[Quote:]

The military commander responsible for the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, confirmed Tuesday that officials there last month turned to more aggressive methods to deter prisoners who were carrying out long-term hunger strikes to protest their incarceration.

The commander, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, head of the United States Southern Command, said soldiers at Guantánamo began strapping some of the detainees into “restraint chairs” to force-feed them and isolate them from one another after finding that some were deliberately vomiting or siphoning out the liquid they had been fed.

“It was causing problems because some of these hard-core guys were getting worse,” General Craddock said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. Explaining the use of the restraint chairs, he added, “The way around that is you have to make sure that purging doesn’t happen.”

After The New York Times reported Feb. 9 that the military had begun using restraint chairs and other harsh methods, military spokesmen insisted that the procedures for dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo had not changed. They also said they could not confirm that the chairs had been used.

[..]

In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David J. Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantánamo, Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but “providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment.”

[..]

That effort was stepped up, one official said, in January, when Captain Edmondson left Guantánamo for a new post after receiving a Legion of Merit Medal for “inspiring leadership and exemplary performance.”

Inspiring indeed.