especially since your feeding them laxatives...
The United States authorities are facing demands by doctors from around the world to abandon the barbaric method of force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay.
More than 250 medical experts are launching a protest today against the practice - which involves strapping inmates to "restraint chairs" and pushing tubes into the stomach through the nose. They say it breaches the right of prisoners to refuse treatment.
The United Nations has demanded the immediate closure of the US detention camp in Cuba after concluding that treatment such as force-feeding and prolonged solitary confinement could amount to torture.
Doctors from seven countries, including the best-selling author Oliver Sacks, call for disciplinary action against their US counterparts who force-feed detainees. About 80 prisoners are understood to be refusing food, including a UK resident, Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national who is married to a British woman and has four children.
Since August they have been routinely force-fed, an excruciatingly painful practice that causes bleeding and nausea. The doctors say: "Fundamental to doctors' responsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners have a right to refuse treatment.
"The UK Government has respected this right even under very difficult circumstances and allowed Irish hunger strikers to die. Physicians do not have to agree with the prisoner, but they must respect their informed decision." The World Medical Association has prohibited force-feeding and the American Medical Association backed the WMA's declaration.
The doctors' open letter, which is published today in The Lancet, has been organised by David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at the City Hospital in Birmingham, who has the backing of doctors from Europe, the US and Australia.
He has campaigned for more than a year over the detainees' plight, running the London marathon last year in a Guantanamo-style orange jump suit and chains, and has urged Tony Blair to protest to the White House about the camp's conditions. He said: "This letter shows the strength of feeling amongst the world's leading medical experts. They are saying that force-feeding of hunger strikers by medical staff at Guantanamo is unequivocally wrong."
Kate Allen, the UK director of Amnesty International, said: "Reports of cruel force-feeding methods at Guantanamo are deeply troubling and only underline the need for independent medical examinations of the prisoners.
"The US should respect their human rights by putting an end to arbitrary detention and ensuring access to justice."
Andrew Mackinlay, a Labour member of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said: "I hope the US authorities pay heed... Britain has direct experience of it from force-feeding suffragettes at the beginning of the last century and abandoned it."
About 550 prisoners of some 35 nationalities are being held, some for more than four years. Only 10 have been formally charged with a crime and none has been brought to trial.
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