The GITMO feeding chair
The Defense Department has released its 3-month-old Guantanamo forced-feeding protocol, a 24-page how-to document that rhetorically recasts the yearlong hunger strike in the remote prison camps as “long term non-religious fasting.”
The release blacks out the portions of the document that define how much weight loss and how many missed meals qualifies a hunger-striking captive for the prison’s twice-daily tube feedings.
Some prison spokesmen had argued that the captives were manipulating their weight loss to qualify as hunger strikers — and to focus attention on their indefinite detention at the prison, where about half of the 155 prisoners are approved for release if the Obama administration reaches resettlement or repatriation agreements for them.
It does, however, appear to include a medical calculus for how much to force-feed a morbidly obese hunger striker.
It also includes this instruction: “If the RN (nurse) or HM (medic) feels they are in any danger of personal harm during an enteral feed, they are to withdraw from the situation and immediately inform the guards of their concerns.”
The document — dated Dec. 16, 2013 — describes the health challenge that caused the military to send in additional medics last year as “weight loss,” and calls forced-feedings “involuntary enteral feedings.” With the reinforcements still there, the prison now has a nearly 1-to-1 ratio of U.S. Navy medical staff to captives.