fixin' to die

i've noticed a recent tendency in the uk, following the government's authoritarian crackdown's in the wake of the london bombings, to focus inwardly in an attempt to retain our civil liberties at home. lest anyone forget tho, the blackhole of guantanamo bay continues to subject british citizens to unbearable torment.

today's guardian reports news of a mass hunger strike of inmates at the gulag where "More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike". the inmates are protesting their continued degradation and alleged humiliations and qur'an desecration. binyan mohammed is quoted as saying:

People will definitely die. Bobby Sands petitioned the British government to stop the illegitimate internment of Irishmen without trial. He had the courage of his convictions and he starved himself to death. Nobody should believe for one moment that my brothers here have less courage.

this is precisely what the americans fear - the mass death of detainees on their watch.

this is a second hunger strike, the first of which is alleged to have been ended by a cruel trick:

The administration promised that if we gave them 10 days, they would bring the prison into compliance with the Geneva conventions. They said this had been approved by Donald Rumsfeld himself in Washington DC.

the inmates are obviously in a very poor condition if they're starting to believe that rumsfeld would ever let that happen. mohammed continues with some graphic details of the routine his fellow prisoners endure:

Hisham from Tunisia was savagely beaten in his interrogation and they publicly desecrated the Qur'an (again). Saad from Kuwait was ERF'd [visited by the Extreme Reaction Force] for refusing to go (again) to interrogation because the female interrogator had sexually humiliated him (again) for 5 hours - Therefore, the strike must begin again.

given the intensely repressive conditions in which the men are being held, it is no wonder that they are grimly holding onto control of the only thing they have left - their voluntary cooperation. by refusing to eat they hope to retain their humanity by not submitting to the machine of interrogation and punishment. as to whether their hopes to die rather than to endure the torture will be fulfilled a pentagon spokesman was blunt:

They are being held in the same standards as US prison standards... they don't allow people to kill themselves via starvation.

clearly the us' aim is to force the men into submission, to make them slaves to a wrathful american master. this is bentham's panopticon in the 21st century, an institution of total control where surveillance is complete and freedom is evaporated. surely no one can remain in doubt that this is the logical conclusion of our security obsessed society.

we must fight to destroy control wherever it arises. each new cctv camera and each new law to criminalise thought takes us one step closer to guantanamo.