From Raw Story
Detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp are staging a hunger strike to protest the confiscation of personal items, including Korans, in early February, their lawyers and prison officials said Monday.
“My client and other men have reported that most of the detainees in Camp 6 are on strike, except for a small few who are elderly or sick,” said Pardiss Kebriaei, a New York lawyer representing Ghaleb Al-Bihani, a detainee from Yemen.
Camp 6 houses the majority of the 166 detainees still incarcerated at Guantanamo — estimated at about 130 men — who usually don’t pose any disciplinary problems and don’t represent a “value” in terms of information or a particular risk.
Interviewed by AFP, Robert Durand, director of public affairs for the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said nine detainees were engaged in hunger strikes, five of whom were being fed through tubes inserted into their stomachs.
However, he indicated that “refusing delivered food does not make a detainee a hunger striker, not eating does.”
