You Aren’t What You’re Force-Fed

Prisoners at GITMO are being force-fed. U.S. actor and rapper Yasiin Bey, also known as Mos Def, demonstrates what that’s like.

A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees by a practice that involves using a nasogastric tube to involuntarily feed hunger-striking prisoners with a liquid nutrient mix.

“Being strapped to a chair and having a tube forcibly inserted through one’s nostrils and into one’s stomach is dishonorable and degrading,” according to a motion for a preliminary injunction filed by four prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “It falls within the ambit of torture.”

The motion was filed Sunday, June 30th by with the U.S. district court in Washington by attorneys Jon B. Eisenberg, based in Oakland, California, and Cori Crider, who is with the British human rights group Reprieve.

In this four-minute film, made by Human Rights organization Reprieve and director Asif Kapadia, U.S. actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), experiences the procedure, although you can rest assured, the prisoners at GITMO aren’t being extended quite the same courtesy in terms of gentleness and respect.

The same people who dismissed the torture at Abu Ghraib as just humiliation or who refused to acknowledge that America tortured will argue in some self-righteous fashion that force feeding detainees is humane somehow, or they will find some contorted pro-life logic that enables them to feel nothing — no empathy, no responsibility, no culpability.

Recent documents obtained by FOIA requests by journalist Jason Leopold reveal frightening, widespread and systemic breakdowns of procedures at Guantanamo, including the controversial use of Reglan, a drug known to cause neurological disorders, to hunger striking detainees.

Leopold also reported that more than a dozen Guantanamo prisoners had asked a federal court judge to immediately suspend a new policy enacted at the detention facility over the month of May that now requires prisoners to submit to a genital search when they exit the camps to speak with their lawyers and return to their cells.

Even U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in June that the “current approach” raises “very important ethical questions.”

President Obama, in his first act as President, signed an Executive Order declaring torture over. Unfortunately those “running things” at GITMO did’t get the memo.

“Warning: some viewers may find these images distressing,” the opening of the video cautions. Imagine how distressing it must be for the people being force fed. 

The image is a frame from the video made by Human Rights organization Reprieve and director Asif Kapadia.  

Clinton Fein is an internationally acclaimed author, artist, and First Amendment activist, best-known for his 1997 First Amendment Supreme Court victory against United States Attorney General Janet Reno. Fein has also gained international recognition for his Annoy.com site, and for his work as a political artist. Fein is on the Board of Directors of the First Amendment Project, “a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and promoting freedom of information, expression, and petition.” Fein’s political and privacy activism have been widely covered around the world. His work also led him to be nominated for a 2001 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award.