Guantanamo Food Strike

Associated Press headline:  “Guantanamo hunger strike largely over.  The U.S. military on Monday effectively pronounced the end of a mass hunger strike.”

It was a “six month protest that refocused global attention on the prison and pushed the Obama administration to revive the effort to shutter Guantanamo.”  

It goes on to say that “about seven detainees have been on strike for years.”  They must have taken turns striking, or they’d have died within a few months back in year one. 


You can imagine them chatting it up.  It’s like a Jenny Craig meeting:  Here’s this week’s schedule.  Seven guys, everyone fasts for a day.  What’s the question, Yousef?...sure, we’ll sneak you some tatertots, but don’t let the guards see you eating on your day off.  That way we’ll always have someone striking, right?  The American Liberal newspaper idiots can keep it going.  Ok, you guys sort it out among yourselves, choose your day.  The meal schedule is posted in the canteen.  Don’t like beets, take off Monday, hate the pizza, that’s Thursday.  Look gaunt, boys, shuffle when you see observers.  

Poor guys!  Not a terrorist among ‘em, just peaceful young men swept up from their villages illegally, taken from their homeland by what they call, “filthy Americans.”  (To pronounce the word, American, in Pashtung you whisper-spit it bitterly, fast, repeating it so you’re making a sound like goats running on a dirt road.)  

When Obama was given a briefing on individual prisoners many months after promising to close Guantanamo once elected President, even he was staggered to learn of their savagery.  He said, “Holy shit!  I can’t let these guys out!  Baby bombers, box-cutter guys, nasty bastards!  What, they don’t use toilet paper?  Their hand?  Nooo, really?  They shit over a hole in the ground?  Whaaat?  Bring ‘em to America?  That’ll just focus international attention...on me.  Muslims from all over the world will come to America to protest at the prison.  What?  Let ‘em go in Detroit?  Nah, they’d get shot before they could change to baggy jeans.  Hey, you guys are shitting me about the hole in the ground, right?  Tell me the truth.  I’m gonna Snopes it.”

More article:  “At it’s peak, 106 of the 166 prisoners were listed as participants, but now just 19 have been participating.”  Participating means missing a meal, I assume, as the information comes from “a prison spokesman.” The spokesman in cell #9?  Left to your imagination is the squabbling among the detainees, who have been eating better than Mullahs back home.  They did not know that food could affect their taste buds. Hamburgers are good!  Gimme more of that mac and cheeze, pile on them taters.  Grits?  My, my, that’s some fine stuff.  That chicken fried, now they got something there.  Salad, that’s new...tomatoes, extra tasty.  Ribs?  Ok, just a little, ‘cause that’s pork, don’t you know...no, a little more than that!  The nineteen seen to be eating irregularly are dyed in goat wool, whacko religious fanatics, crazier than dervishes.

What in the world is all the fuss about?  Here’s a fact:  it’s good if a detainee starves.  Thumbs UP!  When they’re dumb enough to kill themselves, what does that do to their recruitment efforts?  Hunger ain’t fun, zero glory in it, any desert lad knows that.  “Ok,” the recruit would say, “but I do get to eat, right?  I’ll blow shit up, and I’ll wait for the virgins, but meantime I get to eat, right?  Right?  No food, nothin’ doing, I ain’t joinin’.”  They may be ignorant and unsophisticated, but they know worlds about starvation.

Here’s a possible solution, a money-saver:  They don’t want to eat, don’t try to feed ‘em once they go on strike... until they make a formal, written request for whatever food is available, hot or cold, and denounce the silly strike and agree to be photographed eating a ballpark hotdog, wearing only a thong, with their head and beard shaved.  The day will come when they’ll sign up.  Hunger’s a bitch!

Start a new program with choice foods on day one of their strike, then day-by-day present worse food, until after a week or so they’re down to eating leftovers out of plastic tubs delivered from American prisons.  I missed lunch once back in 1978, and it was not fun.  I know about stuff like this.

Instead of allowing the detainees to meet and eat together, feed them on retractable metal trays, through cell door openings.  They sand and eat off the tray within minutes or the food is removed, saved for their next meal and re-presented.  I learned this technique when training a fussy small dog.  I call it the “takeaway” technique.  Miss a few meals and damned if they won’t eventually catch on.  About day four the detainees will eat before they bitch about the food.  

My Dad lived with an Uncle who re-fed him what he didn’t eat on the first go ’round, until it was all gone.  The idea was imprinted on my father that respect was due whoever supplied and prepared the food.  He found that crusty, old food was better than no food.  Sometimes, if he bragged on the meal, he was given extras.

I visited Morrow Castle with my family as a child, the ancient stone prison in Havana harbor. 
I remember seeing a very narrow brick chute--think apartment building laundry chute-- that led from the prison cells down into the shark-infested harbor.  The guide pointed out that dead or problem prisoners were tossed in the chute.  I said, precocious kid that I was, “You couldn’t fit a fat person in it,” to which the guard responded with glee, “There were no fat prisoners at Morrow Castle.”

A Guantanamo Chute!  That’s what we need!