Physicians involvement in force feeding people who are on hunger strike is definitely NOT widely accepted as an ethical practice by the medical community, regardless if the practice is cleared by the War Crimes Tribunal. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where what constitutes ethical medical practice is defined as the blanket whitelisting of all things that aren’t technically considered war crimes. Do you?
Three prominent medical ethicists recently published an article directly on the case of force feeding in Guantanomo. The article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and encourages the military medical staff to disobey the orders undermine their integrity as ethical practitioners: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1306065
“In April the American Medical Association appropriately wrote the secretary of defense that ‘forced feeding of [competent] detainees violates core ethical values of the medical profession.’”
