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Army commanders this week released 75 captives from 22-hour lockdown in their solitary cells, allowing them communal time to eat and pray together. And some did share a meal of lamb and rice in the week, said Durand, predicting the hunger-strike and forced-feeding figures would come down. Navy doctors designated 45 of the captives for twice daily nasogastric feedings, if they didn't voluntarily drink two cans of Ensure on their own — and listed 104 captives as hunger strikers, down from an all-time high of 106.
Kebriaei said Thursday that she suspected the new genital pat-downs were “part of the campaign of the camp to break the hunger strike.”
Under previous Guantánamo commanders, Lamberth recounted, guards searching the detainees had avoided touching their genital areas. This was designed to avoid showing religious or cultural disrespect. Search procedures changed in May with the arrival of a new commander.
“The guard will search the detainee’s groin area ‘by placing the guard’s hand as a wedge between the scrotum and thigh … and using flat hand to press against the groin to detect anything foreign attached to the body,’ ” Lamberth said, quoting the new policy. “The guard uses a flat hand to frisk the detainee’s buttocks to ensure no contraband is hidden there.”
Each detainee, already guarded and shackled, has been searched this way up to four times each time he’s met with an attorney, Lamberth noted. No contraband has been found.
“Searching detainees up to four times in this manner for every movement, meeting or phone call belies any legitimate interest in security given the clear and predictable effects of the new searches,” Lamberth wrote. “The motivation for the searches is not to enhance security, but to deter counsel access.”
As they successfully argued in the earlier force-feeding case before Kessler, Obama administration attorneys said Lamberth didn’t have legal jurisdiction over the “conditions of confinement” at Guantánamo. Lamberth, though, sidestepped this by reasoning that he was ruling on the separate, narrower question of whether detainees’ legal rights were being impeded.
Julian, the U.S. Southern Command spokesman, wondered how one federal judge could conclude that he had the authority to intervene just days after another federal judge had concluded the opposite.
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