Forced Feeding: The Torture of Keeping Detainees Alive

John Ritter

In practical ways, I was first introduced to Ensure nutrition shakes in late spring 2002. For eighteen months, a span that included the attacks of 9/11 and the beginning of the decade-plus of war that followed, my stepfather had been undergoing treatment for cancer. We were very close. Paul had married my mother a few years after my father died, and over their time together he behaved in ways that assured her she was not alone in raising these three kids.

Cases of Ensure were sold from a bottom shelf of the Sentry grocery store in the town where I grew up, Waterford, Wisconsin, and I bought at least one case, maybe more, in the final weeks of his life. Even then, time was a blur. Some sleepless nights, some long naps during the day. Visits from a priest and a string of hospice nurses. As much Brewers baseball as we could consume on the television. He was confined to a hospital bed set up in the family room. Home from New York, I stayed in the guest bedroom at the other end of the house. With the door open through the night, I could see him from my bed while he slept or quietly prayed. Mostly he slept.

Paul ate very little in those weeks. He had neither the appetite nor the energy. To feed him anything at all—to continue to keep him alive was how I saw it—my family resorted to food products that made hydration and nutrition easy, fruit-flavored ice pops and vanilla Ensure. He died anyway.

This is something I haven’t thought about in years: how we fed him. But then, recently, I began thinking about feeding Paul and buying Ensure in bulk, about the lengths we’ll go to in order to keep someone alive, about the boundary between death and life. About what one life can teach us.

This past winter, two books were published that ought to reshape how we understand the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last December, Melville House released The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, a document that had been made available by the Senate committee earlier in the month in an electronic format that was slightly cumbersome. Putting it between covers, said the press’s copublisher, Dennis Johnson, was part of its “duty to try and get this report out there to the widest possible audience.”

Then, in January, Little, Brown released Guantánamo Diary, a firsthand account of the detainment of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who has never faced formal charges and, despite a 2010 order by a US District Court judge for his release, remains in lockup to this day. His detainment began when he turned himself over to Mauritanian police in late 2001. The manuscript was written in the summer and fall of 2005, after Slahi had been given certain allowances—a TV/VCR, some books, a chance to garden and the occasional company of another detainee. Paper and something to write with. In the book’s introduction, editor Larry Siems explains: “Under the strict protocols of Guantánamo’s sweeping censorship regime, every page he wrote was considered classified from the moment of its creation, and each new section was surrendered to the United States government for review.” Even so, Slahi hoped the book would reach an American audience. “What do the American people think?” he writes near the end of the diary. “I am eager to know.” And after more than six years of legal wrangling by a team of pro bono attorneys, the pages have been declassified.

Presenting the book, Siems insists that Slahi’s story—“one man’s odyssey through an increasingly borderless and anxious world”—is “an epic for our times.” To me the literary analogue is more grounded—and more damning—than the epic. Slahi, who is shipped overseas (from Mauritania to Jordan to Bagram Air Base to GTMO) and held in chains, who learns English from his guards and interrogators, who...