Officials are sparing little effort or expense to improve Gitmo. They provide captives with prayer rugs, beads, caps and Qurans in their native languages. Arrows point toward Mecca. The center spends about $4 million a year offering detainees a choice of six different halal meals a day. The kitchen prepares two Islamic "feast" meals a week and offers fresh food - such as yogurt, veggie-burger patties with fresh garlic and onion, and scrambled eggs and waffles.
In fact, obesity is increasingly a problem, one Navy doctor said. He knows, because the detainees make roughly 7,800 visits a year to the medical center to receive state-of-the-art care. That includes colonoscopies for "age-appropriate" detainees; 25 have been performed so far. The medical center has one staff member for every two detainees
Hunger strikes are allowed, but only along with "voluntary force-feeding" - a phrase admittedly worthy of Orwell. Each day, most of the hunger strikers (about 18 percent of the detainees) line up for Ensure nutritional supplements. They ingest the supplements not through the mouth but through the nostril, via a yellow, spaghetti-size tube lubricated with olive oil. (Butter pecan is the most popular of the five available flavors, the doctor said.) Of course, those who don't "volunteer" are shackled and force-fed anyway. "They have a right to protest, and we have an obligation to keep them alive and healthy while they do so," Admiral Copeman explained.
