Attorneys for US tell court restraint chair was necessary after detainees ‘splashed faeces and vomit’ and could use feeding tubes as ‘whip-like weapons’

Three days of legal arguments concluded Wednesday in the first-ever court challenge to the controversial US practice of forcibly feeding hunger-striking detainees at Guantánamo Bay.



While most of the testimony occurred in public, against the wishes of a Justice Department that warned national security could be compromised, Judge Gladys Kessler closed her courtroom doors in the afternoon to watch and discuss classified videotapes showing the tube-feeding and forcible cell extraction of Syrian detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab.

As lawyers emerged from over three hours of closed viewing of the videos, said to be graphic, attorneys for Dhiab said they watched the reaction of their Justice Department adversaries.

“I just had to wonder: what are they thinking?” said Jon Eisenberg.

Last week, Kessler ordered the tapes declassified and released, a process that has yet to begin.

Dhiab, who has spent much of his 12 years at Guantánamo hunger striking to protest his confinement without charge, wants Kessler to bar his captors from repeatedly removing and reinserting his feeding tubes, a process he describes as torturous, and using guards to forcibly remove him from his cell for the feeding.

Dhiab considers the treatment to be a punitive tactic to break the Guantánamo hunger strike – which last year attracted global infamy before officials stopped releasing information about it – has said he wants the American public to watch the feeding and exactions tapes.

As they concluded their case, Justice Department attorneys relied on written declarations from unidentified medical officers at Guantánamo and two detentions operations commanders, Colonels John Bogdan and David Heath, to contend that the forced feedings and forced cell extractions are safe, necessary and humane. None of the relevant Guantánamo officers were called to testify, and so no cross-examination was possible. A Justice Department attorney said the medical officers were not named to protect their privacy.

The Guantánamo officers cited the experience of a 2005-era hunger strike as critical to informing why they now remove hunger strikers’ feeding tubes – a practice doctors testifying for Dhiab called painful, unnecessary and dangerous – and strap them into “five-point restraint” chairs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yasiin Bey force-fed under standard Guantánamo Bay procedure.

During the earlier hunger strike, Guantánamo officials took a softer approach, keeping the feeding tubes inserted in detainees for days at a time and allowing detainees to communicate with each other while fed under relatively minimal “two-point” restraint. A declaration from the Guantánamo task force commander at the time, army major general Jay Hood, said the detainees were “verbally and physically assaulting” medical personnel, punching nurses and “splashing” them with vomit or excrement, and “sabotaging” the feedings.

“One detainee bit his tube in half and swallowed it, requiring endoscopic removal,” navy captain Stephen Hooker, a former Guanatanamo hospital commander, said in a declaration.

In late December 2005, forensic psychiatrists and officials with the federal Bureau of Prisons visited Guantánamo to recommend new safeguards, Justice Department attorneys recounted, leading to the adoption of the five-point restraint chair and the removal of the naso-gastric tubes for each feeding.

An anonymous military officer who commands the medical staff at Guantánamo said that the length of tube necessary to permit so-called “enteral feeding” for days on end could be turned into a “whip-like weapon” or used to commit suicide or strangle others. Neither Hood nor Hooker indicated detainees participating in the earlier hunger strike had turned their feeding tubes into weapons.

The medical officers cited by the Justice Department testified that they remove and reinsert the detainees’ feeding tubes because the risk of medical complications “is generally higher” when the tubes are left in, a flat contradiction of medical testimony on behalf of Dhiab.

Bogdan, who left Guantánamo in June after two years in charge of detentions, revealed that there are six detainees who have been allowed to be force fed without the “restraint chair”, wherein a detainee has his limbs and head tied down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dhiab has been on hunger strike at the detention centre on Cuba for about seven years. Photograph: Ben Fox/AP

But notably for Dhiab, whose lawyers contend that the force feeding and its implementation amounts to unstated punishment, Bogdan said the six detainees were fed “in a standard sofa chair” to establish a “better rapport” with medical staff and “incentivize these detainees to stop their fast”.

“This improved rapport, it was hoped, would lead to these detainees ultimately deciding to follow medical advice and to at least eat some solid food, if not end their fasts entirely,” Bogdan wrote to the court.

The lax treatment yielded “no significant enduring improvements”, Bogdan wrote. While it continued through the end of his command, he did not exempt other hunger strikers from the restraint chair, Dhiab among them.

Since 30 May, Guantánamo staff have been ordered to strap Dhiab into the chair and feed him two 237ml cans of nutritional drink twice daily, providing him with approximately 500 calories. Dhiab sometimes eats solid food or drinks Ensure, Jevity or other nutritional drinks instead. Kessler temporarily ordered a halt to his tube feedings – the first judicial intervention into the feedings – earlier that month.

“I have sat in the restraint chair while fully secured. It was padded, comfortable, and felt like a normal chair,” Bogdan wrote.

Eisenberg said that the government initially sought to black out the word “incentivize” from Bogdan’s testimony but ultimately backed down.

Justice Department attorneys and Guantánamo officials vigorously disputed that any aspect of the feeding, the extraction or the restraint is punitive. They stated that any detainee who eats or drinks nutritional supplements like Ensure will spare themselves the forced feedings, and the forced cell extractions are a “last resort” for detainees who refuse the force feedings, pose a danger, indicate resistance or “cause a disturbance”.

A US naval medic explains the feeding chair at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Photograph: AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Attorneys for the government on Wednesday kept two cans of Ensure on their courtroom table, but did not refer to them in argument.

Dhiab, who stands over 6ft tall and weighs about 152lbs, was described as such a threat. Heath, Bogdan’s successor as detentions operations commander, declared that Dhiab since April has struck guards three times with his arms or head and twice “splashed” guards with a cocktail of feces and vomit.

Earlier in the trial, doctors testifying on behalf of Dhiab described him as too weak to threaten anyone, with his right arm and leg afflicted with a mysterious quasi-paralysis that Guantánamo officials have dismissed as fakery. Two doctors who examined Dhiab recently testified that he does not wish to die from his hunger strike.

Kessler is likely to take weeks to decide the case. She requested closing arguments to be submitted as briefs, not orally in court, by 17 October . It also remains unclear when the force-feeding videotapes will be made public, as she has yet to order any timetable.

Dhiab may not remain at Guantánamo for the outcome of his challenge. He is awaiting a transfer for resettlement in Uruguay, the result of a diplomatic brokerage reached in the spring.