This last sketch – actually reinterpreted as two separate sketches, based on Mr al-Haj’s original two-part drawing – is Mr. al Haj’s take on the force-feeding of prisoners at Guantánamo. Whether they are emaciated (as in the first picture) or portrayed by the US military as overweight (as in the second), the inhuman process remains the same.
“All they care about is the prisoner’s weight,” Mr al Haj explained. “Are you sick? Are you in pain? Who cares? It is all about the number on the scale. At the top of the drawing there is a skeleton again, but this time without hands or feet. The top of the head, the cranium, even the eyes are gone. Our lives depend on the doctors, but we get nothing from them. So we’re going mad.”
Mr. al Haj also reported that the US soldiers ‘cheat’ on the weights, including the 4.5 lb weight of the shackles, and sometimes even pushing down on the scale.
He continued: “A man who is mad has no mind, but he still has a heart. We’re all going mad here. The skeleton is strapped to a gurney, there’s a tube and a pump, and the gurney is on a scale. It reads 98 lbs. But that’s with the weight of the gurney, and maybe the soldier’s pushing down on the skeleton a bit also.”
Mr al Haj also explained: “As they prepare the feeding they don’t use gloves. When they take the tube out, things come out of the nose, but the people are strapped to the chair, and cannot do anything to clean the revolting tube. There are psychological teams all around, all keen to work out what the impact of this is on the prisoner.”
Mr. al Haj explained what he meant by the second picture of a bloated body. Even if the prisoner’s weight were to rise due to force feeding, he would still be losing his mind: “In the second half of this drawing the prisoner is INFLATED. The man is strapped to the gurney, and the weight on the scale reads 250 lbs. He has filled out, there are rolls of fat on his belly, but he is still mad. The pumps are all hooked up, forcing food into him. But the top half of his head is still vacant.”
Today (March 27, 2008) is the 441st day of Sami al Haj’s hunger strike, where his only demand is liberty or an open and fair trial.
As Reprieve’s Director, Clive Stafford Smith, explained: “Sami al Haj knows more about the brutal force-feeding of prisoners than anyone else in Guantánamo. The IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who died in a British prison in 1981, refused food for 66 days. Sami has been on strike for more than a year longer than that. And yet, because he has the courage to protest his imprisonment without charge or trial, he – and Guantánamo’s other hunger strikers – are strapped into restraint chairs twice a day and force-fed in the most abusive manner.”
He added: “Mr. al-Haj’s vivid depictions of the callousness of the military – and of the medical and psychiatric doctors who are shamefully complicit in his torture – serve only to reinforce the power of his basic demand: that the prisoners in Guantánamo be tried in a recognized court, or released without any further delay.”
