A federal judge has determined that the U.S. military can force-feed a Syrian detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to prevent him from dying, but she urged authorities to consider alternative methods and ordered them to release potentially embarrassing videos depicting the man’s treatment. 
 
 U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler said she was faced with an “anguishing” choice: issuing another temporary restraining order that would prevent the military from force-feeding detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab, “despite the very real probability” that he will die, or refusing to extend the order, “at the possible cost of great pain and suffering” to the prisoner. 
 
 “The Court is in no position to make the complex medical decisions necessary to keep Mr. Dhiab alive,” Kessler said in a three-page ruling issued late Thursday. She added that because of the Pentagon’s “intransigence,” or refusal to compromise, “Mr. Dhiab may well suffer unnecessary pain from certain enteral feeding practices and forcible cell extractions. However, the Court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die.” 
 
 Kessler’s rulings promise to keep attention on the Pentagon’s controversial force-feeding practices for weeks to come. The judge said in a scheduling order issued Friday that the U.S. government must release to Dhiab’s lawyers by June 13 videos of the detainee being removed from his cell and force-fed. It will mark the first time that individuals not affiliated with the U.S. government have seen the videos. 
 
 Dhiab, 42, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and has been detained since without any charges being filed against him. He was cleared for transfer by the Obama administration in 2009, but the government has not been able to repatriate him, first because of fears about how he would be treated at home and then because of the Syrian civil war. 
 
 Dhiab is among the many Guantanamo prisoners who have staged hunger strikes to protest their prolonged detention; 154 detainees remain at the facility, and about half of them have been cleared for transfer to their home countries or to third countries. 
 
 Force-feeding involves restraining a detainee in a chair, inserting a tube through his nose and down his throat, and pumping a nutritional drink directly into his stomach. The process is uncomfortable at best and agonizing at worst, human rights advocates say. 
 
 A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, said Friday that the Defense Department has long held that it should not allow “the detainees in our charge to commit suicide.” 
 
 “It’s particularly worth noting here that we only apply enteral feeding in order to preserve life,” he added. 
 
 In court papers filed Wednesday, attorneys for another detainee, Ahmed Rabbani, said their client had contracted a chest infection that led him to vomit blood repeatedly as a result of the force-feeding process. They alleged that he endured several botched force-feeding attempts. In one of them, the tube was pointing up, rather than down into his throat, causing him to feel as if it was being pushed into his brain, they said. In another attempt, his airways were blocked by the feeding liquid pooling in his throat, preventing him from breathing, his attorneys alleged. 
 
 Kessler’s ruling follows a decision this week in which she barred the Pentagon from forcibly feeding Dhiab. In her follow-up order issued late Thursday, however, she changed her mind, she said, to keep the detainee alive. 
 
 She had harsh words for the Pentagon, though. In her ruling, she noted that Dhiab had indicated he was willing to be enterally fed if it could be done at the hospital at Guantanamo Bay, to avoid “the agony” of having the feeding tube inserted and removed for each feeding and the “pain and discomfort of the restraint chair.” 
 
 “If he could have been enterally fed in that manner, it would have been possible to litigate his plea to enjoin certain practices used in his force feedings in a civilized and legally appropriate manner,” Kessler said in her ruling. “The Department of Defense refused to make these compromises.” 
 
 Kessler said in her ruling that the Pentagon should abide by its own protocols, which say the standard for force-feeding is whether Dhiab is facing an “imminent risk of death or great bodily injury.” 
 
 The detention of Dhiab and other Syrians at Guantanamo has become increasingly controversial since Uruguay offered to resettle them. 
 
 Cori Crider, one of the Syrian detainee’s attorneys, said in a news release that the U.S. government has refused to treat Dhiab with decency and that its actions say “all you need to know about what is really going on at Gitmo.” 
 
 The president said last year that force-feeding detainees is not “who we are,” she added but noted that no changes have come. 
 
 “He could put my cleared client on a plane today if he had the will to do it,” she said of Obama. ||||| WASHINGTON — The seemingly unending struggle over Guantánamo Bay — the prison President Obama vowed to close shortly after he was sworn in — is again reverberating over an “anguishing” case of force-feeding a Syrian detainee. 
 
 The case involves Jihad Ahmed Mujstafa Diyab, a Syrian who has been held for 12 years without a trial, and who has gone on prolonged hunger strikes. Late Thursday, a Federal District Court judge lifted an order barring his force-feeding, even as she rebuked the military for using procedures that she said caused “agony.” 
 
 The decision underscored the stubborn problems entangling Guantánamo — a dispute over its future between Mr. Obama, who still wants to close it, and many Republicans in Congress, who want its use expanded, has resulted in a frozen-in-place policy that no one supports. There have been recurring vows to resolve the situation, but the years pass and the government keeps dozens of men imprisoned without trial, despite the recommendations of a task force in January 2010 that they be released. 
 
 Last week, Judge Gladys Kessler temporarily barred the military from force-feeding Mr. Diyab. On Wednesday, she also ordered the Obama administration to turn over videotapes showing the procedure, which he is challenging. But in Thursday’s decision she cited, “an anguishing Hobson’s choice”: to risk that the detainee dies by keeping the order in place as a legal fight unfolds, or to allow the military to take steps to keep him alive using procedures that inflict “unnecessary” suffering. 
 
 “The court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die,” she wrote, using an alternate spelling for the detainee’s name. 
 
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 The force-feeding procedure involves strapping a detainee into a restraint chair and inserting a tube through his nose and down his throat. Liquid nutritional supplement is then poured into his stomach. 
 
 A leaked military file for Mr. Diyab said he was arrested by the Pakistani police in April 2002 and later turned over to the United States. 
 
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 The file describes Mr. Diyab, who is now 42, as a member of a group of Syrians who fled to Afghanistan in 2000 after escaping a government crackdown on terrorist cells. He was sentenced to death in absentia in Syria, it said, for “unspecified political crimes,” which it speculates was “probably for his terrorist activities in Syria,” which it does not detail. 
 
 The assessment also alleges that he was a document forger for jihadist groups, saying he had 30 passport-size photos in his possession when he was arrested. It says he insisted instead that he was a honey salesman. 
 
 Mr. Diyab was recommended for transfer more than four years ago, but officials fear repatriating him because of the chaos in Syria and the apparent death sentence. 
 
 In February, the president of Uruguay offered to allow him to be released there, but Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who has the final say under restrictions imposed by Congress, has not signed off on the transfer. 
 
 Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, said: “We remain fully committed to implementing the president’s direction that we transfer detainees to the greatest extent possible, in a way that is consistent with the tenets of both our national security and our humane treatment policies, as we work toward shutting down the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. ” 
 
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 At one point this year, Mr. Diyab suspended his hunger strike for a brief period when it appeared to him that release might be imminent. But he said he found the continuing limbo “too difficult to bear” and resumed the protest “because of the delay in releasing him,” a defense lawyer who spoke with him recounted in a new court filing. 
 
 Judge Kessler wrote that he had indicated a “continued desire to refuse to eat and/or drink” since she forbid the military to force-feed him a week ago, and that his condition was “swiftly deteriorating.” 
 
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 Mr. Diyab’s challenge to the military’s procedures for force-feeding hunger-striking detainees is the first since a federal appeals court ruled in February that the judiciary may review conditions of confinement at Guantánamo, reversing an earlier ruling by Judge Kessler that she lacked the authority to intervene. 
 
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 She had asked the military to compromise over its procedures while the litigation unfolded. She wrote that Mr. Diyab had asked to be fed at the base hospital without being restrained and without having the feeding tube reinserted and removed for each cycle, sparing him the “agony” of that procedure. 
 
 If he could have been fed in that manner to prevent him from committing suicide by starvation, “it would have then been possible to litigate his plea to enjoin certain practices used in his force-feeding in a civilized and legally appropriate manner,” she wrote. 
 
 “The Department of Defense refused to make these compromises,” the judge said. 
 
 Mr. Diyab’s defense team recently learned that some videotapes of forcible cell extractions and force-feeding of Mr. Diyab and other detainees exist, and on Wednesday, Judge Kessler ordered the military to turn 34 such tapes over to his lawyers. 
 
 But in his statements, Mr. Diyab said the tapes might not show everything. The medical staff and guards, he said, turn the cameras off when they are forcing the tube into him, and turn them on only when he has stopped resisting. 
 
 In 2009, Mr. Obama promised to close the prison within a year. But the plans slowed amid a congressional blockade to any transfers to a prison in the United States, and steep restrictions on transfers elsewhere. 
 
 Transfers dried up after 2011, leading to a major hunger strike in early 2013. Mr. Obama defended the force-feeding, saying, “I don’t want these individuals to die.” But he also vowed to revive efforts to close the prison, and since then, a dozen detainees have been transferred. There are 154 inmates left in the prison. 
 
 After Mr. Obama revived his efforts, participation in the hunger strike fell off sharply. But the military also stopped making public how many detainees were refusing to eat, and lawyers for detainees contend that the guards are using rough force-feeding to break the wills of those who continue. 
 
 “I am stunned that the Department of Defense refused to agree to the reasonable compromise Mr. Diyab proposed,” said Jon Eisenberg, another lawyer for Mr. Diyab. “But the real responsibility lies at the door of President Obama, who utters lofty words but fails to stop the terrible things that are happening at Guantánamo Bay on his watch.”
– A federal judge today allowed the US military to resume force-feeding a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, but Gladys Kessler made clear she is not happy about it, reports the McClatchy News Service. Kessler criticized the Pentagon for refusing to budge over how it administers the force-feeding and urged authorities to figure out a way to make it less painful for detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab, reports the Washington Post. “Thanks to the intransigence of the Department of Defense, Mr. Dhiab may well suffer unnecessary pain from certain enteral feeding practices and forcible cell extractions,” Kessler wrote. “However, the court simply cannot let Mr. Dhiab die.” She described the decision as "anguishing." Last week, Kessler ordered a temporary halt to the force-feeding, but reversed herself when it became clear that Dhiab would not voluntarily eat. She noted that the detainee has said that he would agree to the tubal feeding if he could “be spared the agony of having the feeding tubes inserted and removed for each feeding," along with the "pain and discomfort of the restraint chair." She criticized the Pentagon for not compromising. Dhiab, 42, is a Syrian who has been held for 12 years without charges and has been cleared for release since 2009, notes the New York Times. His attorneys recently won the right to view videotapes of his forced feedings.