The number of detainees taking part in a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has more than doubled in the past week, US authorities say. Some 84 prisoners are now refusing food, with 46 of them reported to have joined the protest on 25 December.Human rights groups have challenged the US in the past over the number of detainees it says are refusing food and whether they have been force fed. Guantanamo spokesman Lt Col Jeremy Martin said: "The number of detainees involved in the current fast, which began on 8 August 2005, routinely fluctuates.
"On the anniversary of 11 September, the number of strikers spiked to 131. They steadily decreased over the weeks and months until 25 December, and then they spiked again."
In a statement, the army said it was providing appropriate nutrition through nasal tubes, a procedure that would be consistent with force feeding, our correspondent says.
| As I recall from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviets had a simple way of handling hunger strikers: 1) they let you starve yourself to death 2) they made sure no one, no one, ever heard about it. Thus any moral claim was dismissed, since the world wouldn't know. And if the jailers wanted to help the process along, they'd make you mine coal for 12 hours a day while you held fast to your hunger strike. Not that the human rights lawyers currently complaining about our use of feeding tubes on these guys have any clue. |