Guantanamo hunger strikers defiant despite force-feeding

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Twice a day at the U.S. military prison, Abdul Rahman Shalabi and Zaid Salim Zuhair Ahmed are strapped down in padded restraint chairs and flexible yellow tubes are inserted through their noses and throats. Milky nutritional supplements, mixed with water and olive oil to add calories and ease constipation, pour into their stomachs.

Shalabi, 32, an accused al-Qaida militant who was among the first prisoners taken to Guantanamo, and Ahmed, about 34, have refused to eat for almost two years to protest their conditions and open-ended confinement. In recent months, the number of hunger strikers has grown to two dozen, and the military is using force-feeding to keep them from starving.

The restraint chair was a practice borrowed from U.S. civilian prisons in January 2006. Prisoners are strapped down and monitored to prevent vomiting until the supplements are digested.

The British human rights group Reprieve labeled the process "intentionally brutal" and Shalabi, according to his lawyer's notes, said it is painful, "something you can't imagine. For two years, me and Ahmed have been treated like animals."

The government says force-feeding detainees in the restraint chair was not meant to break the hunger strikes, but it had that effect. A mass protest that began in August 2005 and reached a peak of 131 detainees dwindled at one point to just two -- Shalabi and Ahmed. In recent months, though, the number has grown again.

The military won't identify strikers, citing privacy rules and a desire to keep detainees from becoming martyrs.

But the Associated Press was able to identify Shalabi and Ahmed, both Saudi Arabians, through interviews with several detainee lawyers and detailed military charts, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, tracking the weights of each detainee.

The military counted 24 men on hunger strike this week, including 23 receiving "enteral feeding" through tubes. It begins daily monitoring and considers force-feeding any detainee who misses nine consecutive meals.

Health experts unaffiliated with the military say there are no nutritional consequences from long-term tube feeding, that with proper care it can be done safely. Psychological and physical harm, however, are a real possibility.

Prisoners have sporadically refused to eat at Guantanamo since shortly after they began arriving in January 2002.

The mass hunger strike that began in August 2005, however, was something different. The prisoners compared themselves to the 10 Irish Republican Army hunger strikers who starved themselves to death in Britain's Maze prison in 1981 in hopes of winning status as political prisoners.