By Lyndsey Kelly
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America
WASHINGTON, D.C., United States of America – A Navy medical officer at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba has refused an order from the Pentagon to continue force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners. This is the first known instance of a U.S. service member defying the Pentagon’s force-feeding policy.
The Pentagon calls its Guantánamo Bay tube feeding policy humane and designed to prevent prisoners from starving to death. The military refers to the controversial process as “eternal feeding.” The force-feeding practice is designed to provide prisoners with liquid nutrition and medicine via a tube inserted in the nose and directly into the stomach. Defense attorneys say that their clients consider the practices torture.
An unknown number of the 149 total detainees at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp Delta have been on a hunger strike for the past year and a half. The purpose of the strike is to protest their indefinite detention.
News of the Navy medical officer’s refusal comes to the public by way of an attorney for one of the prisoners. Abu Wa’el Dhiab, whom is part of a group of detainees participating in the hunger strike, has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since August 2002. Dhiab has been cleared for release since 2009, but U.S officials said that they were reluctant to send him back to Syria because of the ongoing civil war in the country.
A Pentagon official confirmed the statements made by the defense attorney, stating, “There was a recent instance of a medical provider not willing to carry-out the eternal feeding of a detainee. The matter is in the hands of the individual’s leadership. The service member has been temporarily assigned to alternate duties with no impact to medical support operations.”
The identity of the Navy medical officer is currently unknown, but the defense attorney for Dhiab has said that his client described the nurse as a “40-year-old Latino who turned up on the cellblocks in April or May, with the rank of a ‘captain’.”
The medical officer’s refusal came one year after civilian doctors writing for the New England Journal of Medicine declared that medical professionals taking part in force-feeding was unethical. The civilian doctors urged the Guantánamo medical staff to refuse to participate in the pentagon’s designed practices.
Medical staff is allowed to refuse to participate in the eternal feeding of prisoners by invoking medical ethics. Retired Army Brig. Gen. Stephen Zenakis, a psychiatrist who visits the Guantánamo Bay facilities frequently, says that based on his talks with Pentagon policymakers, the medical officer should suffer no consequence for having refused.
For more information, please see the following:
CNN – U.S. Navy Nurse Won’t Force-Feed Guantanamo Detainees – 19 July 2014.
FOX NEWS – Navy Nurse Reportedly Refuses to Force-Feed Guantanamo Prisoners– 19 July 2014.
MIAMI HERALD – Navy Nurse Refuses to Force-Feed Guantánamo Captive – 19 July 2014.
TIME – Navy Nurse Refuses Gitmo Force Feed Order – 19 July 2014.
