Lindsey
October 21st, 2005, 07:18 PM
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Prisoners on hunger strike at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reported troops force-fed them with dirty feeding tubes that have been violently inserted and withdrawn as punishment, said declassified notes released Wednesday by defence lawyers.
The repeated removal and insertion of the tubes has caused striking prisoners to vomit blood and experience intense pain they have equated with torture, the lawyers reported to a U.S. federal judge after visiting their clients at the base in eastern Cuba.
Prisoners said they were taunted by troops who said the treatment was intended to persuade them to end the hunger strike that began Aug. 9, the lawyers wrote in affidavits filed as part of a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking greater access to prisoners at the high-security jail for terror suspects.
--Associated Press, October 20, 2005 (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1020-07.htm)
The reports of the forced feeding of hunger-striking Guantanamo prisoners reminded me of some of the parallel reading I had done on the Pankhursts and the women's suffrage movement in Britain for a college course in British history.
In the early 20th century, too, force-feeding was regarded as a form of torture. The object of the practice was quite obviously not supply nutrition, but to break the will of the prisoners on whom it was inflicted.
Lest modern-day readers of the accounts of activities at Guantanamo be inclined to regard force-feeding as no big deal, I thought it might be instructive to supply here some first-hand accounts by women on whom it was inflicted. It doesn't sound to me, judging by the news reports, as if the technique as practiced at Guantanamo has been made any more humane in the course of the last century.
On Saturday afternoon the wardress forced me onto the bed and two doctors came in. While I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long, with a funnel at the end; there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up the right and left nostril on alternative days. The sensation is most painful - the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and there is a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I am on the bed pinned down by wardresses, one doctor holds the funnel end, and the other doctor forces the other end up the nostrils. The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down - about a pint of milk...
--Mary Leigh of the WSPU, recounting a force feeding from September, 1909
It was the most concentrated moment of my life. [...] All life's problems had now been reduced to one simple act—to swallow or to choke. It seemed years that I lay there watching the pitcher as it rose in the hand of the doctor and hung; devilish, inhuman menace. In it was the liquid food I was to have. It was milk, but I could not tell what it was, for all things are alike when they reach the stomach by a rubber tube... Unsuspected nerves thrilled pain tidings that racked the area of my face and bosom. They seared along my spine. They set my heart at catapultic plunging. [...] Still, the liquid trickled irresistibly down the tubing into my throat; and every drop seemed a quart, and every quart slid over and down into space. I had lapsed into a physical mechanism without power to oppose or resent the outrage to my will. [...] There it is—the outraged will. If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits.
--Djuna Barnes, columnist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, recounting a voluntary force-feeding in 1914 undertaken for the purposes of writing an article about the practice, as quoted here (http://www.hermenaut.com/a42.shtml)
I was visited by the Senior Medical Officer, who asked me how long I had been without food. I said I had eaten a buttered scone and a banana on Friday about midnight. He said, "Oh, then, this is the fourth day; that is too long, I must feed you at once."
He urged me to take food voluntarily. I told him that was absolutely out of the question, that when our legislators ceased to resist letting women vote then I should cease to resist taking food in prison.
Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. The doctor leant on my knees as he stooped over my chest to get at my mouth. I shut my mouth and clenched my teeth… The doctor seemed annoyed at my resistance and he broke into a temper as he pried my teeth with the steel implement. He dug his instrument down and it pressed fearfully on the gums. The pain was intense and at last I must have given way, for he got the gag between my teeth, when he proceeded to turn it much more than necessary until my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they would go naturally.
Then he put down my throat a tube, which seemed to me much too wide and something like four feet in length. The irritation of the tube was excessive. I choked the moment it touched my throat until it had got down. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down and the action of the sickness made my body and legs double up, but the wardresses instantly pressed back my head and the doctor leant on my knees. The horror of it was more than I can describe. I was sick all over the doctor and wardresses, and it seemed a long time before they took the tube out. As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval.
When the doctor had gone out of the cell, I lay quite helpless. The [wardresses] were kind and knelt round to comfort me, but there was nothing to be done. I had been sick over my hair, all over the wall near my bed, and my clothes seemed saturated with it, but the [wardresses] told me they could not give me a change that night as the office was shut. Presently the wardresses left me.
Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howley. When the ghastly process was over and all quiet, I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn't much just then, "No Surrender," and then came the answer in Elsie's voice, "No Surrender."
--Lady Constance Lytton, recounting an experience from January, 1910, in Prisons & Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (1914), reconstituted from partial quotations here (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whunger.htm), here (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27), and here (http://www.kids-right.org/p_lytton.htm).
(Constance Lytton had entered the prison under the pseudonym "Jane Warton" to avoid receiving preferred treatment because of her status. When she was confined at Newcastle Prison in October, 1909, she had been released two days after beginning a hunger strike without being force-fed, ostensibly because of a heart condition. Her heart was not examined before the force-feeding when she was imprisoned as "Jane Warton," however, and she was subjected to forced feedings another seven times before her identity was discovered and she was released. She never fully recovered from the experience, suffering a stroke in 1912, and dying in 1923.)
Thursday morning, 16th July ... the three wardresses appeared again. One of them said that if I did not resist, she would send the others away and do what she had come to do as gently and as decently as possible. I consented. This was another attempt to feed me by the rectum, and was done in a cruel way, causing me great pain. She returned some time later and said she had ‘something else’ to do. I took it to be another attempt to feed me in the same way, but it proved to be a grosser and more indecent outrage, which could have been done for no other purpose than torture. It was followed by soreness, which lasted for several days.
--Fanny Parker, imprisoned in Perth prison in 1914 as "Janet Arthur," as quoted by Jane Purvis, "The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27)," Women’s History Review,Volume 4, Number 1, 1995
(The "grosser and more indecent outrage" Fanny Parker is speaking of is being "fed" through her vagina. Purvis continues, "When released, a medical examination revealed swelling and rawness in the genital region. The knowledge that new tubes were not always available and that used tubes may have been previously inflicted on diseased persons and the mentally ill or be dirty inside the tube, issues that had been openly discussed in Votes for Women, undoubtedly added to the feelings of abuse, dirtiness and indecency that the women felt.")
And from historical narratives:
Many women suffered after effects of being force-fed. Often it was various forms of infections, but occasionally it meant death. Emmeline Pankhursts' sister, Mary Clark was also a member of the WSPU; she was arrested and force-fed in prison in 1910. Shortly after being released from Holloway prison she fell ill and died due to a burst blood vessel, most likely caused while being force fed in prison.
--from an essay entitled "The Militant Suffragettes," author unknown
Whether force fed by a cup, tube through the nostril (the most common method) or tube down the throat into the stomach (the most painful), the individual suffragette struggled on her own and often feared damage to the mind or body. Kitty Marion’s screaming in prison greatly upset the other women, but she found it was the only way she could fight against the torture of forcible feeding and remain sane. Rachel Peace, an embroideress, who had already experienced several nervous breakdowns, was not so fortunate. During a period of prolonged hunger striking and forcible feeding three times a day she feared, “I should go mad ... Old distressing symptoms have re-appeared. I have frightful dreams and am struggling with mad people half the night”. Her fears became true when she “lost her reason in prison” and spent the rest of her life in and out of asylums, with Lady Constance Lytton, an upper-middle-class WSPU worker, maintaining her.
--Jane Purvis, "The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27)"
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whunger.jpg
A 1909 drawing from The Suffragette
Contact your district's representative in the House and urge support for the McCain amendment (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502062.html) against the use of torture by the armed services.
--Lindsey
The repeated removal and insertion of the tubes has caused striking prisoners to vomit blood and experience intense pain they have equated with torture, the lawyers reported to a U.S. federal judge after visiting their clients at the base in eastern Cuba.
Prisoners said they were taunted by troops who said the treatment was intended to persuade them to end the hunger strike that began Aug. 9, the lawyers wrote in affidavits filed as part of a lawsuit in federal court in Washington seeking greater access to prisoners at the high-security jail for terror suspects.
--Associated Press, October 20, 2005 (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1020-07.htm)
The reports of the forced feeding of hunger-striking Guantanamo prisoners reminded me of some of the parallel reading I had done on the Pankhursts and the women's suffrage movement in Britain for a college course in British history.
In the early 20th century, too, force-feeding was regarded as a form of torture. The object of the practice was quite obviously not supply nutrition, but to break the will of the prisoners on whom it was inflicted.
Lest modern-day readers of the accounts of activities at Guantanamo be inclined to regard force-feeding as no big deal, I thought it might be instructive to supply here some first-hand accounts by women on whom it was inflicted. It doesn't sound to me, judging by the news reports, as if the technique as practiced at Guantanamo has been made any more humane in the course of the last century.
On Saturday afternoon the wardress forced me onto the bed and two doctors came in. While I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long, with a funnel at the end; there is a glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up the right and left nostril on alternative days. The sensation is most painful - the drums of the ears seem to be bursting and there is a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I am on the bed pinned down by wardresses, one doctor holds the funnel end, and the other doctor forces the other end up the nostrils. The one holding the funnel end pours the liquid down - about a pint of milk...
--Mary Leigh of the WSPU, recounting a force feeding from September, 1909
It was the most concentrated moment of my life. [...] All life's problems had now been reduced to one simple act—to swallow or to choke. It seemed years that I lay there watching the pitcher as it rose in the hand of the doctor and hung; devilish, inhuman menace. In it was the liquid food I was to have. It was milk, but I could not tell what it was, for all things are alike when they reach the stomach by a rubber tube... Unsuspected nerves thrilled pain tidings that racked the area of my face and bosom. They seared along my spine. They set my heart at catapultic plunging. [...] Still, the liquid trickled irresistibly down the tubing into my throat; and every drop seemed a quart, and every quart slid over and down into space. I had lapsed into a physical mechanism without power to oppose or resent the outrage to my will. [...] There it is—the outraged will. If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits.
--Djuna Barnes, columnist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, recounting a voluntary force-feeding in 1914 undertaken for the purposes of writing an article about the practice, as quoted here (http://www.hermenaut.com/a42.shtml)
I was visited by the Senior Medical Officer, who asked me how long I had been without food. I said I had eaten a buttered scone and a banana on Friday about midnight. He said, "Oh, then, this is the fourth day; that is too long, I must feed you at once."
He urged me to take food voluntarily. I told him that was absolutely out of the question, that when our legislators ceased to resist letting women vote then I should cease to resist taking food in prison.
Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. The doctor leant on my knees as he stooped over my chest to get at my mouth. I shut my mouth and clenched my teeth… The doctor seemed annoyed at my resistance and he broke into a temper as he pried my teeth with the steel implement. He dug his instrument down and it pressed fearfully on the gums. The pain was intense and at last I must have given way, for he got the gag between my teeth, when he proceeded to turn it much more than necessary until my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they would go naturally.
Then he put down my throat a tube, which seemed to me much too wide and something like four feet in length. The irritation of the tube was excessive. I choked the moment it touched my throat until it had got down. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down and the action of the sickness made my body and legs double up, but the wardresses instantly pressed back my head and the doctor leant on my knees. The horror of it was more than I can describe. I was sick all over the doctor and wardresses, and it seemed a long time before they took the tube out. As the doctor left he gave me a slap on the cheek, not violently, but as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval.
When the doctor had gone out of the cell, I lay quite helpless. The [wardresses] were kind and knelt round to comfort me, but there was nothing to be done. I had been sick over my hair, all over the wall near my bed, and my clothes seemed saturated with it, but the [wardresses] told me they could not give me a change that night as the office was shut. Presently the wardresses left me.
Before long I heard the sounds of the forced feeding in the next cell to mine. It was almost more than I could bear, it was Elsie Howley. When the ghastly process was over and all quiet, I tapped on the wall and called out at the top of my voice, which wasn't much just then, "No Surrender," and then came the answer in Elsie's voice, "No Surrender."
--Lady Constance Lytton, recounting an experience from January, 1910, in Prisons & Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences (1914), reconstituted from partial quotations here (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whunger.htm), here (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27), and here (http://www.kids-right.org/p_lytton.htm).
(Constance Lytton had entered the prison under the pseudonym "Jane Warton" to avoid receiving preferred treatment because of her status. When she was confined at Newcastle Prison in October, 1909, she had been released two days after beginning a hunger strike without being force-fed, ostensibly because of a heart condition. Her heart was not examined before the force-feeding when she was imprisoned as "Jane Warton," however, and she was subjected to forced feedings another seven times before her identity was discovered and she was released. She never fully recovered from the experience, suffering a stroke in 1912, and dying in 1923.)
Thursday morning, 16th July ... the three wardresses appeared again. One of them said that if I did not resist, she would send the others away and do what she had come to do as gently and as decently as possible. I consented. This was another attempt to feed me by the rectum, and was done in a cruel way, causing me great pain. She returned some time later and said she had ‘something else’ to do. I took it to be another attempt to feed me in the same way, but it proved to be a grosser and more indecent outrage, which could have been done for no other purpose than torture. It was followed by soreness, which lasted for several days.
--Fanny Parker, imprisoned in Perth prison in 1914 as "Janet Arthur," as quoted by Jane Purvis, "The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27)," Women’s History Review,Volume 4, Number 1, 1995
(The "grosser and more indecent outrage" Fanny Parker is speaking of is being "fed" through her vagina. Purvis continues, "When released, a medical examination revealed swelling and rawness in the genital region. The knowledge that new tubes were not always available and that used tubes may have been previously inflicted on diseased persons and the mentally ill or be dirty inside the tube, issues that had been openly discussed in Votes for Women, undoubtedly added to the feelings of abuse, dirtiness and indecency that the women felt.")
And from historical narratives:
Many women suffered after effects of being force-fed. Often it was various forms of infections, but occasionally it meant death. Emmeline Pankhursts' sister, Mary Clark was also a member of the WSPU; she was arrested and force-fed in prison in 1910. Shortly after being released from Holloway prison she fell ill and died due to a burst blood vessel, most likely caused while being force fed in prison.
--from an essay entitled "The Militant Suffragettes," author unknown
Whether force fed by a cup, tube through the nostril (the most common method) or tube down the throat into the stomach (the most painful), the individual suffragette struggled on her own and often feared damage to the mind or body. Kitty Marion’s screaming in prison greatly upset the other women, but she found it was the only way she could fight against the torture of forcible feeding and remain sane. Rachel Peace, an embroideress, who had already experienced several nervous breakdowns, was not so fortunate. During a period of prolonged hunger striking and forcible feeding three times a day she feared, “I should go mad ... Old distressing symptoms have re-appeared. I have frightful dreams and am struggling with mad people half the night”. Her fears became true when she “lost her reason in prison” and spent the rest of her life in and out of asylums, with Lady Constance Lytton, an upper-middle-class WSPU worker, maintaining her.
--Jane Purvis, "The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain (http://www.triangle.co.uk/pdf/viewpdf.asp?j=whr&vol=4&issue=1&year=1995&article=4-1-JP&id=64.83.28.27)"
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Whunger.jpg
A 1909 drawing from The Suffragette
Contact your district's representative in the House and urge support for the McCain amendment (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502062.html) against the use of torture by the armed services.
--Lindsey