Detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been protesting their imprisonment and cruel treatment with ongoing hunger strikes for the past several months, and have been attacked and force fed by guards as a result. These actions were condemned by more that 250 doctors from the UK, the US, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Italy and the Netherlands.
One nurse that was responsible for force feeding the prisoners, recently made news by refusing to do so. For a length of time this nurse obeyed the orders that he was given, but eventually began to regret his actions, and became a conscientious objector. A spokesperson for the NAVY would not release the name of the nurse, nor the details of their case. They only revealed that the nurse was sent home early and that he is currently “pending court martial”.
“There’s not been a determination of what’s going to be done at this point,” Navy Capt. Maureen Pennington said. “There’s a process and depending how everything goes, it will determine what avenue this will take, if it takes any avenue.”
The attitude among many people about this struggle, especially in America, has been one of indifference, because people actually believe that these detainees deserve the treatment that they are receiving.
However, many of these Guantanamo Bay detainees have never been found guilty of any crime, or even charged with a crime to begin with. They just happened to be captured and declared an enemy combatant by the government one day and taken to a torture camp.
It is probably true that some of the prisoners are guilty, even a broken clock is right twice a day, but a good number of them are probably innocent, and even a guilty person deserves due process.
Some of the detainees were children when captured, throughout the prisons dark history there have been multiple cases of children as young as 12 or 13 years old who were tortured and held without trial. In fact, although the prison still holds nearly 200 people, almost 1000 have passed through, and many of them were proven innocent and released years after being declared an “enemy combatant” and submitting to torture and imprisonment.
Over the years, the military dungeons at Guantanamo Bay have become largely forgotten by the general population back home in the US. Since the election of Barack Obama, many of the people who protested wars and the inhumane acts of the military industrial complex are now silent as if nothing has ever happened.
