LONDON, March 10, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – More than 250 medical experts blasted as "unethical" the US force-feeding of prisoners in the notorious Guantanamo Bay, urging the US government to abandon the practice and the use of restraints on the hunger strikers in the detention camp.

"We urge the US government to ensure that detainees are assessed by independent physicians and that techniques such as force-feeding and restraint chairs are abandoned," said 263 from seven countries in an open letter to be published in this Saturday's issue of Britain's The Lancet medical journal, Reuters reported Friday, March 10.

Recalcitrant detainees were strapped into "restraint chairs", sometimes for hours, by US jailers in Guantanamo to force-feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterwards.

US officials have argued that the force-feeding was designed to improve the prisoners' health and was done in a humane fashion.

The doctors from Britain, the United States, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Italy and the Netherlands said physicians must respect the detainees' decision to refuse food.

"Physicians do not have to agree with the prisoner, but they must respect their informed decision."

The letter said that the World Medical Association, a global body representing physicians, specifically prohibits force-feeding in two declarations dating back to 1975.

"Those breaching such guidelines should be held to account by their professional bodies," the letter said.

The US has been holding for years more than 500 prisoners at Guantanamo, most of them were detained in Afghanistan after US-led troops invaded the country and ousted the Taliban regime in late 2001.

Several people who were released from the notorious prison spoke about torture, sexual humiliation and deliberate insults to the Muslim faith by guards and officers.

Human Rights Watch expressed concern on Monday, March 6, that the United States was secretly holding unacknowledged "ghost detainees" at Guantanamo even as it identified hundreds of other detainees earlier in the month.

Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist at City Hospital in Birmingham, England, said the American public and the medical community need to be aware of what is happening at Guantanamo Bay.

"These are very serious allegations," Nicholl, who is the initiator of the letter, told Reuters.

The letter also questions how seriously the American medical profession takes allegations of torture by its own members.

"This is a challenge to the American Medical Association," he said. "Are they going to obey those declarations (forbidding force-feeding), or are those bits of paper literally not worth the paper they are written on?

Nicholl said US doctors going to the detention facility were being screened to ensure they agreed with the policy of force-feeding.

"In effect they are screened to make sure they don't have doctors with a conscience," he told the BBC's World Today program.

Last February, a UN report said that the United States committed acts amounting to torture in the notorious facility, including the horrible forced-feeding of detainees.

"The excessive violence used in many cases during transportation ... and forced-feeding of detainees on hunger strike must be assessed as amounting to torture," said the UN report.

Former US president Bill Clinton and a chorus of Democrat and Republican Senators had pressed for the closure of the X-ray camp.

Amnesty International had dismissed Guantanamo as "a symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards." 

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