I don't know if it bothers anybody, but this is considered to be torture by the people who study what torture really is. From the Washington Post:

Ten detainees at the facility are under a self-imposed hunger strike, ICE spokeswoman Danielle Bennett said in an email Saturday. Of the 10, nine are from India, and one is from Nicaragua, Bennett said. Nine of them missed nine consecutive meals, triggering ICE’s hunger strike protocols — medical evaluations and health monitoring. At various points in mid-January, a federal judge ordered the nine to be fed and hydrated without consent, according to ICE.

ICE’s update comes on the heels of a report by the Associated Press, which revealed on Wednesday that six detainees were being force-fed at the El Paso facility. They are on a hunger strike to protest “rampant verbal abuse and threats of deportation from guards.” The AP report triggered outrage from lawmakers and human rights groups who decried the practice as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

(Let us note here for the record that a casual attitude toward torture carried out in facilities beyond the reach of human-rights law is a legacy from the second Bush administration and everybody on TV who spent the Aughts carrying water for that administration should be made to account for what it normalized.)

Force-feeding equipment at Guantanamo Bay Charles Dharapak/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The World Medical Association has declared it anathema for any doctor to participate in a force-feeding program. In 2013, a leak to Al Jazeera provided us with a look into how grotesque the process is.

Hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners who are force-fed a liquid nutritional supplement undergo a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires them to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours, according to documentation obtained by Al Jazeera. The prisoners remain this way, with a 61cm - or longer - tube snaked through their nostril until a chest X-ray, or a test dose of water, confirms it has reached their stomach.

At the end of the feeding, the prisoner is removed from the restraint chair and placed into a "dry cell" with no running water. A guard then observes the detainee for 45-60 minutes "for any indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting". If the prisoner vomits he is returned to the restraint chair. That's just a partial description of the "chair restraint system clinical protocol" which medical personnel are instructed to follow when administering a nutritional supplement to prisoners who have been selected for force-feeding by Guantanamo Commander Rear Admiral John Smith.

An ICE detention facility in Lumpkin, Georgia Kate Brumback/AP/REX/Shutterstock

As Clara Long of Human Rights Watch put it:

Force-feeding – which involves pushing a feeding tube down a patient’s nose – can be very painful and is inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Medical ethics and human rights norms generally prohibit the force feeding of detainees who are competent and capable of rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food. A relative of two men being force-fed with nasal tubes by ICE told the AP the men are having persistent nose bleeds and vomiting several times a day.

Hunger strikes are often the last resort of the otherwise powerless. Suffragettes employed them and, having done so, were brutally force-fed while in custody. They have a long history in Irish politics, from the death in custody in 1917 of Thomas Ashe, who succumbed immediately after having been force-fed, to the blanket protests of imprisoned IRA and INLA men in the early 1980s, during which the sainted Margaret Thatcher allowed an elected member of Parliament named Bobby Sands to starve himself to death rather than allow him to wear clothes of his own choosing while incarcerated. It is a last, desperate cry from people otherwise voiceless. And force-feeding these people is torture, no matter how many doctors are standing around, watching.

What the hell is wrong with us?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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