Lawyers say inmate Emad Hassan has been force-fed 5,000 times as practice gets first legal challenge at US federal level

Hunger-striking Guantánamo detainees are being subjected to a form of torture known as the “water cure” that was widely used in the Spanish Inquisition, lawyers are claiming, in the first legal challenge to force-feeding at the military base brought before a US federal court.

The case was lodged on Tuesday in the US district court for the DC circuit that has jurisdiction over Guantánamo. It was brought on behalf of Emad Abdullah Hassan, a Yemeni who has been on hunger strike in the detention camp intermittently since 2005 and continuously since 2007.

By his lawyers’ reckoning, Hassan has been force-fed more than 5,000 times during that period, in conditions they allege are abusive, illegal under international law, and a form of torture. The motion calls for a preliminary injunction that would put an immediate halt on the practice pending full review.

The legal move is the first of its kind to be brought before the civilian courts following last month’s decision by a federal appeals court to allow such a challenge to go ahead. It paves the way for the first comprehensive hearing in the US judicial system over the legality and propriety of the military’s controversial use of force-feeding at Guantánamo.

Hassan, now 34, was picked up by Pakistani security forces in February 2002, having travelled from his native Yemen to Faisalbad to attend university. He has been held without charge for almost 12 years in Guantánamo, despite the fact that he was cleared for release in 2009.

The legal motion, together with testimony from Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the human rights organisation Reprieve, which is co-sponsoring the challenge, gives gruesome details of Hassan’s treatment at the hands of US military guards and military doctors administering the feeding regime. Since November 2005, techniques have been used that the lawyers allege are designed to inflict pain and humiliation on the prisoner in the hope of persuading him to give up his hunger strike.

Those techniques include:

• using feeding tubes that are too big to be inserted into the prisoner’s nostrils without causing great pain;

• insisting on inserting and removing the tube for each feed, rather than leaving it in for prolonged periods, causing repeated agony twice a day;

• restraining Hassan in what he and other detainees call the “torture chair” in which his hands, legs, waist, shoulders and head are strapped down tightly;

• giving the prisoners a laxative drug at the same time as feeding, causing them to defecate while in the restraint chair and then leaving them in their own filth.

The technique also includes what Hassan’s lawyers liken to the medieval torture of the “water cure”, where large volumes of liquids are forced into detainees’ stomachs at excessive speed, causing severe enteral pain. As much as 2,300ml of fluid may be passed down the tube in just 20 to 30 minutes – a method that an expert witness in the case, retired military doctor Stephen Xenakis, said “does not conform to standards of medical care”.

The legal challenge stresses that Hassan’s intention on going on hunger strike is not to commit suicide, and that he does not want to die. Rather, he is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, among others, to conduct “a peaceful protest against indefinite detention without charge or trial”, the motion says.

Hassan’s lawyers argue that an acceptable alternative to Guantánamo’s current force-feeding regime can be found in the US federal bureau of prisons regulations. They stipulate that detainees should only be force-fed if a physician determines that they are facing an imminent risk of death or great bodily injury.

Even then, “only that amount of force necessary to gain control of the inmate” should be applied, the regulations state.