US defends Guantanamo force-feeding
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon will not stop force-feeding Guantanamo detainee hunger strikers despite criticism from some doctors that has mounted even as the number of strikers has fallen, officials said on Friday.
A group of 263 doctors from seven countries called on the United States to end the force-feeding and use of restraint chairs for detainees fed through nasal tubes into their stomachs at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Their letter, in the British medical journal The Lancet, also questioned how seriously the U.S. medical profession takes allegations of torture by its own members.
"The policy of the department is unchanged, and it is to support the preservation of life by appropriate clinical means and to do that in a humane manner," said Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman.
The Pentagon said there were six detainees currently on a hunger strike, including three being tube-fed. It said the number of hunger strikers peaked at about 130 in September and was as high as 84 in late December, but fell to about a half dozen in January.
Detainees launched the strike in August to protest conditions and lack of legal rights at Guantanamo, according to their lawyers.
"I think it's fair to say that these are difficult issues -- they are difficult moral, ethical, legal issues," Whitman said. "And one would not expect that everyone would come to a consensus on this."
The Lancet letter's authors called it a challenge to the American Medical Association.
AMA Chairman Dr. Duane Cady said his group, the largest professional organization of physicians in the United States, has told the military of its opposition to force-feeding hunger strikers, but noted "we are not a regulatory or licensing agency."
'A HASSLE'
Gen. Bantz Craddock has said Guantanamo officials in recent months began strapping some detainees into "restraint chairs" during force-feeding and isolating them after determining some had been purposely vomiting the liquid they had been fed.
Craddock, who as head of U.S. Southern Command oversees the Guantanamo prison, said some detainees subsequently decided that taking part in the strike had become "too much of a hassle."
About 490 foreign terrorism suspects are being held at Guantanamo, many for four years and only 10 charged with a crime.
Detainees' lawyers previously accused the military of violently shoving tubes through the men's noses and into their stomachs without anesthesia or sedatives as part of the feeding process and then hurling religious taunts at them when they vomited blood. The military has denied allegations of deliberately inflicting suffering in the feeding process.
Rights activists have said the military's force-feeding methods may have succeeded in breaking the hunger strike.
"The allegations are of quite startling brutality in the implementation of force-feeding," said Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights. "Yet there's been no independent medical evaluation, and there absolutely needs to be one."
In the Lancet letter, doctors from Britain, the United States, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Italy and the Netherlands said the World Medical Association specifically prohibits force-feeding in declarations to which the AMA is a signatory.
In a written response to questions, the Pentagon said, "Professional organization declarations by doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. are not international treaties, therefore are nonbinding and not applicable to sovereign nation-states."
