The U.S. has adopted the practice of force-feeding detainees who hunger strike
by Keith Barratt ("Welshman")
The United States and Iran share an expression of public opinion, one that still causes considerable distress to the majority of British:
[In 1997] the people of Hartford, Connecticut, dedicated a monument to Bobby Sands and the other Irish Republican Army hunger strikers. The monument stands in a traffic circle known as Bobby Sands Circle, at the bottom of Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park. The Iranian government named a street in Tehran after Bobby Sands. (It was formerly Winston Churchill Street.) It runs alongside the British embassy.
Readers may or may not be familiar with this part of Northern Ireland's history, involving the death through a hunger strike of the IRA detainee. Bobby Sands was 27 years old when he died, 5 May 1981, after 66 days without food. Nine other IRA prisoners died following him in the same strike. Sands and his fellow strikers were protesting their reassignment from political prisoner status back to criminal status; poltical status was won the previous year through a hunger strike. Sands was elected to Parliament several days after he began his protest. The British government's unwillingness to concede to the prisoner's demands during the second strike, which led to the death of Bobby Sands and the other detainees, resulted in much greater sympathy for the IRA from Irish nationalists and greatly strengthened the movement as well as earned recognition from people around the world. A further brief summary is given by the Cain Institute.
Before discussing the aspect of force-feeding that is taking place now in U.S. prisons, I want to step back a bit further into British history. I first became aware of the question of force-feeding through an excellent BBC docudrama many years ago about suffragettes, who employed civil disobedience in the UK from 1900 to 1920 in order to achieve the vote for women.
Many were imprisoned and used hunger strikes to further their cause. The authorities could not let these women, many of whom were connected to leading families in the country, die and become martyrs. They were forcibly fed.
The BBC did not hide what this meant in their dramatization of the events. They showed the women being bound to chairs, their heads pulled back by their hair, and the rough-handed prison warders thrusting large-diameter rubber tubes down their throats and pouring in a food mixture through a funnel.
So that you take what follows as seriously as you take all other acts now being done in our name, I ask you to sense the ugliness of the abuse, your mouth being forced open, the taste of that tube, and the abomination of the act. For surely we have become so accustomed to these atrocities that our newspapers can discuss them calmly and objectively. But you can no more be objective about these horrors than you can calmly debate in Congress where and when torture might be acceptable.
Yet what follows is classified not as torture but as prisoner welfare. Constance Lytton was force-fed in October 1909. Her book Prison and Prisoners included an account of her experiences:
Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. The doctor leant on my knees as he stooped over my chest to get at my mouth. I shut my mouth and clenched my teethâ?¦. The doctor seemed annoyed at my resistance and he broke into a temper as he pried my teeth with the steel implement. The pain was intense and at last I must have given way, for he got the gap between my teeth, when he proceeded to turn it until my jaws were fastened wide apart. Then he put down my throat a tube, which seemed to me much too wide and something like four feet in length. I choked the moment it touched my throat. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down. I was sick all over the doctor and wardresses. As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek. Presently the wardresses left me. Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howley. When the ghastly process was over and all quiet. I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, "No Surrender," and then came the answer in Elsie's voice, "No Surrender."
As is happening now in Guantánamo Bay, nasal insertion was also employed. Mary Leigh, a member of the WSPU, was forced-fed in September 1909:
On Saturday afternoon the wardress forced me onto the bed and two doctors came in. While I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long, with a funnel at the end; there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up the right and left nostril on alternative days. The sensation is most painful ? the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and there is a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I am on the bed pinned down by wardresses, one doctor holds the funnel end, and the other doctor forces the other end up the nostrils. The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down about a pint of milk, egg and milk is sometimes used.
Emmeline Pankhurst, who was then in her fifties, endured 10 hunger strikes. Kitty Marion underwent at least 200 force-feedings in prison while on hunger strike. Emmeline Pankhurst's sister, Mary Clarke, was taken ill at her home in Brighton soon after release from prison and died of a broken blood vessel, probably as a result of being forced-fed in Holloway Prison.
In Parliament James Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour Party, said:
In reply to a question of mine today, Mr. Masterman, speaking on behalf of the Home Secretary, admitted that some of the nine prisoners now in Winston Green Gaol, Birmingham, had been subjected to "hospital treatment", and admitted that this euphemism meant administering food by force. The process employed was the insertion of a tube down the throat into the stomach and pumping the food down. To do this, I am advised, a gag has to be used to keep the mouth open.
That there is difference of opinion concerning the horrible brutality of this proceeding! Women worn and weak by hunger, are seized upon, held down by brute force, gagged, a tube inserted down the throat, and food poured or pumped into the stomach. Let British men think over the spectacle.
In 1913 the British Government sought a better way to treat such prisoners. The Prisoner's (Temporary Discharge of Ill Health) Act came into force. Suffragettes were now allowed to go on hunger strike, but as soon as they became ill they were released. Once the women had recovered, the police rearrested them and returned them to prison where they completed their sentences. This successful means of dealing with hunger strikes became known as the Cat and Mouse Act.
Now step forward in time to the 1970s and '80s. Prisoners detained for terrorism in Northern Ireland undertook hunger strikes in support of demands that were unacceptable to British public opinion. In words so terribly familiar today, the Cat and Mouse Act could not be employed, on the grounds that alleged IRA gunmen could not be let loose on the streets. At the same time, the British government could not countenance creating martyrs by letting them die.
Debate on force-feeding came to a head in the UK in the 1970s when two Irish prisoners, Dolours and Marian Price, legally challenged the Home Office's right to force-feed in any case other than where refusal of food arose from a medical or psychiatric condition. It caused a furor, and the prison policy of involuntary feeding that earlier IRA prisoners had experienced was overturned. In 1981 the wishes of hunger strikers were respected and doctors supervised death-fasts in Northern Ireland. The death of Bobby Sands came as a result. The policy was subsequently refined, so that when prisoners became too weak to communicate effectively, the prisoner's priest met with family members so that a final decision on intervention could be taken.
The hunger strikes came to an end, in part because of the realization that each of the families of the strikers would ask for medical intervention whenever the strikers lapsed into unconsciousness. At the same time, on 6 October 1981 James Prior, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, announced a series of measures that went a long way toward meeting many aspects of the prisoners' five demands.
The relevance of this history to Guantánamo Bay will become clear.
The New York Times of February 9, 2006, includes this information:
United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.
In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward.
Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantanamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.
Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out 'in a humane and compassionate manner'
