A group of Guantánamo prisoners are vowing to continue their hunger strike against indefinite detention and prison conditions. The U.S. military stopped releasing data on the hunger strike last month after its tally of participants dropped to 19.
But in an article translated by his lawyer and posted by Al Jazeera, Moath al-Alwi, a Yemeni man who has been in U.S. custody since 2002, says he has remained on hunger strike for nearly nine months despite painful force-feedings. He wrote: “The U.S. military prison staff’s intent is to break our peaceful hunger strike. The result can be read all over my body. It is visible on my bloodied nose and in my nostrils, swollen shut from the thick tubes the nurses force into them.”
Al-Alwi says some prisoners ended their hunger strikes to avoid force-feeding or give President Obama time to deliver on a renewed pledge to close Guantánamo. But “as for my brothers and me,” he wrote, “we will remain on hunger strike. We pray that the next thing we taste is freedom.”
