Saving Lives is Torture

Today Yahoo! news published an article with the ludicrous title, “US defends Guantanamo force-feeding”. What is tomorrow’s headline going to be?... “US defends giving health benefits to government employees”?

The article is about the latest in a series of hunger strikes held by the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center (Gitmo). Most of the inmates were captured in Afghanistan and are classified as illegal combatants by the US government. Left-wing “human rights” activists are doing everything in their power to kill these detainees.

Amnesty International official, Jumana Musa, issued a statement justifying the hunger strike. He said, “You are talking about a prison population of hundreds who have decided that with no conceivable change in their future that they just don’t care to live anymore, or they are going to make a statement in dying”. For years such activists have been making baseless accusations that the US has been mistreating the Gitmo detainees and they see this as their golden opportunity to create some martyrs for their cause.

Lawyers for a Gitmo detainee objected to the forced-feedings of the hunger strikers. They were upset that the US was “...feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water, and leaving them in the chair for as long as two hours to keep them from purging the food...” The horror!!! In an effort to kill their client the lawyers are asking a federal judge to stop the feedings. The basis of their argument to stop the treatment proclaims, “that the insertion and removal of the feeding tube was painful”.

So to stop the “suffering” they would rather see their clients succeed in killing themselves. One of the hunger strikers, Binyam Mohammed, told his attorney, “I do not plan to stop until I die or we are respected. People will definitely die.” On another occasion the lawyers of a hunger striker said that their client wrote a will in anticipation of starving to death. The New York-based law group, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), states that their clients have proclaimed a “starvation until death”. On a similar note, Gitanjali Gutierrez (a CCR lawyer) is on record saying that US policy had, “driven detainees to strike until they die or are afforded a fair hearing and humane treatment”.

It is painfully clear that these lawyers are aware that their clients are suicidal and they are trying to help them harm themselves in order to embarrass the US, regardless of the welfare of the clients that they should be protecting. I believe in the right to die for the terminally ill, but this is going too far.

A major concern for these activists is that the military’s force-feeding methods may have succeeded in breaking the hunger strike. This is distressing for them because they have found common ideological ground with their clients and have completely embraced their cause.

However, just a little over a month ago they were singing a different tune (are you surprised?). Towards the end of January lawyers were complaining that some of the hunger strikers were close to death. Stafford Smith (the lawyer of one of the detainees) threatened that the, “inevitable spectre of a Muslim prisoner dying on Guantanamo soil will cause greater outrage than even the desecration of the Koran”.

Perhaps he should have added “Allah willing” for effect.