A US navy nurse stands next to a chair with restraints, used for force-feeding during a tour of the detainee hospital at Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
MIAMI — A Navy lieutenant nurse who refused to force-feed protesting prisoners at Guantanamo in the summer of 2014 has been restored to full duty and is serving at a Navy medical facility in New England, his attorney said Tuesday.
The case became a cause celebre in certain circles that both honored the nurse’s defiance and defended the duty of a medical professional to let his ethics trump his chain of command if he disapproves of U.S. military medical decisions.
But it took nearly two years to resolve after the Miami Herald disclosed the crisis of conscience, as overheard by a Syrian hunger striker, and the prison confirmed it happened.
In the interim, the Pentagon has released some of Guantanamo’s most determined hunger strikers and the U.S. military has maintained a blackout on its once exacting, daily disclosure of hunger strikers at the prison in southeast Cuba.
“A handful” of the last 80 war-on-terror detainees were on a Navy medical list to get up-to-twice daily nasal-gastric feedings on Tuesday, Navy Capt. Christopher Scholl said by email from the remote outpost. As described by prison medical staff, a captive who won’t voluntarily drink a medically prescribed twice-daily dose of a nutritional shake, usually Ensure, is strapped into a restraint chair and fed it via a tube tethered up his nose and into his stomach.
Also on Tuesday, Dr. Vince Iacopino, the medical director of Physicians for Human Rights, called the decision “a long-overdue vindication of the nurse’s integrity, professionalism and adherence to medical ethics in refusing to force-feed Guantanamo detainees.”
“With this decision, the Pentagon has finally acknowledged that no health professional should be punished for acting ethically. The first obligation of medical professionals is to do no harm,” Iacopino added.
The nurse, who has never been publicly identified, had been under scrutiny since the episode around July Fourth 2014. First, he was threatened with court martial for dereliction of duty, a prosecution that was dropped. Then the Navy had him formally defend himself on why he should keep his commission.
Once he won that case, the Department of Defense began proceedings to permanently revoke his clearance, meaning he could not treat patients because he was forbidden from accessing Pentagon computers.
New York City attorney Ronald Meister, a…
Read more at Navy
from DefenseNewz.com http://ift.tt/1rt5ogI
via Defense News
No comments: