• Detainees' letters claim US keeps numbers artificially low • US admits it has recorded video of Guantánamo force-feedings

Recent letters written by Guantánamo Bay detainees on hunger strike accuse the US military of manipulating data about the strike and using force-feeding techniques as a method of punishment.

Letters from a Yemeni detainee, Emad Hassan, and a Saudi former resident of the UK, Shaker Aamer, describe a core of “around 17” hunger strikers, down from a peak of 106 last spring. But the letters allege that the number is kept artificially low by a “new strategy” of only force-feeding detainees when their weight reaches dangerous levels, which the US military denied.

The letters come as the Defense Department admitted, for the first time, that it has recorded video of some of the Guantánamo force-feedings.



They also come months after the US military command at the detention facility, stung by criticism of its handling of the hunger strike, drastically curtailed the release of information about the residual strikers.



A Miami Herald tally reported that fewer than 40 detainees were on strike as of March 19. There are 154 detainees still at Guantánamo.



“There is a scheme here to avoid blame about the force-feeding,” wrote Hassan, a Yemeni and persistent hunger striker who remains at Guantánamo despite the US government clearing him for transfer in 2010.



If a hunger striker declines what the military describes as an enteral feeding – performed by inserting a tube into a detainee’s stomach through the nose – the detainee will not be forcibly fed “until it’s a critical situation”, meaning the detainee’s weight has dropped substantially, Hassan wrote in a letter to his lawyers around late March or early April.



The US military command at Guantánamo denied the allegations made by the detainees and defended its treatment of the strikers.



“Medical personnel monitor detainees' health on a regular basis to ensure the detainees' safety,” said Commander John Filostrat, a spokesman, who added that enteral feedings “are used only when the detainee’s health is in danger.”



Letters from Guantánamo detainees undergo a time-consuming declassification process. They were provided to the Guardian by Reprieve, a UK-based human rights group that represents several detainees.



Guantánamo doctors, Hassan alleged, do not consider detainees as being on hunger strike if they are not currently forcibly fed.



“When the doctor stops feeding four detainees, he decreases the total number of hunger strikers to 13. When their weight goes down and the doctors have to feed him, he cancels three or four others so he can keep the numbers of hunger strikers low. I am hesitating between refusing the feeding until the doctors decide to force-feed me, and waiting to see what will happen in the next two-three weeks.”



Filostrat said: “That allegation is false.”



As part of a lawsuit on behalf of one of its Guantánamo clients, Abi Wa’el Dhiab, Reprieve revealed that the Defense Department has video recordings of the force-feedings.



According to court filings, lawyers for the government told Reprieve on Tuesday that the Defense Department had told them it had videos of the process of removing the prisoners from their cells for the feedings, as well as “the enteral feeding process” itself.



Reprieve has asked a judge with the US district court for the District of Columbia to preserve the tapes. In 2005, the CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations of detainees in its custody. The judge, Gladys Kessler, on Wednesday gave the government a day to respond to Reprieve’s request.



Hassan and Aamer allege that the medical personnel will “use any and every thing” to make the force feeding “as excruciating as they can,” particularly for hunger strikers designated as non-compliant.



Medical staff change the mixture of the liquid nutritional formula, such as Ensure or TwoCal, in a manner the detainees claim results in painful stomach conditions. They claim US military personnel do so for punishment.



“They manipulate the brothers being force-fed so that they will stop their hunger strikes,” Aamer wrote in a letter dated January 8.



“For instance, they mix the Ensure with Milk of Magnesium to cause diarrhoea. Or they use one of the 101 other ways to break our hunger strike – from cutting off the water in the cell to using torture in the feeding chair.”



Hassan described receiving a treatment of Pulmocare, another nutritional formula, that “made me vomit from 10pm to 7am. Pieces of fat kept coming out whenever I vomited.”



In one letter, believed to be written on April 18, Hassan describes a force feeding administered to “Brother Khalid (ISN 242),” apparently a reference to Yemeni detainee Khalid Qasim. Qasim, according to Hassan, had asked nurses to avoid mixing his Ensure with water, which had upset his stomach. But after he was sent to force-feeding by a military “Forcible Cell Extraction” team, he found water in his feeding bags.



“Khalid waited until the same nurse came and asked her about the reappearance of water with the feeding formula. She said softly: ‘It’s the doctors’ orders.’ He said he smiled at her and asked: ‘Is this because of the FCE team?’ The nurse simply nodded.”



Hassan continued: “The odd thing is that there are members of staff here (nurses, corpsmen etc) who are convinced, or at least appear to be convinced, that they are here protecting us (as safety officers). Who is going to protect us from these protectors?”

With limited information emerging from Guantánamo Bay, it is difficult to independently corroborate the detainees’ accounts. For months, the US military command at Guantánamo has stopped releasing information about the hunger strike, effectively declaring it over.



Spokespeople for Guantánamo deny wrongdoing, and routinely accuse the hunger strikers of attempting to manipulate public opinion through false accusations.



“You’ll always have protesters not eating. And our primary mission is to make sure that we’re taken care of. Anything else out of that we’re just not going to do it through the press,” Filostrat told reporters at Guantánamo on April 15, saying that only a “small number” were subject to enteral feeding.



Filostrat said in an email to the Guardian on Wednesday that the policy of the Joint Task Force remains not to release to the public the number of detainees who are “not eating on a regular basis,” but said it was “incorrect” to tally the figure at 17 detainees.



In July 2013, Judge Kessler said it was “perfectly clear” that force-feeding at Guantánamo was “a painful, humiliating and degrading process”.



A Reprieve caseworker, Cortney Busch, urged Guantánamo officials to force-feed detainees via a tube inserted for days at a time instead of extracting feeding tubes twice daily during the sessions, which she described as “extremely painful.”



“Streamlined feeding procedures and better treatment of those being force-fed should be implemented too,” she added.