Duty to Refuse': Top Medical Groups Back Nurse Who Said 'No' to Force-Feeding Guantanamo Hunger Strikers

Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault.'

Leading medical groups are speaking out in support of a U.S. Navy nurse who refused on ethical grounds to force-feed hunger strikers held captive at Guantanamo Bay.

The American Nurses Association announced Wednesday that they have penned letters to U.S. government and military officials strongly urging against any punishment or retaliation for the act of refusal, which occurred in July. The military is planning to try the unidentified nurse, who is an officer, before a Board of Inquiry, which could result in a dishonorable discharge that strips him of his veterans benefits.

"The ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses clearly supports the ethical right of a professional nurse to make an independent judgment about whether he or she should participate in this or any other such activity," reads an October 17 letter (pdf) to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel from Pamela Cipriano, ANA president. "The military setting does not change the nurse’s ethical commitments or standards."

Doctor Vincent Iacopino, senior medical adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, told Common Dreams that his organization strongly supports the nurse's refusal to take part in the force-feeding of competent adults, which is banned by the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association and has been condemned by the office of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights as torture and a violation of international law.

"Force feedings are being done without informed consent, against people's wishes," said Iacopino. "We have codes of conduct that prohibit us from conducting therapeutic interventions or diagnostic procedures that people do not consent to."

"The government is claiming it is doing this to save people's lives," Iacopino continued. "The reality is that people are on hunger strike, protesting something: indefinite detention, often without charges. Any health professional under those circumstances has a duty to refuse. This is ill treatment with no respect for autonomy."

This is not the first time medical professionals have called for non-participation in the Guantanamo Bay force-feedings.

In op-ed published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July, a time of doctors writes, "Force-feeding a competent person is not the practice of medicine; it is aggravated assault. Using a physician to assault prisoners no more changes the nature of the act than using physicians to 'monitor' torture makes torture a medical procedure. Military physicians are no more entitled to betray medical ethics than military lawyers are to betray the Constitution or military chaplains are to betray their religion."

Furthermore, the American Medical Association also penned a letter to Hagel in April declaring, "Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions."

The nurse's act of refusal was originally revealed by Abu Wa'el Dhiab, a Syrian man and father of four who currently held in Guantanamo Bay despite being cleared for release since 2009. Dhiab told his lawyers at Reprieve that he heard the nurse, described as an approximately 40 year-old Latino man, state, "I have come to the decision that I refuse to participate in this criminal act."

"Before we came here, we were told a different story," the nurse reportedly added. "The story we were told was completely the opposite of what I saw."

The U.S. military has been broadly criticized for its treatment of hunger strikers. In response, the U.S. has imposed secrecy on its procedures and practices, including a media blackout on the number of people participating in the protest.

One hundred forty eight men remain incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay without charges or fair trial. More

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If this brave and honourable nurse is going to be tried, then so should President Obama and the Joint Chief of Staff. Editor

 

© 2014

The Hard Times Facing Humanity by Fidel Castro Ruz

The world is ever more misinformed in the midst of a turmoil of events that occur at a speed never before expected.

Fidel Castro Ruz

Those of us who have lived a few more years and experienced a certain eagerness for information can attest to the amount of ignorance with which we used to approach facts.

While an increasing number of persons lack housing, bread, water, health, education and employment in the planet, the wealth of the Earth is being wasted and squandered to manufacture weapons and wage endless fratricidal wars. This has become –and is ever more becoming- a more frequent and abominable world practice.

Our glorious and heroic people, despite an inhumane blockade that has been in place for more than half a century, has never given in: it has struggled and will continue to struggle against the sinister empire. That is our humble merit and our humble contribution.

At the opposite side of our planet, in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, President Barack Obama is attending a Summit on Nuclear Security to impose policies related to the distribution and use of nuclear weapons.

These are, no doubt, unheard of events.

I personally did not become aware of these realities just by mere chance. The experience lived throughout more than fifteen years since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution –after the battle in Girón, the criminal Yankee blockade that intended to subdue us by hunger; the pirate attacks, the dirty war and the nuclear missile crisis in October, 1962, which pushed the world to the verge of a sinister hecatomb- led me to the conviction that Marxist and honest Christians –of whom I had met many- regardless of their political and religious beliefs, should and could struggle for justice and peace among human beings.

I proclaimed so and I have maintained so without any hesitation whatsoever. The reasons I have today are absolutely valid and even more important, because all the events that have occurred for almost 40 years now confirm that. Today there are more reasons than ever, because neither Marxists or Christians, whether Catholic or not; Muslims, Shiites or Sunnites; freethinkers, dialectical materialists or even persons who think would like to see the premature disappearance of our irreplaceable thinking species, and wait until the complex laws of evolution could give rise to another similar species with the capacity to think.

Tomorrow I will gladly greet His Excellency Pope Benedict XVI, as I did with John Paul II, a man in whom the contact with children and the humble citizens of the people always aroused feelings of affection.

That is why I decided to ask him for some minutes of his very busy schedule when I knew from our Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez that he would be glad to have that modest and simple contact. More

 

Fidel Castro to North Korea: nuclear war will benefit no one

Retired Cuban leader sternly cautions North Korea and US of dangers of nuclear war in first column in nearly nine months.

Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro published his first column in nearly nine months on Friday, urging both friends and foes to use restraint amid tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

In the brief piece published in Communist Party daily Granma and other official media, Castro warned of the impact that nuclear war could unleash in Asia and beyond. He said Havana has always been and will continue to be an ally to North Korea, but gently admonished it to consider the well-being of humankind.

"Now that you have demonstrated your technical and scientific advances, we remind you of your duty to the countries that have been your great friends, and it would not be fair to forget that such a war would affect ... more than 70% of the planet's population," he said.

Castro used stronger language in addressing Washington, saying that if fighting breaks out, President Barack Obama's government "would be buried by a flood of images that would present him as the most sinister figure in US history. The duty to avoid (war) also belongs to him and the people of the United States."

North Korea has issued a series of escalating threats in recent weeks as the United States and South Korea have conducted joint military exercises beginning in March, and expressed anger over U.N. sanctions imposed after it held a nuclear test in February. Pyongyang says it needs nuclear weapons for self-defense, and on Tuesday it announced it would restart a plutonium reactor that was shut down in 2007.

Analysts say the elevated rhetoric is probably calculated to push for concessions from South Korea, prod Washington into talks and bolster the image of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But Castro called the situation "incredible and absurd," and said war would cause terrible harm to the people of both Koreas and benefit no one.

"This is one of the gravest risks of nuclear war since the October Crisis in 1962 involving Cuba, 50 years ago," he wrote, a reference to what is known in English as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Castro last published one of his columns known as "Reflections" on June 19, 2012. In October, amid the latest round of rumors of his purportedly dire health, he said he had stopped writing them not due to illness but because they were occupying space in official newspapers and state TV news broadcasts that was needed for other uses. More