U.S. Bid for Secret Guantánamo Force-Feeding Hearings Prompts Cover-Up Fears

By Spencer Ackerman, Guardian UK

30 September 14

he Obama administration has asked a federal judge to hold a highly anticipated court hearing on its painful force-feedings of Guantánamo Bay detainees almost entirely in secret, prompting suspicions of a cover-up.

Justice Department attorneys argued to district judge Gladys Kessler that allowing the hearings to be open to the public would jeopardize national security through the disclosure of classified information. Should Kessler agree, the first major legal battle over forced feeding in a federal court would be less transparent than the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay.

Attorneys for Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian detainee on hunger strike whose court challenge is slated to begin next week, said the government was using national security as an excuse to prevent the public from learning the extent of a practice that the judge in the case has considered brutal.

But the case “includes inextricably intertwined classified, protected and unclassified information,” argued Joyce Branda, an acting assistant attorney general, in a motion filed Friday.

Branda, joined by other Justice Department attorneys, said the government would not object for the hearing’s opening statements, scheduled for 6 and 7 October in Washington DC, to be public, nor for a “public version of the transcript” to be available “on an expedited basis.”

While Branda did not offer a detailed explication of the government’s secrecy rationale, her motion referenced discussion of classified videotapes of the force-feedings, which Kessler has already barred the public from seeing.

Holding an open trial with closed sessions for discussions of classified information would “interrupt the natural flow of the hearing,” she argued, although closed session breaks are routine in the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. Barack Obama has boasted that his is the most transparent administration in US history.

The Guardian is among several news organizations planning to file a motion to challenge the secrecy request. It has already opposed the sealing of the videotapes.

Dhiab contends that the military’s practice of forcibly feeding detainees through tubes inserted through the nose into the stomach is abusive, as is removing detainees from their cells against their will to conduct what the military calls “enteral feeding.” While Guantánamo Bay authorities reject any assertion that the treatment is brutal, Kessler in 2013 called the force feedings “a painful, humiliating and degrading process.”

The government’s desire for secrecy in the hearings is consistent with the military’s attempts to break the hunger strikes through a media blackout. Guantánamo officials no longer release formerly public information about how many of the 149 detainees are on hunger strike, going so far as to ban the term from its lexicon in favor of “long-term non-religious fasting.”

Dhiab, captured in 2002, has been cleared for transfer since 2009. Earlier this year, Uruguay agreed to resettle him and six other detainees, something human-rights lawyers suspected was an attempt to preempt the court challenge to the force feedings.

Cori Crider, an attorney for Dhiab with the human-rights group Reprieve, called the government’s request for a closed trial an attempt to conceal the practical realities of how the US military carries out the forced feedings.

“It’s obvious what is really going on here: the government wants to seal the force-feeding trial for the same reason it is desperate to suppress the tapes of my client being hauled from his cell by the riot squad and force-fed. The truth is just too embarrassing,” Crider said.

“The Defense Department says force-feeding isn’t torture? Bring it on, I say. Release my client’s force-feeding tapes, and let’s let the American people decide for themselves. DOD [the Defense Department] know full well that if Americans saw the real evidence they would side with the Navy nurse who refused to force-feed my client, and condemn this daily violation of medical ethics.”