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Others could eat and pray together at times but were being locked in their cells 12 to 18 hours a day.
In a concession to Islam’s month-long holiday, those being force-fed would get their tube feedings after sunset and before dawn.
“We have sufficient staff on hand to conduct enteral feeds at night,” Durand said.
Last year at this time, the vast majority of captives passed a quiet Ramadan collectively. Since then, a captive committed suicide by overdose inside a maximum-security cell and the military cracked down — searching Qurans, seizing electronic devices, books and food supplies suddenly considered contraband.
The hunger strike soon followed, and Reprieve, which does not charge its clients, began a campaign to address what Crider called “an empathy problem.”
In April, she turned a telephone call with Yemeni captive Samir Mukbel into a column about the agony of endless detention and force-feeding. The New York Times published it under the headline “Gitmo is Killing Me.”
U.S. military medical staff had for years described the procedure as safe, similar to that done to hospital patients in the U.S., and humane, modeled after U.S. Bureau of Prisons policy — with no captive’s voice to contest it. Mukbel, approved years ago for conditional release, offered a counterpoint.
Reporters who visit the prison have so far been forbidden to see the twice-daily tube feedings, to test military claims that most captives go willingly and sometimes agreeably chug a can of Ensure instead. News photographers can’t show a captive’s face as a condition of access to the camps. Forced-feeding became a distant, daily numerical report from Cuba.
Enter Bey, a New Yorker who is also Muslim. He donned the orange jumpsuit of a detainee in June, said Crider, to make the four-minute video in a single day in London.
It shows a British doctor in turquoise scrubs lubricating a tube and then attempting to insert it into Bey’s nostril, the doctor urging him to “relax.” Instead, Bey tenses up as another doctor and unseen actors in black T-shirts try to restrain him.
In a portion of the video that military sources say could not happen at Guantánamo today, the actor gets loose from his restraints. Bey wails and sobs, and calls it quits.
“It is me,” he said. “Please stop. I can’t do it.”
Efforts to reach the rapper failed Tuesday. Crider said he was in Morocco, unavailable for comment.
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