CAIRO,
February 9, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – Hunger-striking prisoners at
the notorious US Guantanamo detention camp were strapped into
restraint chairs for hours by US jailers to force-feed them and were
isolated in cold cells, a leading US newspaper unveiled on Thursday,
February 9.
American
jailers have begun in recent weeks strapping recalcitrant prisoners
into "restraint chairs", sometimes for hours, to force-feed
them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting
afterwards, The New York Times reported citing
officials.
Detainees
who refused to eat have also been put in isolation for long periods,
in highly air-conditioned cells and have been deprived of such
comforts as blankets and books, it added.
The
US has been holding for years more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo,
most of them were detained in Afghanistan after US-led troops invaded
the country and ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001.
Detainees
staged a round of hunger strikes in August to protest their indefinite
detention at the infamous camp.
The
number of the hunger-strikers peaked on September 11, marking the
fourth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when 131 prisoners took part
in the strike.
Pentagon
documents indicated that only 45 percent of the detainees had
committed some hostile acts against the US and its allies, according
to a study released on Wednesday, February 8.
It
also showed that only 8 per cent of Guantanamo detainees were Al-Qaeda
fighters.
"Disgrace"
 |
|
Wilner criticized the use of force and "the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment" against the strikers.
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Thomas
B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, lashed
out at the practice.
"It
is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the
use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of
treatment," he told the Times.
"It
is a disgrace," added Wilner, who last week visited the six
Kuwaiti detainees he represents.
Officials
said that the force-feeding of the Guantanamo hunger strikers
reflected concern at the detention camp and the Pentagon that the
detainee protests were becoming difficult to control.
They
fear that the death of one or more detainees could intensify
international rebukes of the detention center.
Until
Wednesday, February 8, Guantanamo officials had acknowledged only
having forcibly restrained hunger-striking prisoners to feed them a
handful of times.
They
said that doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using
Velcro straps.
Tom
Hogan, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair,
told the Times that his Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs
to Guantanamo on December 5 and 20 additional chairs on January 10.
Once
calling the detention camp the "gulag of our time," Amnesty
International said in a recent report that Guantanamo has become a
"symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is
betraying the best US values."
Chief
among the Guantanamo critics are former US presidents Jimmy Carter and
Bill Clinton, who both called on the Bush administration to shut down
the prison to demonstrate to the world America's commitment to human
rights.
In
2004, the Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled "The
Road To Abu Ghraib" linking the abuse of detainees in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Guantanamo to the policies adopted by Bush in his
so-called war on terror.
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