Two leading Democratic senators (click here) on Wednesday asked President Barack Obama to order the Pentagon to stop routinely force-feeding hunger strikers at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo and adopt a model that feeds out of medical necessity, like in the federal prison system.
The letter by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who toured the detention center last month, and Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin directly challenged a U.S. military claim that the so-called “enteral feedings” at the remote prison in Cuba were both humane and modeled after the federal Bureau of Prisons.
The senators invoked a judge’s ruling Monday that called Guantánamo’s forced feedings “a painful, humiliating, and degrading process.”
Prison commanders have defended Guantánamo’s policy of hunger-strike management through forced feeding as a system designed to deny captives the ability to starve in U.S. custody....
