialist attempt to grab the oil reserves in the Middle East.

In its annual report last May, Amnesty International called for the shutting down of the prison because of the many human rights abuses at Guantanamo. The U.S., however, still continues to deny the humanity of the 500 prisoners on Guantanamo.

The U.S. has denigrated Amnesty International and other reports coming out about the abuses at Guantanamo Bay, going so far as to label some “absurd.” But what is clearly absurd is the Bush administration’s assertion that it is establishing democracy in the Middle East, especially as Washington is made to answer for the detentions at Guantanamo.

Chaplain James Yee, who was stationed at the Guantanamo prison camp, tried to speak out against the conditions there but was targeted by the military and vilified by the media. Yee spent months in a Navy brig. The military went to great lengths to demonize him, charging him with downloading pornography and with spying, but finally had to release him as it could produce no evidence to substantiate the trumped-up charges.

The imprisonment of the Muslim chaplain and the denigration of Amnesty International show to what lengths the Bush administration and the Pentagon are willing to go to maintain their secret prison on Guantanamo Bay.