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11/02/2005:

"Rumsfeld: Gitmo hunger-strikers "dieting""

DOD press briefing, November 1, 2005:

SEC. RUMSFELD: I guess -- I'm not a doctor and I'm not the kind of a person who would be in a position to approve or disapprove. It seems to me, looking at it from this distance, is that the responsible people are the combatant commanders and the Army as the executive agent for detainees. They make -- have expert medical people who make decisions of that type. And they've made a decision that they think it's appropriate for them to provide nourishment to people who, for whatever reason, at various points in their detention decide they want to not provide normal nourishment to themselves. There are a number of things that one can glean from the way it's being done. I don't think there's a serious risk of people -- well, I shouldn't say that, I'm not in a position to know that. But there are a number of people who go on a diet where they don't eat for a period and then go off of it at some point, and then they rotate and other people do that. So it's clearly a technique to try to get the attention of you folks, and they're successful.
defenselink.mi

Every 'decision' made comes straight from Rumsfeld.

As Gitmo Hunger Strike Continues, Lawyers Step Up Fight for Access

...Last week, Julia Tarver, an attorney representing ten detainees at Guantánamo, obtained judicial permission to publicly release her clients’ statements. She said her clients who are currently hunger striking described the conditions under which they were force-fed as "torture." They said their captors physically restrained them from head to toe and forcibly shoved large tubes up their noses and down into their stomachs without providing anesthesia or sedative. According to Tarver’s statement, the detainees said they vomited blood as a result of the force-feeding.

According to Tarver’s notes, in the presence of Guantánamo physicians, prison guards took tubes from one detainee and "with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee.When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from other detainees remaining on the tubes."

The fact that they are denying UN reps access to the prisoners says it all.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.