Sunday Times 2
Inside Guantanamo Bay: Rare pictures show harsh life of inmates
It might not look out of place in a private gym – but for the various straps to keep the occupant in place and the hospital drip stand looming ominously behind.
Pictured is the notorious restraint chair at Guantanamo Bay, where former inmates claim they were subjected to long hours of agonising forced feeding.
Pick a face: A chart used at the hospital for patients to indicate their pain level
The US military is still using the chair to cope with a hunger strike by 104 of the 166 prisoners which has lasted more than three months.
Each day, up to 40 of them are strapped down and kept alive with a liquid nutrient mix fed through a nasal tube.
Medical experts have described the practice as unethical and dangerous, and even Barack Obama has condemned it, saying in his national security address: ‘Is this who we are? Is this something that our Founders foresaw?’
But officials insist ‘enteral feeding’ is considered safe and its use has been upheld by the courts.
Under the procedure, an inmate who refuses nine successive meals or whose body weight drops significantly is offered a twice-daily can of a nutritional supplement, Ensure, whose flavours include butter pecan. If he refuses, guards shackle him into the chair by his arms, head and feet, and a nurse inserts the tube up his nose, down the back of his throat and into his stomach.
Most prisoners are taken to designated ‘feeding cells’ but a few are fed at the Cuban base’s detainee hospital, where these photographs were taken. They are asked to point to one of six happy or sad faces on a card to indicate their discomfort level.
Ahmed Zuhair, a 47-year-old former inmate, recently described how four years of being regularly strapped to what he dubbed the ‘torture chair’ had damaged his back and nasal passages.
Zuhair, a Saudi former sheep trader who was never charged with any crime during a seven-year stretch at Guantanamo which ended in 2009, said his nose would bleed during each force-feeding. He claims he would be forced roughly into the chair and left there much
Force-fed: The restraint chair used to force-feed detainees on hunger strike at the detainee hospital in Camp Delta which is part of the U.S. military prison for 'enemy combatants' in Guantanamo Bay
longer than the official two-hour maximum. ‘The pain from each force-feeding is so excruciating that I am unable to sleep at night because of the pain in my throat,’ he said in a sworn statement.
A military spokesman said the feeding tubes are lubricated and prisoners are offered anaesthetic to prevent long-lasting damage.
‘We think there are adequate safeguards in place to make it as pain-free and comfortable as possible. It’s not done to inflict pain and it’s not done as punishment. It’s done to preserve life.’
The pictures were taken by the Getty agency after it was granted a request to visit the base. Three doctors writing this month in the New England Journal of Medicine called Guantanamo a ‘medical ethics-free zone’ and urged doctors there to speak out. ‘Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault,’ they said.
© Daily Mail, London
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