WASHINGTON, April 9 (Xinhua) -- A new hunger strike is underway at the U.S.
detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees
subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, The
Boston Globe reported Monday.
According to the online edition of the newspaper, lawyers for the
hunger-strikers were quoted as saying that their clients' actions are driven by
harsh conditions in a new maximum-security complex at Guantanamo to which about
160 prisoners have been moved since December 2006.
The 13 detainees now on hunger strike is the highest number to endure the
force-feeding regime on an extended basis since early 2006, when the U.S.
military broke a long-running strike with a new policy of strapping prisoners
into "restraint chairs" while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through
their nostrils.
The hunger strikers are now monitored so closely that they have virtually
no chance of starving themselves, the report said.
Yet their persistence underscores how the struggle between detainees and
guards at Guantanamo has continued even as the military has tightened its
control.
"We don't have any rights here, even after your Supreme Court said we had
rights," one hunger-striker, Majid al-Joudi, told a military physician,
according to medical records released recently under a federal court order.
"If the policy does not change, you will see a big increase in fasting," he
said.
Guantanamo spokesman Robert Durand played down the significance of the
current hunger strike, describing the prisoners' complaints as "propaganda."
The United States opened the detention facility at its naval base in
Guantanamo in January 2002 to hold terror suspects and Taliban members mainly
captured during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.
More than 390 detainees have been transferred abroad from Guantanamo, and
currently about 385 prisoners are still being held there.
WASHINGTON, April 2 (Xinhua) -- The
U.S. Supreme Court refuses on Monday to consider two appeals by prisoners at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, over their confinement there for over five years.
The appeals sought to overturn a ruling by a federal
appeals court in Washington in February that upheld a key provision of a law
enacted last year. Full story
WASHINGTON, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Australian David Hicks
was sentenced Friday to serve no more than 7 years in jail during his trial at
the detention facility in the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Hicks, 31, is the first Guantanamo detainee charged in the
revised military tribunals created under the authorization of the U.S. Congress
last year, according to a report from CNN. Full story
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