Yes. The doctors have to assume it would continue until the end. I don’t.
It’s a lot like their numerous “suicide” attempts. A few have managed it, but almost all of them fail.
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.’”
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We don’t live in such a society. We don’t rule everything out either. This is real life. The people fighting the war need to weigh the costs and benefits.
It’s obviously not all physicians who joined that chorus. The ones at The Hague didn’t object. The ones at Guantanamo, and the ones at various U.S. prisons didn’t either. But I doubt this would even be an issue if they didn’t do this at Gitmo.
In fact, if they never force fed at Gitmo, and the doctors allowed a couple hunger strikers to die, you’d probably see a number of the same people object to that. I believe it could be immoral to let a hunger striker starve to death if they’ve doing it out of peer pressure, which is probably what’s happening in most cases.
Here’s why it’s not “extra torture”:
The U.S. prison at Guantánamo has sufficient military medical staff to
synchronize forced-feedings to the Ramadan fast and will only feed
hunger strikers after sunset and before dawn…
That is, they will be fed in accordance with the Ramadan fast, and not fed during daylight hours.
What it should be called: Guantanamo Illegal Detention and Forced Hunger Strikebreaking, Now With Less Torture!
But this is far from true. Look how many they’ve had to let go, even with the extremely prosecutor-friendly tribunal system. It’s disgusting how many “hardened terrorists” in Guantanamo are cab drivers or were in the wrong place at the wrong time when Afghan or Pakistan bounty hunters needed to make some coin.
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Had to let go? Of the ones let go, the overwhelming majority were released because they were unimportant, or because their home countries wanted them back, not because they were innocent.
A lot of play was given to the Uyghur detainees who were eventually determined to not be enemy combatants. Innocent? In reality, they definitely were combatants, but their enemy was China, not the U.S. (The “War on Terror” is only a name; we’re not legally at war with all terrorists.) We had to hold them a long time only because they didn’t want to be sent home to China (which was eager to get them back).
You’re mixing up a bunch of memes. The innocent cab driver was at Bagram, not Gitmo, after being fingered by an Afghan officer later found to be working for the Taliban. There was never a big chance he would have gone to Gitmo.
The “bounty hunter” meme was first pushed by a Gitmo lawyer. He was using fact that the U.S. paid big bucks for Bin Laden’s driver to make it sound like the rest were all captured by bounty hunters, too. Were there bounty payments? Yes, of course, but not really that big a percentage, unless you want to say that the Afghan and Pakistani militaries were working as bounty hunters.
There were a few innocents, but they were exceptions. Most were affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban in some capacity. Even one the famous “Tipton Three” later admitted he had been training with the Taliban, and their neighbors said they had a reputation as being extremists. Strangely, those things didn’t make it into the movie about them.
O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see; who have ears but do not hear.
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It’s always good to see the gods descend from Mount Olympus so that we might catch what they’re thinking about mortal men.
How silly of me! Yes, this war is different. We need to throw away the old laws of war, and live by a fresh, new ideal that is still being scribed.
This is not getting formatted the way I wanted it… This was aired on BBC World Service a few weeks ago. I’ll say that force feeding does not sound pleasant.
So is there anybody detained at Gitmo who isn’t Muslim?
Because the Bureau of prisons is a bastion of ethical enlightenment?
My reference to the Bureau of Prisons and the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (and I’ll add the West Germans with the Baader-Meinhof Gang) wasn’t to say whether or not it’s ethical. I was pointing out that it’s legal and not unusual. People are only talking about it now because of the anti-Gitmo meme.
As for ethics, letting a detainee starve to death because they’ve been sucked in by peer pressure isn’t ethical either. It’s astonishing that anyone could think it would be.
No. Everyone detained there now is either Muslim or pretending to be. A non-Muslim would have been killed by now, if not isolated.
They did have a few Shiite Muslims once, but they had to be kept separate from the others.
Xeni has obviously misinterpreted this story. They are making an effort, however small, to respect the religious beliefs of the detainees. Although there is a lot of off-topic conversation here about the right-ness or wrong-ness of Gitmo itself, in regards to this particular story, Xeni clearly has the facts reversed. Anyway, if they were deliberately disrespecting these beliefs (and I am not saying that they wouldn’t), do you really think that a military spokesperson would be out there bragging to the press about it?
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[quote=“Ion, post:11, topic:2600”]
They’re not locked up because of their thoughts. They’re locked up because they’re at war, and tribunals are legally sufficient to establish that.
[/quote]They’re only “at war” in the sense that they’ve been designated as such by a government that won’t even abide by its own guidelines for release.
If you think the law has any meaningful bearing on their imprisonment then you should ask yourself why we had to build a whole extrajudicial detainment facility in another country just to have a place to put them.
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Al Qaeda declared war on us in 1996. If you can name a current detainee who opposes that war then please name him. Even Shaker Aamer, who’s cleared for release but wants to live in the U.K., won’t say he’s opposed to their war.
The Supreme Court believes the law has a bearing on their imprisonment.
BTW: I can’t resist, what “guidelines for release” are they not complying with?
The laws are pretty clear. If you mean those like the Yemenis who’ve been “cleared for release,” they hadn’t been found innocent. They are cleared only under the condition that their government is able to keep an eye on them, as the Saudis have done with their ex-detainees. Yemen hadn’t been able to do that.
It’s been over 11 years. At some point, the critics of Guantanamo really need to ask something of their friends on the other side.
That’s funny. People have been bringing that up over the court’s recent decision on gay marriage, too.
The difference here is, the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions have a more solid purpose than the definition of marriage, which is ideological, whichever way you look at it. The critics of Guantanamo shouldn’t be throwing them away.
That sounds remarkably like, If you love Russia so much, why don’t you move there.
