Inmate Protest Continues

Scores of inmates at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are entering the second month of a hunger strike that has led to the hospitalization of at least 15 prisoners, the Pentagon and defense lawyers said Friday.

Some detainees and their lawyers contend that a number of strikers might starve to death to protest conditions at the military base. Thirteen inmates are being force-fed intravenously.

“People will definitely die,” detainee Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, said in one of several statements from inmates that defense lawyers recently released.

“Bobby Sands petitioned the British government to stop the illegitimate internment of Irishmen without trial,” Mohammed continued, in reference to an Irish Republican Army inmate who died during a hunger strike in a British prison in 1981. “Nobody should believe for one moment that my brothers here have less courage.”

The hunger strike is the fifth among the foreign-born, Muslim inmates at Guantanamo, all but four of whom are being held indefinitely without charges as part of the U.S. war on terrorism. The U.S. has been accused of denying inmates due process and subjecting them to physical and emotional abuse.

The Pentagon has denied any wrongdoing and said in a statement that it was “constantly looking for ways to improve conditions” for detainees.

“The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantanamo,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman.

Plexico described the base’s legal procedures for detainees, which defense lawyers are barred from attending, as appropriate.

According to base spokesman Sgt. Justin Behrens, 89 of Guantanamo’s 505 inmates are on the fast, which began Aug. 8. Behrens said 15 inmates were hospitalized and were in stable condition.

The Pentagon defines a hunger strike as missing nine meals over 72 hours.

Defense attorneys said more than 200 inmates were fasting but some were accepting small amounts of liquid or occasional meals to prolong the strike.

Prisoners are demanding trials in U.S. courts, as well as such improvements as better food, bottled drinking water, more reading materials and greater religious freedom.

“It’s a dire situation because the military is refusing reasonable negotiation,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a British attorney representing several detainees. “It is incredible that the U.S. government is denying these inmates fair trials even if the alternative is that they could die of starvation.”

Smith said the military refused to let him see one fasting client and threatened to arrest him for being a hunger-strike ringleader -- which he denied -- when he was visiting Guantanamo in mid-August.