a book on guantanamo:
Leading human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, the United States prison camp in Cuba, are treated worse than the Irish hunger strikers during the conflict in Northern Ireland. The Guantanamo hunger strikes began in June 2005. They have now lasted nine times longer than the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland of the early 1980s.
(...) "In 1981, the British recognised that it was unethical to force feed a hunger striker. Twice a day my client, Shaker Aamer, is strapped into a torture chair and a 110 centimetre tube is forced up his nose. Occasionally, it goes into his lungs - which is excruciatingly painful and quite deliberate."
(...) However, some 42 men remain on hunger strike. The longest surviving has lasted 620 days with forced feeding. Stafford Smith's clients, Shaker Aamer and Al Jazeera journalist Sami al Haj, have been on hunger strike for 115 and 106 days respectively.
(...) The strikers are demanding a fair trial, for abuse of the Koran to cease and that juvenile prisoners should not be kept in solitary confinement. They want an end to violations of the Geneva Convention, such as the provision of yellow unsanitary water and inedible food. They also want different sorts of treatment - which depend upon how compliant prisoners are, to stop. Compliant prisoners wear white uniforms while others wear orange and brown uniforms.
(...) He admits to encountering some suspicion from prisoners who think those lawyers who do come into the camp are there to provide a veneer of respectability for the whole inhumane process of detention. But Stafford Smith stresses: "Some of the guys are crazy now, losing their minds. They are being horribly abused. Probably the worst abuse is the daily torture the hunger strikers undergo."
(...) Stafford Smith is keen to point out that Guantanamo is just one of an increasing number of US detention centres all over the world. "There are almost 14,000 people being held in secret prisons from Iraq to Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, to name but a few."
(...) "I think it was Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness who said that the internment process created the greatest recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had. A CIA agent admitted as much in the present context in 2004, when he said that, for every person you put in Guantanamo, it would create 10 who want to blow up the US. Now that figure is more likely to be 1,000 for every new prisoner."
(...) A new threat had to be found to replace the Russians and it is Muslim fundamentalism. But Stafford Smith says: "The idea that the world today faces a greater threat than when the Germans were bombing London to oblivion or when the Russians held massive amounts of nuclear weapons just does not stand up to analysis. The suggestion international laws now need to be torn up because of the threat is foolish and amounts to incredible populism."