Finally today, after nearly a month and a half of silence, we have word again about the ongoing hunger strike down at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And it’s not good.
The last we heard about the hunger strike, which began in August and was meant to protest both conditions at the camp and the undefined legal status of the detention, was around September 22. At that point it was said to involve more than a third of the camp’s inmates. The small burst of stories centered on the news that lawyers for 11 Kuwaiti detainees, fearful for their clients’ lives, had asked a Federal District Court judge to assume oversight of the hunger strike’s management.
But those were just a few short pieces, tucked away inside their respective papers. The last time the story got any real attention was in the New York Times on September 17, in an article headlined, “Widespread Hungerstrike at Guantanamo” which reported that 200 prisoners had been refusing food and that 20 of them were being feed nasally through feeding tubes. The Times quoted a lawyer for one of the detainees, who said his client had told him, ”Look, I’m dying a slow death in this place as it is. I don’t have any hope of fair treatment, so what have I got to lose?”
That was a month and a half ago. Only in the past few days has there been any word on the fate of these detainees, who it seems the Pentagon is determined to keep alive at all costs.
The government hasn’t made it easy to figure out the details of the hunger strike (which it euphemistically refers to as a “voluntary fast”); last Thursday the Times reported that lawyers representing the detainees had finally won access to information on their condition. The judge who ordered the disclosure based her decision on reports from lawyers of the detainees who claimed that their clients were being brutally force-fed using tubes shoved into their noses.
The other news this weekend was that UN investigators refused an invitation to check out conditions at the camp because they wouldn’t be allowed to meet with detainees during their visit. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times reported on this with 97 words of Reuters copy. Only the Post took the time to run a 480-word article from its own reporter, Josh White.
And today, at the Post, in an article by White, again alone among major papers, ran a longer piece on its front page doing what the press has only reluctantly done since the strike began in August: talking to the lawyers, the only people who have had access to the detainees and can provide a different picture than the optimism and doublespeak of the Defense Department.
And that picture is grim. The story focuses on one detainee, Jumah Dossari, who tried to both slash his wrists and hang himself in the bathroom while his lawyer was visiting him on October 15. White describes the suicide attempt for what it surely was, “a cry for help meant to reach beyond the base’s walls.” Dossari’s lawyer claims “his client has endured abuse and mistreatment on par with some of the worst offenses discovered at any U.S. detention facility over the past four years,” including having cigarettes put out on him, being severely beaten and watching U.S. Marines use pages of the Koran to shine their boots.
Col. Jeremy Martin, spokesman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo, contradicted that, suggesting that accounts that hunger-striking detainees are near death are “absolutely false.” He added that, “This technique, hunger striking, is consistent with the al Qaeda training, and reflects the detainees’ attempts to elicit media attention and bring pressure on the United States government.” (Of course, if media attention is indeed what they are trying for, they’re hardly succeeding; note that we still don’t know what the condition of the hunger strikers is or a definitive figure on how many there are.)
This is not the first time we’ve written about this issue, and the Post is to be commended for reporting this story on the front page, even as other political events are consuming much of the media world’s attention.
And while we don’t have any empirical evidence to judge what is or isn’t happening at Guantanamo, we do know that only the press can bring to bear the kind of pressure that will get the government to provide it.
–Gal Beckerman
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.