Pentagon decides not to punish Navy nurse who refused to force-feed Guantanamo prisoners
A US naval medic holds liquid food supplement force fed to hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay.
Last July, a Navy nurse at Guantanamo Bay detention camp refused orders to force-feed prisoners who were engaging in a peaceful hunger strike. Now, finally, he's allowed to serve as a military nurse again and knows that he won't be discharged for defying orders.
Medical associations including Physicians for Human Rights, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association (WMA) argue that force-feeding isn't an ethically-acceptable medical procedure. And when the Miami Herald reported in July 2014 that the Defense Department was considering proceedings against a nurse who'd refused to force-feed detainees, civilian medical professionals backed the anonymous nurse.
The American Nurse's Association wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urging him not to discipline the nurse, saying it's “the ethical right of a professional nurse to make an independent judgment about whether he or she should participate in this or any other such activity.”
If you're wondering what force-feeding a Guantanamo detainee looks like, the human rights group Reprieve teamed up with Mos Def back in July 2013 to make this video. It's based on leaked documents detailing the military's standard operating procedures for force-feeding.
The nurse, who had served in the Navy for 18 years before defying the force-feeding order, has been unable to work as a military nurse since the incident. He's been waiting to know whether the Navy would take the recommendation of his commanding officer and convene a Board of Inquiry that would decide whether to discharge him.
Well now it's over. The nurse's lawyer told the Miami Herald, which reported the news today, that the nurse has been told he's free to serve again.
That's great news for him.
It's also good news for Defense Department, which has quietly walked away from a proceeding that might have once again had Americans talking about controversial detention and interrogation programs.
Maybe Pentagon officials calculated that one scandalous Guantanamo story was enough for the month of May. Last week, a former Guantanamo prisoner, Toronto-born Omar Khadr, was released on bail in Canada. He was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 when he was 15 years old and spent the next 13 years in US military detention.
The nurse has gotten his job back. Khadr can't get back that time — nearly half his life.