U.S. crimes in Guantanamo grow more horrific

In an interview with the weekly magazine Der Spiegel published days before her first visit to the United States, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Guantanamo detention camp should be closed and that Washington should find other ways of dealing with what it calls “terror suspects”.

“An institution like Guantanamo can and should not exist in the longer term,” Merkel said in an interview published on Saturday.

“Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.”

Merkel plans to visit Washington next week, her first since becoming chancellor in November.

A Guantánamo Bay doctor has recently admitted that hunger strikers at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba are tied down and fed through nasal tubes.

Contrary to what the U.S. military claimed on Friday; that the number of Guantanamo Bay prisoners taking part in an ongoing hunger strike has fallen by more than half, new details have emerged, according The Observer, revealing the growing number of hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay, and detailing how prisoners are being tied down and force-fed through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs to keep them alive.

Gitmo detainees participating in the current hunger strike routinely experience bleeding and nausea, according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen by The Observer.

And according to Bill Goodman, legal director for the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees, restrictions on information from the base made it impossible to know just how many detainees were participating.

"You can't believe them because they have an interest in trying to purvey this perspective that everything at Guantanamo is fine and everybody is wonderful. In order to do that, they have to say there aren't that many hunger strikers," he said.

Detainees' lawyers have repetitively accused the U.S. military of violently shoving tubes through the men's noses and into their stomachs without anesthesia or sedatives as part of the force-feeding process.

Captain John S Edmondson, commander of Guantanamo's hospital admitted that 'experience teaches us' that such symptom must be expected 'whenever nasogastric tubes are used'.

It is painful, Edmonson admits.

But Edmondson argued that the thick, 4.8mm diameter tubes tried previously to allow quicker feeding are not being used anymore and that a new 3mm tubes are 'soft and flexible', so they’re not that painful.

The London solicitors Allen and Overy, representing some of the hunger strikers, lodged a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson is registered to practise.

They call on the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional conduct' for allowing force-feeding.

The Observer obtained Edmonson's affirmation last week, as a Guantánamo spokesman confirmed that the number of hunger strikers has almost doubled since Christmas. Now 81 put of the 550 detainees held at Guantanamo jail are taking part in the hunger strike.

Last week, the U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH signed a law denying the detainees their right to file habeas corpus petitions in the U.S. federal courts. And on Friday, the administration asked the Supreme Court to make this retroactive, “nullifying about 220 cases in which prisoners have contested the basis of their detention and the legality of pending trials by military commission,” The Observer stated.

According to Article 5 of the 1975 World Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which U.S. doctors are legally bound to observe, doctors are prohibited from using force-feeding under any circumstances.

“If I were to do what Edmondson describes in his statement, I would be referred to the General Medical Council and charged with assault,” said Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at Queen Elizabeth's hospital in Birmingham.