Guatanamo: Force-feeding is about repressing protest - not saving lives

db: Guantanamo prison spokesman Maj. Jeff Weir said the military would not allow the detainees' conditions to become life-threatening.

"Basically, if you stop eating and wait several weeks or months, it is a slow form of suicide," Weir told British Broadcasting Corp. radio and television. "No detention facility in the world will deliberately let their people commit suicide, so we can't let that happen."

This is a lie. You cannot equate 'hunger strikes' with 'suicides' - the latter want to die, the former seek a specific outcome by way of protest. The World Medical Association ['The global representative body for physicians'] explains :

Suicide and Hunger Strikes

Hunger strikers, as defined in the introduction, are not suicidal. If a prisoner wants to be self-destructive, there are many other ways he can inflict violence on himself. "Slashers" and "swallowers" are found in abundance in prisons - and are not the same prisoners who go on hunger strikes. Self-mutilation is another, more radical, but certainly different form of protest.

Hunger strikers with the stated intent to "go all the way" unless they obtain satisfaction, by definition do not want to die. They want to live - for their cause, for their comrades, for their political ideals: for whatever reason - and want to obtain something to this effect. Prison authorities, however, often qualify hunger strikes as a form of "aggressive blackmail-form-of-suicide". The "suicide" element intends to imply that hunger strikers have pathological personalities, thereby giving the authorities a "medical alibi" for intervention.

..The pathological personality of the genuine suicidal person can (in most cases) indeed be argued. The true-blue hunger striker is however not such a case. A hunger striker has to be sound of judgment, and otherwise by definition will be a medical case. Hunger strikers furthermore have to implicitly trust that the outside society will respect and prefer their "altruism" ("willingness to die in the name of a cause") to any self-centered ego-centrism. Hunger strikers have to believe that outside society will not tolerate their death. They must believe that the "spectators" to the fasting will do all they can to exert pressure on those responsible for negotiations, to try to find a compromise solution - thereby avoid the death of the hunger strikers. This is certainly not the attitude of persons intending to commit suicide.

A hunger strike thus involves reciprocal threats. The fasting persons threaten to harm their health - and thereby implicitly threaten to harm the "authority's" reputation.

Hunger strikers tacitly demand some form of negotiation - something the authorities usually refuse to accept under such pressure. This very obviously has nothing to do with the "call for help" present in most cases of attempted suicide, nor with the "acute" self aggression of those who successfully commit suicide. In many cases, the "suicide alibi" is merely an excuse used by the authorities to medicalise intervention to stop the strike. In other cases, religious principles equating any form of self-aggression as "attempted suicide", further cloud the real issue. Physicians should not be led astray by either argument, and should maintain their objective appraisal of the hunger strike situation. Read more [pdf]