Mr. Diyab was delivered to Guantánamo in 2002. He was cleared for release in 2009, but was freed just this last weekend and sent to Uruguay with five other detainees. In 2013, Mr. Diyab had joined others in the camp’s second major hunger strike to protest their continued detention. At its peak it included more than 100 detainees, and it continues, though authorities stopped reporting the number of participants a year ago.

The tapes’ existence came to light after Mr. Diyab filed a lawsuit over the feeding procedure. His lawyers, with a consortium of news organizations that included The Times, sued to make the videos public, with redactions to protect the guards’ identities. (Litigation over the tapes is expected to continue despite Mr. Diyab’s release.) Judge Gladys Kessler of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia granted the request but has stayed that order pending resolution of the government’s appeal.

The government defends its demand for secrecy by trying to have it both ways. The tapes, officials insist, depict only “lawful, humane and appropriate” behavior by guards. But since the public is not used to seeing images of men strapped down for force-feeding, releasing the tapes would cause international outrage, harming national security and endangering American soldiers abroad.

The larger question is why Guantánamo officials continue to make imprisonment as inhumane as possible, by, say, denying Mr. Diyab a wheelchair to leave his cell, and strapping him and other strikers into five-point restraints. In a November ruling, Judge Kessler wrote that she could not understand why the government refused to give Mr. Diyab a wheelchair or crutches. “Had that simple step been taken, numerous painful and humiliating forced cell extractions could have been avoided,” she said.

President Obama, who has spoken of the country’s “willingness to act on behalf of human dignity,” has it in his power to release the Guantánamo tapes. Americans — in whose name the prisoners there continue to be held — should be able to decide for themselves how to define, and protect, that dignity.