A long-awaited trial on force-feeding practices at Guantanamo Bay, decried as torture by rights groups, begins Monday in Washington before a judge calling for openness and transparency. It will mark the first time since terror suspects first arrived at the US naval base in southern Cuba nearly 13 years ago that a federal judge will hear a case about prison conditions and treatment.
US District Judge Gladys Kessler has rebuked the government's "deeply troubling" request to hold the trial behind closed doors. In May 2013, at the height of an unprecedented hunger strike, President Barack Obama had asked: "Is that the America we want to leave our children?" "Our sense of justice is stronger than that," added the president, who has called for the internationally denounced prison camp to be shuttered but has struggled to do so in the face of fierce opposition at home in Congress and reluctance from allies to host the terror suspects in third countries.
Among the 149 detainees still held there is Abu Wa'el Dhiab of Syria, who has been held without charge or trial since 2002 and was cleared for release in 2009. He has protested his detention regularly through hunger strikes. He has filed suit to protest his force-feeding by Guantanamo handlers, using a tube inserted and removed inserted and removed for each feeding from the nostrils down the esophagus and into the stomach. "In our view, it is extremely painful and unnecessary," Dhiab's attorney Eric Lewis, who has watched 11 hours of videotaped force-feeding sessions filmed over the past 18 months, told AFP. "He has made clear that he is in great pain."
In a dramatic order just days before the trial is due to begin, Kessler demanded Friday that the Obama administration release 28 videos showing such feeding sessions at Guantanamo Bay. The videos show a so-called "forcible extraction team" restraining, intubating and force-feeding Dhiab. "They are procedures in place that cause unnecessary pain, are not related to any legitimate security objective and there are ready alternatives that can allow it to be done in a more humane and less painful manner," Lewis said.
Kessler, appointed by former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat like Obama, also ruled against the government on Thursday, when she denied Washington's request to close proceedings to the public. The government had claimed that public viewing of the videos would harm national security. But the judge ruled in favour of 16 media outlets that had requested that the videos be made public. Only the defense has had access to the recordings so far, following a May ruling. "I want Americans to see what is going on at the prison today, so they will understand why we are hunger-striking, and why the prison should be closed," Dhiab said in a court document.
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