Have You Ever Tried to Force-Feed a Captured Human? [View all]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/have-you-ever-tried-to-force-feed-a-captured-human/275507/



Another hunger strike is happening in the detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba. It currently involves around 100 people, 23 of whom are being force-fed by Naval medics as a matter of "suicide prevention." Extra medics were flown in earlier this week for this purpose.

The hunger strike led President Obama to bring Guantánamo back into the national spotlight at a press conference on Tuesday. He called the current situation at the base "unnecessary and unsustainable," but did not lay out a timetable for definitive action. What's happening now, though, could compel it.

An understanding of what it means to be force-fed is important in the discussion of the morality surrounding this, and why it is unsustainable. Carol Rosenberg at The Miami Herald -- where they have a daily Hunger Strike Tracker -- described the feedings vividly on Morning Edition yesterday: "Twice a day, if you're designated for what they call tube-feeding, you are shackled at the wrists and ankles to a chair, and a corpsman, a Navy medic, snakes a tube up your nose, down the back of your throat, into your stomach, and pumps a can of Ensure [a high-protein nutritional supplement] inside."


Feeding tubes and high-nutrition shakes used to force-feed detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay (AP / Brennan Linsley)