'Torture Reinforcements' Not 'Medical Personnel' Arrive to Combat Gitmo Hunger Strike

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/30-0



US Military Calls in 'Force-Feeding Teams' as Guantanamo Hunger Strike Continues

'Torture Reinforcements' Not 'Medical Personnel' Arrive to Combat Gitmo Hunger Strike
- Jon Queally, staff writer
Published on Tuesday, April 30, 2013 by Common Dreams

The US military has confirmed that at least 40 "medical personnel" have arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in order to expand a force-feeding operation designed to counter an ongoing hunger strike by more than 100 prisoners protesting their indefinite detention and ill treatment.

But because the procedure of "force-feeding" is widely held as a form of torture, critics of the practice may well view the medical teams as nothing more than 'torture reinforcements' as the number of those approved for the painful process continues to grow and their conditions deteriorate.

Military authorities repeatedly claim that force-feedings are somehow necessary, but experts are unequivocal when they declare that the procedure is torture.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission considers the practice of force-feeding—in which detainees are strapped to a restraining chair, have tubes pushed up their nostrils and liquids pumped down their throats—a clear form of torture. In addition, the World Medical Association prohibits its physicians from participating in force-feeding and the American Medical Association has just sent a letter to the Pentagon calling the practice an affront to accepted medical ethics.

[morningfog]

1. It is disgraceful and shameful. More torture.

[Newest Reality]

2. We are watching a real

horror show there and it is very telling.

It may represent a leak in the reality that the American "commercial" conveys to those willing to accept and perceive a contrivance in place of what is actual or tangible.

Gitmo is a dark deep shadow in the corner of our collective eye. It may be more important to us than we imagine if it does, in fact, have a meaning that is not obvious at first. The paranoid may say it is a sign of things to come, a testing ground and a subtle warning about what we consider to be humane treatment, human rights and "liberty" and "justice".

It is clear that those prisoners are staying as guests of the American people in the sense that we do not want to, or can't do anything about the egregious abuses going on there. We are not just talking about an overnight or short affair here, which is still bad enough. This is a decade of flagrant violations by a country that honors no international law and holds itself above them, (just as we see internally concerning certain industries, like the banking and financial sectors).

If anything comes from this long-standing debacle, perhaps it will be insights to the fabrications that still persist about our policies and how much lip-service is payed to the so-called "values" we profess or tend to believe as real. We have a situation where excuse after excuse reveals how they can easily be ignored when it is deemed convenient to do so.

If those values do not apply generally and are only for the privileged and Gitmo makes me pause to wonder what wave may issue forth from that monstrous example to someday inundate many of us who are not America #1 citizens.

We cannot profess with any dignity something that we are not fully committed to acting on. Otherwise its just the commercial version of a simulated product called Freedom(tm).