Word: prisoners
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...General David Petraeus, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, and former Baghdad Ambassador Ryan Crocker repeatedly quarreled with al-Maliki on the matter throughout 2008, pressing the Prime Minister to clear the way for the trial of at least one senior Ministry of Interior official accused of orchestrating prison abuses and murders. Al-Maliki resisted the U.S. pressure and largely seemed unconcerned about investigating a myriad of cases in which Iraqi security forces, chiefly the national police, remain accused of rape, torture and murder in conjunction with sectarian death squads...
...grievances and settled disputes by fasting on the doorsteps of their wrongdoers until they were publicly shamed into doing the right thing. The IRA resurrected the practice in 1917, with Thomas Ashe, leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, who died in the city's cruelly named Mountjoy Prison during a botched force-feeding. "It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer," he declared shortly before his death. Three years later, 89 strikers were released from Mountjoy after less than three weeks without food; their British captors wanted...
...life, first to protest colonial rule and later to protest Hindu-Muslim violence. He once broke a fast when a group of tearful rioters laid their machetes at his feet. In 2006, newly declassified government records show that Winston Churchill would have preferred to let Gandhi die in prison during his 1942 hunger strike; his war cabinet managed to convince him that this would have been disastrous...
...Woodrow Wilson, who denounced such tactics as appalling and "unladylike," though he later buckled amid a public outcry over the forced feeding of the protesters and agreed to support the 19th Amendment granting women the vote. During World War II, a group of conscientious objectors at Connecticut's Danbury prison staged a 135-day strike against segregated dining. As a result, Danbury became the first federal facility with integrated meals...
...Outside prison walls, though, most hunger strikes are carefully planned with an end date in mind. Two weeks ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales ended a 5-day hunger strike to agitate for new election legislation (it worked), while actress Mia Farrow announced that she had gained nine pounds in preparation for a 3-week fast to draw awareness to starvation in Darfur, telling People magazine that magician and publicity generator David Blaine had called to offer some tips from the 44 days he spent suspended in a glass box above London's River Thames without food. On May 3, more...