Force-feeding — Guantanamo’s shame

Therefore, doctors should be assessing the hunger striker to determine whether he is mentally competent, whether he is suicidal, and whether he is being pressured by other detainees into fasting. Clinicians need to be able to counsel patients about the risk of permanent injury or death, and about measures that can be taken to mitigate those risks.

Above all, as required by their medical ethics, doctors need to be able to act in their individual patient’s best interest and exercise their independent clinical judgment.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Medical Assn. and the American Medical Assn. all oppose force-feeding of prisoners as a violation of medical ethics. Pentagon officials are no doubt sincere in wanting to keep detainees alive. But they also view hunger strikes as a means of “asymmetrical warfare,” as the Guantanamo commander told task force staff when they visited the prison in February 2012.

That belief probably influenced the response to the current hunger strikes. On April 13, the military placed nearly every captive on lockdown in single cells. Since then, there have been at least two suicide attempts. Fortunately, neither succeeded, but a Muslim advisor to the prison recently told reporters that he expected “more than one death” to result from the current hunger strike.

Putting detainees in lockdown and force-feeding them in restraints can postpone deaths, but it cannot prevent them indefinitely. Prolonged force-feeding carries its own medical risks, and Guantanamo detainees have killed themselves even in the highest security sections of the prison. There have been seven suicides.

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