The Webmaster: June 2009 Archives

Six Questions for Cynthia Smith on the Legality of Force-feeding at Guantánamo
By Luke Mitchell

The apparent suicide Monday (6-1-09) of thirty-one-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, who had been protesting his long imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay by refusing to eat, has brought U.S. force-feed policy back into the news. Many human rights organizations have called for an end to force-feeding, which as practiced at Guantánamo amounts to torture. In MayApril, for an article to be published in the July Harper's Magazine, I attempted to query Dr. Ward Casscells, then the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, about how he might modify that policy since Barack Obama had become president. Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokesperson, responded to my written queries (which I have edited here for length) under the requirement that I attribute the answers to her and not Casscells. At the time of the interview, at least thirty prisoners at Guantánamo were being restrained and fed via enteral tube.

Here are the questions by Harper's senior editor Luke Mitchell

On September 22, 2009, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) will welcome Fernando Botero's generous gift of 26 paintings and 30 drawings from his Abu Ghraib series to Berkeley and to the museum's permanent collection. Valued in the multiple millions -- although Botero has always said they would never be for sale -- this is the largest gift in BAM's history and one of the largest in the history of any American university collection. Botero began work on this series in the summer of 2004 after reading Seymour Hersh's revelatory and disturbing report on torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker. His images are not strictly documentary, not a translation of the infamous and much reproduced snapshots into another media. They are a great artist's effort "to make invisible things visible," to represent and thereby interpret, through a new visual vocabulary, the outrages that had been perpetrated on Iraqi prisoners in American custody. The benign and gently grotesque figures for which Botero is famous have become dark and malignly grotesque figures of the body humiliated and in pain.

Download this PDF BRLAS-Spring2009-Laqueur.pdf  to read the entire article from the Spring 2009 issue of the Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies.