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• A long-term hunger striker who cooperates and comes to a guard on command is rewarded with “single-point leg restraint” rather than the full body shackle into the restraint chair. The procedures specify the language of the command, “It is time to feed.”
It makes no mention of the Guantánamo prison practice of doing forced feeds at night during the Ramadan holy month, when faithful Muslims fast by day.
The document did reveal that medical staff place a mask over the face of hunger strikers during tube feedings, a detail that was not mentioned during previous media visits to the prison hospital. Monday, the prison released a new photo of its hospital feeding display alongside a model restraint chair with a surgical mask added to it.
It also lays out elaborate procedures for how medical and guard staff will handle a captive who resists the feedings by either trying to bite the nurse or bite the nasogastric feeding tube, once snaked up his nostril through the back of his throat.
“If a detainee is actively attempting to turn his head to bite the tube between the nose to the [enteral feeding] bag, the RN will affix the tube with tape to the midline of the detainee’s nose and extend it upwards, affixing it with tape to the detainee’s forehead,” it said.
At times, the document calls the captive receiving a forced feeding a “patient.” Mostly it calls him a “detainee.”
It was adopted March 5, about a month after the detainees claim they had begun a widespread hunger strike inside the prison to protest a particularly aggressive guard search of their Qurans.
Military spokesmen denied that a hunger strike was under way and said the prison treats the holy book with respect. The portion entitled “Clinical Protocol for the Evaluation, Resuscitation, and Feeding of Detainees on Hunger Strike” appeared to anticipate what the captives’ lawyer said already occurred.
“In event of a mass hunger strike, isolating hunger striking patients from each other is vital to prevent them from achieving solidarity,” it said.
“Given the inability to isolate patients in the [detention hospital] because of the physical structure of the building,” it added, a hunger striker can get intravenous fluid treatment for 24 hours at the prison hospital “followed by transfer back to Camp 5 to begin enteral feeding in an environment of single cell operations.”
Since then, guards stormed inside the communal camp where prisoners had covered up the surveillance cameras in their cells, put all the once cooperative captives under single-cell lockdown and systematically added them to the hunger strike rolls.
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