The hunger strike at the notorious US Guantanamo prison has entered its 99th day, with the authorities beginning to implement humiliating measures against the prisoners.

Clive Stafford Smith, a leading lawyer representing various detainees in Guantanamo prison, said in a letter to British Foreign Secretary William Hague that hunger strikers should go through body cavity searches before they could contact their lawyers even with a phone call. “The US military has started directly abusing prisoners who want to contact their lawyers to tell them what is happening,” Smith said, adding that the searches involve the private body parts of the detainees. He also said that two of his clients and at least another inmate were dissuaded to contact their lawyers in order not to go through the body searches. The US military has reportedly denied that authorities at Guantanamo carry out the humiliating searches.

Earlier, David Remes, also a lawyer for Guantanamo prisoners, had previously said the prison officials had threatened the inmates with humiliating body searches to dissuade them from meeting their lawyers. “Under the new search policy, a detainee who leaves his camp is subject to a search including his private parts and …,” Remes also said. Remes added that two of his Yemeni clients on hunger strike, identified as Abd al-Malik Abd al-Wahab and Salman Rabeii, had talked about the new policy. The lawyer was at the US naval prison from April 29 to May 3. Over two thirds of the 166 prisoners still held at the notorious US jail are on a hunger strike, which began on February 6 against prison condition and the detainees’ indefinite confinement.

Hunger strikers being force-fed at Guantanamo Bay must wear masks over their mouths while being shackled to a restraint chair for up to two hours. Authorities have revised the way they feed the strikers, comparing their techniques to battlefield tactics. Nasal tubes are jammed up the prisoners’ noses until a liquid supplement reaches their stomachs. The tubes, which are 61cm in length or even longer, stay in the prisoners’ nostrils until a chest X-ray or a test dose of water show that the nutritional supplement has reached the prisoner’s stomach. The shocking procedure doesn’t stop there. Detainees are then sent to a “dry cell” with no running water while they undergo supervision to make sure they don’t vomit. If they regurgitate their supplement, they’re sent right back to the restraint chair.

Force-feeding is an extremely invasive and highly controversial practice which many human rights activists - and the UN - say is torturous. But what’s perhaps even more shocking than the procedure itself is that the final decision regarding who will be force-fed is left up to Guantanamo Commander John Smith - not physicians.

Testimony, Documents Link US Citizen to Killings. - Two months after the initial Afghan government demands for the US to withdraw its forces from Wardak Province, the troops are still there, and the government is still unhappy about it. But new details may mean an additional push after their first effort failed to convince the US to go. Afghan officials now say that they have a specific suspect, an Afghan-born American citizen named Zakaria Kandahari, who they have implicated in at least 15 different killings or disappearances, and who they have on video torturing a detainee. Kandahari appears to have been affiliated with the Special Forces in Nerkh District, which were the source of a lot of complaints. Among the 15 he is accused of killing is Mohammad Qassim, whose body was found in a trash pit just outside the base after being detained.

A California father of four died Wednesday shortly after a group of police allegedly beat him with batons as he lay defenseless on the sidewalk. Cops, before confiscating witness' cameras, also reportedly unleashed a canine unit on him. - David Sal Silva, 33, allegedly resisted when police approached him to ask if he was who neighbors called about to complain of an intoxicated man in the area. The officers called for backup and, witnesses told the Bakersfield Californian, Silva was soon being beaten in the face and upper body by as many as nine policemen and their batons. At least one of the cops reportedly held a German Shepherd on a leash nearby. Witnesses who had recorded the events on their cell phone cameras had the devices confiscated by officers, who claimed the footage was part of a police investigation that could yield evidence. The Sherriff’s Department has released the names of seven officers who were on the scene, but the identities of the California Highway Patrol police who were also there have not yet been made public.

The prison is a deeply un-American disgrace. It needs to be closed rapidly. - The authorities at Guantánamo Bay say that prisoners have a choice. They can eat or, if they refuse to, they will have a greased tube stuffed up their noses, down their throats and into their stomachs, through which they will be fed. This can cause gagging and bleeding in a compliant patient, and is a lot nastier when done against his will. It takes up to two hours, during which time an unco-operative prisoner must be restrained to stop him pulling out the tube. Lawyers for the 23 or so men who are being subjected to this treatment report that it is deliberately being done roughly, with unsterilised tubes that are too large: those claims are denied. But even if they are false, the business clearly violates an individual’s rights; according to the president of the American Medical Association, it also breaches the “core ethical values of the medical profession”.

A Detroit-area lawyer has been fighting for almost a decade to win compensation for four men who spent time in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. - CACI Premier Technology, a Virginia company that handled interrogations at Abu Ghraib, has asked a federal judge to dismiss Shereef Akeel's lawsuit, the Detroit Free Press reported Thursday. A hearing is scheduled Friday in Arlington, Va. Akeel first became involved with Abu Ghraib in 2004 when a man named Saleh visited his law office in Troy, Mich., and described beatings and torture at a prison in Iraq. After seeing the man's story confirmed by a report on "60 Minutes," Akeel traveled to Iraq to interview detainees. The lawsuit has faced a number of hurdles. Three of Akeel's clients have been barred from flying to the United States to give depositions. CACI has said they are on the "no-fly" list as known or suspected terrorists.

British activists are to stage a protest outside the parliament on Thursday, May 9, demanding the British government to bring Shaker Aamer home from the United States’ notorious Guantanamo prison in Cuba. The Save Shaker Aamer Campaign plans to hold a vigil outside the House of Commons every weekday until May 21 to renew their demands for Aamer’s immediate release.

WSWS: Worldwide outrage as Guantanamo hunger strike enters fourth month

President Barack Obama has done nothing to carry out his promise to close Guantanamo. - The hunger strike involving more than 100 detainees at the Guantanamo prison camp entered its fourth month this past Monday. The detainees have been held without charges for more than 11 years. [They] are being held indefinitely, without being charged or tried. It has become increasingly clear that many detainees are prepared to starve themselves to death. As one of them, British citizen Shaker Aamer, told his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, “It is possible that I may die in here. I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have been cleared for release.”

Russia Today: OpGTMO: Anonymous vows global hack attack to shut down Guantanamo

Human rights lawyer Heba Masaleha said one of the Palestinian children detained in an Israeli jail tried to commit suicide as a result of the severe depression he suffers from because of his exposure to maltreatment at the hands of jailers. - Masaleha refrained from mentioning the name of the child, but she said she visited him in jail. She stated that the child has been staying in bed for three days without moving or talking to anyone, except about his intention to commit suicide, adding that the child cannot sleep properly at night and already refused to eat food for two days. [...] The center said that the children were on their way to a Palestinian folkloric festival that was held in the West Bank in solidarity with prisoner Samer Issawi, who ended his months-long hunger strike recently after a deal with his jailers. The center underlined that the Israeli occupation regime deliberately kidnap Palestinian children to break their spirits in violation of the international law, which stipulates the need for protecting the children and their right to grow safely without any restrictions on their freedom. It noted that there are about 321 children, 30 of them patients, in Israeli jails.

Despite reassuring reports in the mainstream media, nothing has been done to resolve the hunger strike in Guantanamo, military attorney Barry Wingard told RT. A third party is needed to negotiate between the camp officials and the men suffering, he said. - “We need to get a neutral third person to negotiate between the camp officials and the men who are hunger striking,” Wingard said. As many as 23 prisoners are now being forced to eat through nasal tubes, as a mass hunger strike in Guantanamo nears the unprecedented three-month benchmark. Lawyers for the detainees say that as many as 130 of the 166 inmates are taking part, while the US military insists it's ‘merely’ a hundred.

Laura Pitter: Why Obama doesn’t need Congress to start to make good on his promise
The Guardian: Drone Policy Author: US Prefers Killing Suspects Than Gitmo

An attorney who represented prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay was found dead last week in what sources said was a suicide. - Andy P. Hart, 38, a federal public defender in Toledo, Ohio, apparently died of a "self-inflicted" gunshot wound. Hart left behind a suicide note and a thumb drive, believed to contain his case files. It is unknown where Hart died, what the suicide note said or whether an autopsy was performed. Hart’s death comes amid escalating chaos that has engulfed Guantanamo over the past three months—from a mass hunger strike to military commissions and renewed pressure on the White House to shut down the prison facility. Hart was one of three-dozen Guantanamo attorneys who signed a letter in March urging Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to take immediate action and bring about an end to the hunger strike.

The UN human rights office has condemned force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay, calling it ‘torture’ and a breach of international law. At least 21 inmates out of the 100 officially on strike are being force-fed through nasal tubes. - The UN bases its position on that of the World Medical Association, which consists of 102 nations including the United States, Coville explained. The international organization, a watchdog for ethics in healthcare, said back in 1991 that forcible feeding is "a form of inhuman treatment" and “never ethnically acceptable.” "Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied with threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the force feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting," it said.

PressTV: Cuba calls on US to close Guantanamo prison
John Glaser: UN: Force Feeding Gitmo Hunger Strikers Violates International Law

A [force-]“feeding chair” at US Guantánamo military prison’s
psychiatric ward, called the "Behavioral Medical Unit" (taken
from a military handout video dated April 10, 2013).

The US has dispatched additional military ‘medical forces’ to its Guantánamo detention and torture camp in Cuba to help with growing force-feeding measures as the hunger strike by captives continues to spread to protest the indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Nearly 40 more “US Navy medical forces” have arrived at the notorious military prison camps in efforts to deal with the spreading hunger strike by what the prison authorities report as 100 detainees, over one-fifth of whom are being force-fed to keep them alive, US-based daily The Miami Herald reported Monday, citing the prison’s spokesman. The "corpsmen, nurses, and other specialists" arrived at the naval base over the weekend "as part of a contingency during the ongoing hunger strike," the report added, citing a statement by the spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Samuel House. The figure offered by prison authorities, however, has been contested by a number of attorneys for the inmates who have put the number of Guantánamo hunger strikers at between 130 and all the 166 remaining detainees.

British rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the United Nations Committee against Torture to hold Britain accountable over cases of “complicity in torture”, including by its military forces overseas.

HRW said in a memorandum to the UN Committee, ahead of its review of the UK in May 2013, that London is not complying with the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in a number of areas. The rights group said it has urged the UN committee to hold the British government accountable for “complicity in torture”, “lack of an independent inquiry into UK complicity in rendition and torture overseas”, “abuses by UK forces in Iraq”, “expanded use of secret hearings in civil cases”, “breach of the principle of non-refoulement [rendering a true victim of persecution to their persecutor]”, “reliance on ‘diplomatic assurances’ against torture” and “reliance on material obtained under torture for intelligence and policing purposes”.

The Guantánamo hunger strike is, in the end, a protest against George Orwell’s Big Lie. I have not been able to read much during the 11 years I have been held here, and right now I am so dizzy from lack of food that I can barely focus. But when I have had the opportunity, I have read and re-read Orwell’s 1984. It is very instructive: “The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings … it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” The Big Lie here in Guantánamo is the idea that holding 166 prisoners in Cuba somehow makes America safe from extremism. Ultimately, any Big Lie falls apart, but only if people care to look closely at it.

At least two Guantanamo Bay detainees have attempted suicide since the confrontation between guards and prisoners in February that brought about the ongoing hunger strike, AP reports.

A team of journalists, including from AP, have been allowed into the facilities. They testify the atmosphere has grown tense and heavy in the prison where 166 men are indefinitely held with little to no hope of release. Still they were not allowed to gather more information on the two suicide attempts. At least seven people have managed to kill themselves since Guantanamo was first set up in 2002. The fact that Gitmo has turned into a pit of hopelessness is confirmed both by the detainee's lawyers and some US officials. While the number of officially-acknowledged hunger strikers is growing, most prisoners are isolated from each other and the world. "How can the military, even the military, hope to maintain discipline over a prison camp where there is absolutely no hope for those men confined here?" Lieutenant Commander Kevin Bogucki, a US Navy Military Lawyer who was visiting his clients at the base this week, told AP. Out of 86 Guantanamo prisoners cleared for the release, the overwhelming majority - 56 of them - are Yemeni nationals, RT's Gayane Chichakyan points out. However, three years ago the US suspended all transfers of detainees to Yemen. It may well mean dying in Guantanamo, Omar Farah, petitioner for the Center of Constitutional Rights, believes.

Two separate bipartisan reports with surprising pronouncements, and a cable news debacle, highlight similar themes.

(1) It's hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation. The Report explains that the impetus behind it was that "the Obama administration declined, as a matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what happened, saying it was unproductive to 'look backwards' rather than forward." It concludes - in unblinking and definitive fashion - that "it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture".

In early February, more than 11 years into his detention at Guantanamo Bay, a Yemeni man named Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel went on a hunger strike. He had company: By mid-March, The Washington Post reported 14 detainees on hunger strike; by mid-April, it was up to 43. The camp’s military guards have responded to the hunger strike with force-feedings and by clamping down on such freedoms as allowing detainees to leave their cell doors open and live communally. A recent clash between guards and prisoners wounded even some guards and ended with gunfire that included, according to a military spokesman, “four less-than-lethal rounds.” Monday, The New York Times published an op-ed column by al-Hasan describing the hunger strike that he says has cost him 30 pounds of body weight. He dictated the column through an interpreter during a phone call to his lawyers. While it does not directly address the question of why they are hunger striking (more on this below), it does describe in harrowing detail what he says is an increasingly haphazard force-feeding routine.

Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison boiled over into a clash between guards and detainees Saturday as the military closed a communal section of the facility and moved its inmates into single cells. - The violence erupted during an early morning raid that military officials said was necessary because prisoners had covered up security cameras and windows as part of a weekslong protest and hunger strike over their indefinite confinement and conditions at the U.S. base in Cuba. Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks and mop handles when troops arrived to move them out of a communal wing of the section of the prison known as Camp 6, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a military spokesman. Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds," he said. There were no serious injuries from the rounds, which included a modified shotgun shell that fires small rubber pellets as well as a type of bean-bag projectile, said Army Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the prison at the U.S. base in Cuba.

As the latest hunger strike at Guantanamo enters its third grueling month, Americans are getting a long overdue wake up call from the mainstream media. "It’s time to close that shameful political prison and end the lawless indefinite detention," The New York Times proclaimed in an editorial on April 6 that deserves to be quoted at length:

The hunger strike that has spread since early February among the 166 detainees still at Guantanamo Bay is again exposing the lawlessness of the system that marooned them there. The government claims that around 40 detainees are taking part. Lawyers for detainees report that their clients say around 130 detainees in one part of the prison have taken part. The number matters less than the nature of the protest, however: this is a collective act of despair. Prisoners on the hunger strike say that they would rather die than remain in the purgatory of indefinite detention. Only three prisoners now in Guantanamo have been found guilty of any crime, yet the others also are locked away, with dwindling hope of ever being released…. For 86 detainees, this is a particular outrage. They were approved for release three years ago by a government task force, which included civilian and military agencies responsible for national security…The Obama administration justifies the force-feeding of detainees as protecting their safety and welfare. But the truly humane response to this crisis is to free prisoners who have been approved for release, end indefinite detention and close the prison at Guantanamo.

National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and CBS News have both recently featured Guantanamo, highlighting the lawless morass that is US government policy.

Glen Greenwald: America's regression