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 WASHINGTON,
Sept. 17 – A hunger strike at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
has unsettled senior commanders
there and produced the most serious challenge yet to the military’s effort
to manage the detention of hundreds of terrorism suspects, lawyers and
officials say.
As many as 200 prisoners – more than a third of the camp – have refused
food in recent weeks to protest conditions and prolonged confinement without
trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them.
from the New York Times
The headline of this article reads "Guantanamo prisoners
go on hunger strike" as though it just started. We have been
reading about this hunger strike for a month on blogs and alternative
media sites. Frankly, we expected the mainstream media to ignore it for
a while longer, at least until someone dies or smuggles out photos of
emaciated prisoners cuffed and in irons as they are being force fed through
tubes.
The fact is that a hunger strike is an ugly and
desperate measure taken only by men with nothing to lose and no other
way to kill
themselves. These unfortunate individuals have been penned up,
going on four years now, with
no habeas corpus, no Fifth Amendment, no hope for a fair trial, no way
to communicate with their families and
no way to question their incarceration. They have been pumped dry of
every fact, feeling and fantasy, they have nothing more to give, but
we can’t let them go. So there they lie, wasting away in ignorant
obscurity, out of sight, but not out of some minds.
The true test of a Democracy is not how it treats its
favorite sons, but how it treats its enemies.
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