Guant\u00e1namo Bay<\/a> to refuse to perform the practice on ethical grounds have got nowhere, a spokesman for the prison said on Thursday [20 June 2013].<\/p>\nNo doctors, nurses or corpsman had balked at feeding the prisoners or even voiced a concern about the military’s policy of using what’s known as enteral feeding to prevent any of the hunger strikers starving to death, said Navy Captain Robert Durand.<\/p>\n
“They signed up to carry out lawful orders,” Durand said. “This is a lawful order.”<\/p>\n
The hunger strike at the US base in Cuba is nearing a fourth month amid increasing pressure on the defence department to reconsider its response to the protest.<\/p>\n
Officials said 104 of the 166 prisoners were on hunger strike as of Thursday in a protest against their indefinite detention. Up to 44 are strapped down each day and force-fed liquid nutrients through a nasal tube.<\/p>\n
“We do it to preserve life,” Durand said, denying the assertions from prisoners that the procedure is painful.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate intelligence committee, released a letter she wrote to the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, after visiting Guant\u00e1namo in which she urged the Pentagon to re-evaluate the treatment of the hunger strikers, saying “the current approach raises very important ethical questions”.<\/p>\n
The American Medical Association’s president wrote to Hagel in April to say that force-feeding hunger strikers violated core ethical values of the medical profession. A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine urged Guant\u00e1namo’s prison doctors to refuse to take part.<\/p>\n
A lawyer for one of the prisoners charged before a military commission in the September 11 attacks sought unsuccessfully this week to raise the hunger strike during a pretrial hearing in the case.<\/p>\n
Navy lieutenant commander Walter Ruiz said his client had refused meals but was not classified as a hunger striker by prison officials. Nevertheless he sought an order from the judge to bar the use of force-feeding. Prosecutors opposed the motion as not relevant.<\/p>\n
“The reality is that it’s not the preservation of a life,” Ruiz said of force-feeding. “It’s the preservation of existence. There is no life. In essence, by keeping these people here we have already killed their soul, and their spirit and taken away their dignity.”<\/p>\n
The judge, army colonel James Pohl, declined to take up the motion. Ruiz said he would continue to press the issue.<\/p>\n
Go to Original \u2013 guardian.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Calls for the doctors who force-feed hunger-striking prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo Bay to refuse to perform the practice on ethical grounds have got nowhere, a spokesman for the prison said on Thursday [20 June 2013]. No doctors, nurses or corpsman had balked at feeding the prisoners or even voiced a concern about the military’s policy of using what’s known as enteral feeding to prevent any of the hunger strikers starving to death, said Navy Captain Robert Durand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,57,65,139,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-justice","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}