More than 250 physicians from around the world condemned the Pentagon's practice of force-feeding suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a letter to a British medical journal.
"Fundamental to doctors' responsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners have a right to refuse treatment," says the letter, which accuses the U.S. military of violating medical ethics.
Their letter, which was published in the British journal "Lancet" (the same periodical that fallaciously claimed that over 100,000 civilian dead in Iraq was a "conservative estimate") is in response to a report by the New York Times that U.S. military medical personnel at the base have been "overseeing force-feedings of hard-core hunger strikers," reported the Houston Chronicle.
The Pentagon said in a statement Thursday night that Guantanamo detainees are being "treated humanely and are being provided with excellent medical care."
This is yet another ridiculous charge against the US and its terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Kofi Annan called on the US to close Gitmo after a UN Human Rights Commision panel reported on the condition of detainees in February. The panel's report called Gitmo a "torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice" and cited just this forced feeding of self-starved detainees as one example of such "torture," along with such horrors as a lack of round-the-clock air conditioning in the Cuban tropical climate, lights being left on while detainees were trying to sleep, and unspecified "religious intolerance."
Atlanta-based radio talk show host Neal Boortz makes the excellent point that "there's no way the US can win on this. If these detainees are allowed to kill themselves through starvation you can bet that these very same doctors, together with the rancid United Nations, would be lining up to condemn the US for their deaths."
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