Gitmo Force-Feeding Videos: Torture Evidence We Need to See

It’s not clear why the US military command at Guantanamo Bay allowed the videotaping of detainees being force-fed. International medical experts and victims of tube feeding have attested to the agony of the practice. Patients often scream and gasp as a two-foot-long plastic tube is snaked through a nostril, down the throat, and into the stomach. Tear ducts well up and overflow, and the compulsion to vomit can be uncontrollable.

It takes a certain brashness to carry out a brutal procedure on a frail body and allow it to be recorded. Did the Gitmo guards assume the tapes would simply never be seen, or did they — with the assumption of impunity — simply not care?

The true barbarism of Guantanamo force-feeding. Read more here.

While the reasoning may be baffling, we know that there are videotapes of Gitmo hunger strikers being force-fed. A federal court has compelled the US government to reveal the existence of dozens of force-feeding recordings. There are 34 videos alone of one detainee, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian who has never been charged and has been cleared for release. Dhiab has been on hunger strike since February, 2013, and his lawyers have sued the government over the conditions of his captivity. A judge ruled Wednesday that his attorneys must be given access to the tapes.

The human rights group Reprieve, whose attorneys represent numerous Gitmo detainees including Dhiab, holds an appropriately dismal view of how the US government treats evidence of its brutalities.

“Gitmo’s riot squad hauling prisoners to force-feeding is some of the worst that is going on there right now, and we were stunned to learn some of it has been filmed,” Cori Crider, Reprieve’s strategic director and an attorney representing Dhiab, said in a press release. “We can’t let this evidence go the way of the waterboarding tapes — they might well be at the heart of the upcoming trial of Gitmo’s brutal force-feeding practices.”

While there is unclear logic behind the creation of a trail of evidence leading to US torture practices, the inclination to destroy such evidence is more obvious — and an established practice in the War on Terror. In 2007 it was revealed that the CIA had destroyed videos of waterboarding sessions on the order of a senior CIA official who said he wanted to shield the identity of agents, as well as “get rid of some ugly visuals.”

Ugly visuals might be more easily expunged than ugly realities. With or without access to recorded evidence, we have more than enough testimony to know that waterboarding and force-feeding both constitute torture. While the former was used explicitly for interrogation purposes, the latter is no less cruelly deployed at Gitmo. Force-feeding, as well as causing excruciating pain, takes away the very last vestige of personal sovereignty from hunger strikers. Force-feeding is a stark symbol of the fact that their wracked bodies — some weighing only 80 pounds — are not theirs.

The US government is, of course, ferociously protective of its atrocities. I’d say ask Chelsea Manning about that, but getting questions to and from military prisons is a hard task. Guantanamo Bay couples media-friendly propagandizing (it gives tours and has a very welcoming PR guy, who we call “Gitmo Todd”) with being an impenetrable black box of information, especially regarding the details of the ongoing hunger strike.

At this point, the detention center’s continued existence is its brutality. But shedding light on the cruelties within by obtaining actual video evidence seems an important first step while unconstitutionally imprisoned bodies are confined there on the very edge of death.

Follow Natasha Lennard on Twitter: @natashalennard

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