Guantánamo Bay inmates in mass hunger strike over new solitary cells

Inmates at Guantánamo Bay have embarked on a mass hunger strike in protest at the isolation and harsh conditions of a new maximum security unit, detainee lawyers and military officials said yesterday.

Thirteen inmates have refused food since the authorities at Guantánamo began transferring detainees in December to the new $38m (£19m) Camp Six, where inmates are locked in windowless cells with steel walls for 23 hours a day.

All 13 are now being force-fed under a regime that has been widely criticised by human rights groups, and is credited for breaking the last mass hunger strike at Guantánamo in 2006.

The number of inmates who have joined the protest is down slightly from its peak late last month when 17 inmates were on hunger strike, but it remains the most sustained show of defiance by prisoners since a riot and the suicide of three prisoners last summer.

That protest led the authorities at Guantánamo to move prisoners into the maximum security units. Some 160 of the camp's 385 inmates have now been moved into the solid steel cells.

Inmates of Camp Six are allowed out of their cells only to shower or exercise. Otherwise, their sole contact with the outside world comes from yelling through the food slots of their cell doors.

The military views the modern Camp Six as an improvement of the crowded mesh cages in which the men were held. But detainee lawyers say the isolation is punishing for inmates who have been held for five years in communal metal cages where they could see and hear other prisoners, or even play board games between cells.

"This was an entirely new and barren existence," said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a detainee lawyer. "The great majority of detainees are being held in complete and maddening isolation."

He said a Bahraini client had reported that a number of prisoners had been brought to the mental health unit of the camp after suffering breakdowns.

The authorities at Guantánamo have played down the significance of the protest, noting that two prisoners have been on constant hunger strike since 2005. They also describe such protests as part of a deliberate play for sympathy by al-Qaida.

Military officials at the camp also reject claims that the force-feeding regime, which requires a prisoner to be strapped into a restraint chair while a plastic tube is inserted through his nose, is inhumane.

Prisoners on hunger strike are monitored constantly and subjected to feeding twice a day.

"We won't let wounded enemies die on the battlefield, and we won't let detained enemy combatants die in our custody," said Commander Robert Durand, a camp spokesman.

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