Right now, more than 100 detainees at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are engaged in a months-long hunger strike. Many are being involuntarily fed through neogastric tubes, a practice that rapper and activist Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) is protesting in a new video.

The unsettling clip, hosted by the Guardian newspaper in England and directed by BAFTA award-winning director Asif Kapadia, follows Bey as he undergoes the standard force-feeding procedure, which many Guantanamo inmates undergo several times a day.

It’s difficult to watch an utterly distraught Bey being fed through tubes. Bey submitted to the ordeal to highlight the prisoners’ predicament at Guantanamo, where many have been detained without trials, and are on a hunger-strike to protest their treatment.

PHOTOS: Celebrities by The Times

The force-feeding is particularly fraught for observant Muslim prisoners, who like Bey fast from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan, which begins this week.


The video recalls author Christopher Hitchens’ article for Vanity Fair where he voluntarily underwent a waterboarding treatment and declared the practice “torture.”

ALSO:

Kanye West’s Twitter review of ‘Pacific Rim’

Essential tracks: New and reissued folk music taps past, present


Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke: Too reliant on NSFW videos?