Word: guantanamo
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...prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won a major victory this week when the Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration's planned military tribunals. But for many prisoners at the detention facility, the protests haven't stopped. Hunger strikes persist, in what Guantanamo commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris, Jr. has called "asymmetric warfare" - a means to attract attention to their increasingly controversial detention. As a result, the camp's administrators have sought to keep prisoners alive at all cost - because a prisoner's death (as the U.S. found out three weeks ago, when three Gitmo inmates committed suicide...
...Mike Bumgarner, who oversees the detention camps on a day-to-day basis, several prisoners have told him of a"vision, or a dream - implicitly a message from God - that if three detainees die it will attract enough attention so that they will all get out of Guantanamo." It needn't be by starvation: according to newly declassified docouments, two prisoners, one of whom was al-Shehri, tried to commit suicide on May 18 by swallowing hoarded anti-anxiety medication. Those attempts triggered a search, which in turn led to the most serious rioting in the history of Camp Delta...
...Civil-liberties advocates point out that Guantanamo's 460 inmates have few other means to make their voices heard, given that most have been detained for more than four years without even being charged with a crime. Indeed, though the U.S. has condemned the hunger strikers at Gitmo, just last year the White House hailed a hunger-striking Iranian dissident for showing "that he is willing to die for his right to express his opinion...
...course, endure some form of voluntary intra-nasal feeding every day in hospital settings. But when force-feeding is involuntary and the recipient is in a state of high anxiety, the muscles tense up and the procedure can trigger nausea, bleeding, diarrhea and vomiting. "We are humane and compassionate,"; Guantanamo commander Harris told TIME, "but if we tell a detainee to do something, we expect the detainee to do it." As a note scrawled in al-Shehri's medical records put it: "[The prisoner] was informed that dying is not permitted...
...hunger strikers have already won a measure of success. In part because of their protests, and the attention focused on Guantanamo, the U.S. is facing growing criticism - from both allies and enemies - for the rules of detention at the camp. Now the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision effectively grants prisoners at least some of their longstanding demands, including more rights at trial. All the same, most of them are unlikely to be released soon. Indeed, authorities are currently constructing a new, state-of-the-art, $30 million prison at Guantanamo, where they plan to consolidate many of the camp...