Force-feeding is brutal: Ex-Guantanamo inmate

A former Saudi prisoner at the US’s notorious Guantanamo prison has exposed the brutality of force-feeding, which is being exercised at the site, arguing that the practice adversely affects the hunger strikers’ health.

Ahmed Zaid Salim Zuhair, who was never charged with any crime despite being held in Guantanamo for seven years, went on hunger strike in June 2005, and did not back down until he was sent home to Saudi Arabia in 2009.

The Saudi national said his nasal passages and his back are permanently damaged from the way he was strapped down, and fed through a nasogastric tube.

“Not once did the thought occur to me to stop my hunger strike,” the 47-year-old man said. “Not once.”

He added that the world should not be surprised that the prisoners at Guantanamo are on hunger strike.

Over 100 out of 166 detainees at the Guantanamo prison have been on a hunger strike for more than 3 months. They have stopped eating to protest against their long confinement without charge or trial, as well as the horrible and degrading conditions at the jail.

“The men there (the detainees at Guantanamo) today are going through the same experience and they are suffering just as much, and so they probably will not stop either,” Zuhair said.

The process of force-feeding at the Guantanamo jail involves restraining men with straps to a specially-designed chair. Tubes are then snaked up the individuals’ nose and into their stomach to feed them a liquid nutrient mix and prevent them from starving to death.

Zuhair said he was left tied down for hours at a time so that the liquid nutrient mix could be digested.

US Navy Captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for the Guantanamo prison, claims that the so-called enteral feeding procedure – the US’s euphemism for force feeding – is considered safe, and its use has been upheld by courts.

“We think there are adequate safeguards in place to make it as pain-free and comfortable as possible,” he said. “It’s not done to inflict pain and it’s not done as punishment. It’s done to preserve life.”

However, Doctor David L. Katz, an internist on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine, argues that force-feeding carries certain risks to the health of the people on whom it is exercised. The dangers include the possibility of getting liquid in the lungs and damaging the nasal passages, particularly when the person is not cooperating.

He added that the effects of the prolonged use of liquid nutrition instead of regular food are not really known.

Upon taking office, US President Barack Obama signed an executive order to stop military commissions in order to close down the Guantanamo prison by 2010. However, he has not delivered on his campaign promise.