[Ppnews] The Gitmo Hunger Strike May Be the Biggest Act of Civil Disobedience in the Camp's History

[Political Prisoner News]

  The Gitmo Hunger Strike May Be the Biggest Act of Civil Disobedience
  in the Camp's History


      Nearly half a decade after the president vowed to close the
      prison, 166 men are still detained there.

---By Adam Serwer <http://www.motherjones.com/authors/adam-serwer>
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/gitmo-hunger-strike-detainees-barack-obama

| Wed Apr. 17, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Only the government knows the exact statistics, but four years after 
Barack Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, 
and eleven years since the first people were imprisoned there, detainees 
at Gitmo are involved in what may be the largest and longest single act 
of civil disobedience in the camp's history.

"I've never seen [a protest] of this magnitude that's gone on for this 
long," says Col. Morris Davis (Ret.), a former Chief Gitmo prosecutor 
who is suing the government after having lost his position as a 
congressional researcher for writing an op-ed critical of Gitmo. "It's 
unfortunate that in order to get America to pay attention you've gotta 
do this kind of thing."

Detainees began a hunger strike in February in response to the military 
searching the detainees' Qu'rans, saying detainees were hiding weapons 
in them. Since then, detainee lawyers say, the strike has grown both in 
scope and intent, from a protest over conditions at the camp itself to a 
broader protest of the detainees' years-long confinement without trial 
and no hope of release. It's unclear how many detainees are striking, 
but the military's official count is 52 detainees on hunger strike and 
15 being force-fed (the military counts detainees as being on hunger 
strike if they've missed nine meals in a row). Attorneys for the 
detainees say that a majority of the men confined at Gitmo---130---are 
now on hunger strike. "If the detainees are right, it is the largest 
percentage-wise, if not numbers-wise," says Karen Greenberg, director of 
the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. "This is not just 
a protest, this is truly an act of despair. This is different."

A defense department official told /Mother Jones/ that the Pentagon 
believes "hunger striking to be a peaceful form of protest," but that 
"we will not allow a detainee to harm himself." The defense department 
official added that "If they present certain medical conditions, we will 
feed them via enteral <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteral> means. We 
believe this is our obligation." The International Committee of the Red 
Cross opposes force-feeding. Last week ICRC president Peter Maurer 
called 
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/04/11/188307/icrc-head-calls-on-us-to-end-political.html> 
the hunger strikes at Gitmo a symptom of the larger problem of the 
political impasse over Gitmo.

"You get this sense that the desperation has reached a new height, 
because it's been so many years," says Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with 
Human Rights First. "When President Obama came in and promised to close 
it there was a sense of hope, and that hasn't happened and things seem 
to have gotten worse." More than half of the detainees at Gitmo have 
been cleared for transfer or release, but legal restrictions passed by 
Congress, decisions by federal courts, and policy positions taken by the 
administration have slowed the number of detainees leaving Gitmo to a 
trickle. "There have been more people who have died there than who have 
been prosecuted there," says Davis.

In response to the strike, the military says that it has been moving 
detainees from the communal living arrangement in one part of the prison 
to single-cell confinement in another part of the facility, saying the 
move was "necessary to ensure security, order, and safety." Saturday 
morning, the military said that some detainees had resisted the move 
with "improvised weapons," and that guards had fired "less-than-lethal 
rounds" in response.

"The raids and the other things we've heard about are part of a campaign 
by the military to break the strike and to limit information from coming 
out of the prison about what's happening," said Pardiss Kebriaei, an 
attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents 
several detainees at Gitmo. Kebriaei spoke with two of her clients at 
Gitmo a week and a half ago, who painted a grim picture of how the 
detainees were faring. Kebriaei told /Mother Jones/ that her clients, 
Ghaleb al-Bihani 
<http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/128-ghaleb-nassar-al-bihani> and 
Sabry Mohammed 
<http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/570-sabri-mohammed-ebrahim-al-qurashi>, 
described detainees in Camp Six as being "skeletal," and "near death," 
some of whom were "barely moving." Kebriaei says that al-Bihani told her 
that "They're taking the camp back to 2006." Al-Bihani and Mohammed are 
both Yemeni citizens, and the Obama administration will not transfer 
detainees 
<http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2011/06/15-yemen-wittes> to 
Yemen because it views doing so as a security risk.

Monday a federal judge declined an appeal 
<http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/04/judge-wont-weigh-in-on-guantanamo-hunger-strike-161681.html> 
from Gitmo detainee Musa'ab Omar al-Madhwani, who told his lawyer guards 
were denying hunger strikers clean water and proper medical care. 
Kebriaei had filed a declaration in that case stating that one of her 
clients, al-Bihani, corroborated al-Madhwani's allegations. They last 
spoke over the phone on the Friday before the clash between guards and 
detainees and Kebriaei says that al-Bihani told her he had been moved to 
Camp Five and was afraid to speak to her because he thought it was 
punishment for supporting al-Madhwani's allegations.

The hunger strike isn't the only problem facing Gitmo as an institution. 
Last week Seton Hall University School of Law released a report showing 
<http://law.shu.edu/About/News_Events/releases.cfm?id=335799> that 
monitoring devices had been placed in rooms where detainees are supposed 
to be able to speak with their attorneys in confidence. Last week, 
ProPublica reported 
<http://www.propublica.org/article/gitmo-defense-lawyers-say-somebody-has-been-accessing-their-emails> 
that copies of defense attorneys' emails had been given to Gitmo 
prosecutors, something the Pentagon claims was an accident. Although 
Americans might not place the highest premium on the privacy of Gitmo 
detainees, these kinds of incidents could easily become grounds for an 
appeal on the basis that it was impossible for the detainees to get a 
fair trial.

Taken together, the ongoing hunger strike and the potential spying on 
defense attorneys undermines the efforts of the Obama administration to 
portray conditions at Guantanamo as humane and the military commissions 
system as fair. As yet, however, there's no sign that either Congress or 
the Obama administration is reconsidering the legal or policy 
restrictions placed on the ability to transfer detainees elsewhere.

"It's just a perpetual fiasco," Davis says. "There is no upside to 
Guantanamo."

/This article has been updated with the latest official count of 
detainees on hunger strike 
<https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/324499246961274880>./

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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