Humane torture?
by digby
“Medical reinforcements” of nearly 40 Navy nurses, corpsmen and specialists have arrived at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to help carry out the force-feedings of inmates there who are on a hunger strike.
As of Tuesday morning, 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo were officially deemed by the military to be participating, with 21 “approved” to be fed the nutritional supplement Ensure through tubes inserted through their noses. In a statement released earlier, a military spokesman said the deployment of additional medical personnel had been planned several weeks ago as more detainees joined the strike.
“We will not allow a detainee to starve themselves to death, and we will continue to treat each person humanely,” said Lt. Col. Samuel House, the prison spokesman.
Except it is a contradiction in terms to say that it is humane to force feed someone who is refusing to eat voluntarily.
And medical ethicists agree:
The military’s response to the hunger strike has revived complaints by medical ethics groups that contend that doctors — and nurses under their direction — should not force-feed prisoners who are mentally competent to decide not to eat.
Last week, the president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that any doctor who participated in forcing a prisoner to eat against his will was violating “core ethical values of the medical profession.”
“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Dr. Lazarus wrote.
He also noted that the A.M.A. endorses the World Medical Association’s Tokyo Declaration, a 1975 statement forbidding doctors to use their medical knowledge to facilitate torture. It says that if a prisoner makes “an unimpaired and rational judgment” to refuse nourishment, “he or she shall not be fed artificially.”
Thankfully, the government didn’t make the fatuous argument they used to make during the Bush administration — that like the terrorists they are, prisoners are waging asymmetrical warfare by committing suicide while in custody. So, at least they aren’t insulting our intelligence as they torture the prisoners. Don’t say it isn’t progress.
President Obama says it’s only going to get worse. But to his credit, unlike congress, he appears to regret it.
“The notion that we’re going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity — even at a time when we’ve wound down the war in Iraq, we’re winding down the war in Afghanistan, we’re having success defeating al Qaeda, we’ve kept the pressure up on all these transnational terrorist networks, when we’ve transferred detention authority in Afghanistan — the idea that we would still maintain, forever, a group of individuals who have not been tried, that’s contrary to who we are, it’s contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop,” Obama said.
“Now, it’s a hard case to make, because for a lot of Americans, the notion is out of sight, out of mind, and it’s easy to demagogue the issue,” Obama said.
The presidency is largely a ceremonial office, as we know, and the Commander in Chief responsibilities are obviously mostly just for show, but he could possibly ask very nicely if the Pentagon wouldn’t mind awfully not treating the prisoners to raids with rubber bullets in the dead of night or strapping them to chairs and putting rubber tubes down their throats — since most of them are innocent and haven’t even been charged with a crime and all. Obviously, the military has no obligation to comply, but if that doesn’t work perhaps we could get Prince William to make a plea. He might have a little more clout.