US straps down Guantanamo hunger strikers, says report

NEW YORK - US military officials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, strapped hunger-striking prisoners into restraint chairs for hours to feed them through tubes and isolated them in cold cells, The New York Times said yesterday.

A Pentagon official said there was no one immediately available to comment on the report.

The Times, citing unnamed military officials, said tougher measures came in recent weeks after authorities concluded some of the prisoners were determined to kill themselves.

The apparent result has been a sharp drop in the number of inmates refusing to eat. Only four hunger strikers remain, down from 84 at the end of December, the chief military spokesman at Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, told the newspaper.

But lawyers called the treatment abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, told the newspaper.

"It is a disgrace," said Wilner, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents.

Guards began strapping the detainees into chairs for hours to feed them through tubes and prevent them vomiting afterwards, the Times said, citing unidentified military officials.

Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. He gave no details.

Hunger strikers have also been put in isolation for extended periods, in highly air-conditioned cells and deprived of such comforts as blankets and books, according to lawyers who visited clients in recent weeks, the newspaper said.

Prisoners began a round of hunger strikes in August to protest their indefinite detention at Guantanamo, which was set up in 2002 to hold foreign terrorism suspects and houses about 500 inmates. Only 10 of them have been charged with a crime.

The number of inmates refusing to eat peaked on September 11, the fourth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks on America, when 131 prisoners -- more than a quarter of the total - took part.

A Navy doctor in January told Reuters prisoners were not strapped down during feedings. Martin told the Times in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was used but he would not answer questions about restraint chairs.

- REUTERS