Perpetrating Torture or Preserving Life? Public Moral Discourse on the Guantanamo Enteral Feedings

• In Event: 286 - Regular Session. Human Rights

Abstract

According to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility’s “Standard Operating Procedure," Guantanamo medical personnel may involuntarily feed any hunger-striking detainee by nasogastric tube in order to prevent him from starving himself to death. Since the first reported hunger strike in the detention facility in 2002, the procedure has sporadically attracted American media coverage, saturated with commentary from human rights and civil liberties groups, medical organizations, politicians, scholars, celebrity activists, released detainees, and detainee lawyers. Yet, not all of these groups have accentuated the enteral feedings’ protection, preservation, and promotion of life. Various groups have depicted the procedure as unethical, abusive, inhumane, and even torturous. In this way, the enteral feedings have achieved a duality of moral meaning in American public discourse. The enteral feedings have been constructed as both morally problematic and morally unproblematic. In this study, I examine the manifestation of that moral duality in American public discourse. Drawing from social constructionist and moral vocabulary approaches, I analyze moral neutralizing and morally problematizing claims about the detainee enteral feedings in 824 newspaper articles published between 2002 and 2014. Ultimately, I find that, while generating periodic and focused moral concern, the enteral-feedings failed to capture widespread, sustained American moral outrage. I suggest that this failure might be attributed to two problems: the pure victim problem and the conservative “moral foundations” problem.

Author

• Jacqueline Henke, Purdue University