Barry Everingham writes:

George W Bush’s guaranteed
freedom of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay has taken on a new slant
following court evidence released here this week.
Seems that
at least twenty prisoners are being force fed – although Donald
Rumsfeld claims detainees are merely “fasting” for brief periods in
rotation with each other. Not so, says Judge Gladys Kessler in the DC
District Court. She was told by a lawyer for some of the detainees,
Julia Tarver, who visited her clients, that force feeding was far from
humane.

She
claimed that in the presence of a Guantanamo
physician one of her clients Yousef Al Shehri, was held by two soldiers
– one holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and
a
medical staff member forcefully inserted a tube in his nose and down
his throat without anaesthetic. She said he couldn’t speak for two days
and the pain was such that he couldn’t sleep. Judge Kessler in her
judgment
found the procedure caused Al Sheri and other detainees accorded the
same “humane” treatment to vomit substantial amounts of blood.

Our
own Alexander Downer agrees with Bush and Rumsfeld that
although Guantanamo may not be a holiday camp, nothing untoward occurs
there.