09 July 2013

Yasiin Bey and Gitmo-Style Force-feeding

I just came across this video clip on the Guardian site.

I thought I should link to it. This is not because I want to make any moral points about Guantanamo Bay. That would be so redundant. No one, save perhaps Tea Party aligned Congresspeople, can justify Gitmo. What they call "the worst of the worst" are mostly ordinary people who were victims of the "wrong place, wrong time" syndrome.
Today, 166 inmates remain. Three have been convicted, while a further 30 will face trial. Fifty or so are in a legal no-man's-land, deemed by the authorities too dangerous to release but against whom there is not enough evidence to prosecute. And then there are 86 who have been cleared for release, but who instead rot in a hell from which there is no escape.
The main reason why they cannot be released is that they know too much. And if, upon their release, they talk about the condition of their detention, they could shatter the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

The main reason I linked to it to find out if this was shown on North American TV. Somehow I doubt that Nightly News programs in the US had this clip in their carefully selected 22 minutes.

The other reason was to say, kudos to Dante Terrell Smith, a.k.a. Yasiin Bey a.k.a. Mos Def for providing a visual aid for what the US military calls "medical intervention."



Incidentally,
Forced-feeding in prisons has been outlawed since 1975 when the World Medical Association issued the Declaration of Tokyo, guidelines for physicians concerning torture and other cruel or degrading treatment in relation to detention. The declaration stipulates that: "Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgement concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially."

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