Meanwhile, Gitmo Is Still There

Writing in the prestigious and influential New England Journal of Medicine, [...] three doctors called Guantánamo "a medical ethics free zone" and said that medical staff had a moral duty to allow the prisoners to go on hunger strike without coercing them into treatment.

[...]

Dr [George] Annas said the force-feeding went against international standards of medical ethics. He said that a hunger strike was a legitimate form of protest – not an attempt to commit suicide – and that the portrayal of doctors at Guantánamo as ethically intervening to preserve life was wrong. "That is at the core of this. These people are not trying to commit suicide. They are risking death to make a political point," he said.

That is backed up by the World Medical Association, which has declared that force-feeding hunger strikers is "never ethically acceptable".

[...]

On Wednesday there were 104 detainees on hunger strike, 43 of them being force-fed by medical staff including a team of more than 40 experts specially flown out to the base.

[...]

A military spokesman for Guantánamo said doctors and other medical staff at the base were treating the detainees ethically and with great care.

[...]

” We will not let them starve themselves to death. Our medical staff will continue to provide life saving care to the detainees."

  UK Guardian

Military doctors don't have the same book of ethics as civilian doctors apparently.

And, as we know, the CIA and our military tribunals have no ethics at all.

When the war court reconvenes this week, pretrial hearings in the case of an alleged al-Qaida bomber will be tackling a government motion that's so secret the public can't know its name. It's listed as the 92nd court filing in the death-penalty case against a Saudi man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was waterboarded by CIA agents.

[...]

But what makes the no-name government motion so intriguing is that those who've read it can't say what it's about, and those who haven't don't have a clue. Not even the accused, who, unless the judge rules for the defense, is not allowed to get an unclassified explanation of it - and cannot sit in on the court session when it's argued in secret. The motion was so secret that al-Nashiri's Indianapolis-based defense attorney said members of the defense team would not characterize it over the phone. "Literally, I had to fly to Washington, D.C., to read it," said attorney Rick Kammen of Indianapolis, a career death-penalty defender whom the Pentagon pays to represent al-Nashiri.

[...]

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the Pentagon's war crimes prosecutor, counters that "there are important narrow occasions where certain interests can allow that to happen," says Martins, "to protect national security interests."Martins said his office doesn't use secrecy to cover up embarrassing episodes. Rather, he has said the court is engaging in a balancing act between national security and the public's right to know.

Bull, General. Also, shit. Where's the balance? You get to cover up God alone knows what in the interest of "national security," and I decline to buy that alibi any more. What, precisely, does "the public's right to know" get in the balance. What do We, the people get out of the deal in terms of what we need to know to make the decisions required of free citizens of a self-governing political commonwealth? This isn't "balance." This is For-Your-Own-Goodism run amok. Between the hunger strikers, and courts in which the judges should all be fitted for kangaroo suits, Guantanamo remains the pustulating, running sore of the war on terror. Nothing having anything to do with democracy happens in that hellhole.

  Charlie Pierce