More than a dozen Muslim detainees have launched a new, long-term hunger strike at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to protest against harsh conditions at a new maximum-security complex, known as Camp 6. The military has responded by subjecting to daily force-feeding the largest group since early 2006, when a long-running strike was broken by strapping prisoners into restraint chairs and forcing plastic tubes through their nostrils. “We don’t have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had rights,” hunger striker Majid al-Joudi told a military physician. Before the use of restraint chairs, some detainees suffered sharp weight losses of more than 28 lbs. within weeks. Al-Joudi had lost 15% of his body weight in 31 days of fasting before he was transferred to a “feeding block” where hardcore hunger strikers are segregated from other prisoners.
About 160 Camp 6 inmates are generally locked in their less than 8ftx10ft cells for at least 22 hours a day, emerging only to exercise in small wire cages and shower. Besides those exercise periods, they can talk with other prisoners only by shouting through food slots in the steel doors of their cells. After a riot last May and three suicides in June, the unit was retrofitted to limit the detainees’ movement, officials said. “My wish is to die,” 27-year-old Yemeni hunger striker Adnan Farhan Abdullatif told his lawyer.
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