• Judge says Abu Wa'el Dhiab's lawyers can view secret footage • 'Pretend it's 1955 – that's where the technology is' – lawyer

A federal court has forced the US government to reveal that it has secretly recorded dozens of force-feedings of just one Guantánamo Bay detainee, raising the prospect that the military possesses a vast video library of a practice criticised as abusive.

On Wednesday, a federal judge decreed that lawyers for that detainee can view hours of his videotaped force feedings, the first time a non-government official will be permitted to view the secret recordings.

Before last week, the Defense Department did not even acknowledge that videotapes of its enteral feedings of hunger striking detainees – conducted by inserting a tube into the stomach through the nose – even existed.

But now the US government has conceded that there are 34 videos showing the forcible feeding of one detainee, a Syrian cleared for release named Abu Wa’el Dhiab. The analogue video cassettes are part of a broader set of 136 videos showing Dhiab being forcibly removed from his cell by Guantánamo Bay guards bringing the hunger striker to be fed enterally.

District court judge Gladys Kessler, of the Washington DC circuit, rejected an argument from the government that the tapes were irrelevant to Dhiab’s unusual lawsuit, which seeks to get a federal judge to set the conditions of his military confinement, which Dhiab considers amount to torture.

One of Dhiab’s attorneys, Jon Eisenberg, said the government possess thousands of tapes detailing feeding and cell extraction conditions of the other detainees. Over 100 Guantánamo detainees participated in the 2013 hunger strike, which garnered international attention and an information blackout from the military command overseeing the detention center.

Other detainees, like Yemeni Emad Hassan, have conducted hunger strikes since 2005.

“There are hundreds of force feedings on tape, maybe even thousands,” Eisenberg said.

Kessler, who ordered Dhiab’s force feeding temporarily halted on Friday, did not order the tapes to be released to the public. The government will have to transfer the classified tapes from Guantánamo to a secured facility in the Washington DC area for his lawyers to view, after faces and other identifying information of Guantánamo personnel and facilities are censored.

The tapes of Dhiab’s feedings are said to range between 15 minutes to half an hour each, suggesting the government possesses at least eight hours of footage of just one detainee enteral feeding. The tapes are said to be in a microcassette format and Eisenberg said they would have to be digitised for viewing, owing to formatting difficulties impacting declassified playback.

“Pretend it’s 1955, that’s where the technology is,” he said. “For all I know, there’s 8-tracks.”

In court papers filed on Tuesday, Dhiab said the forced feeding is “like torture,” but Guantánamo guards have declined to film some of the sessions.

“Sometimes the way the MP [military policeman] holds the head chokes me, and with all the nerves in the nose the tube passing the nose is like torture,” Dhiab said in a legal filing.

“Then, especially when the MP is holding the neck, when they try to force the tube through the throat it often catches and they cannot push it through. At times like these, I ask them to videotape. And they refuse.”

In 2013, a different detainee, Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that after refusing to be fed in the prison hospital, MPs in “riot gear” tied his hands and feet to his bed and forcibly inserted an IV into his hand and another into his penis, as he alleged he was kept restrained for 26 hours.

The Pentagon and Joint Task Force Guantánamo, the military command overseeing Guantánamo detentions, have consistently denied that the force feeding is abusive and accuse the detainees of lying to attract media attention. They have more recently taken to not answering basic questions about how many detainees are on hunger strike, and instead describe the detainees as “not eating on a regular basis.”

Dhiab, in his Tuesday court filings, alleged that he was threatened on Friday with a forcible cell extraction after again refusing to eat, three hours after Kessler’s initial order for the extractions and feedings to halt. It is unclear if Kessler extended the halt to Dhiab’s feeding.

“We won't be discussing the various claims made by Mr Dhiab through the legal team he's retained, especially while this greater issue remains in active litigation,” said Lt Col Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman.

There are currently 154 detainees at Guantánamo, down from nearly 800 at its early peak. But there is no stable public tally of how many have been on hunger strike, let alone how many have been videotaped forcibly being fed or removed from their cells for force feedings.

Eisenberg said that the only reason for the government to have kept knowledge of the feeding tapes secret “is to keep some really horrible abuse under wraps.”

























