Cuba Detainees Go On Hunger Strike
Feb. 28 -- Detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are refusing to eat — protesting the treatment of one of their fellow prisoners.
More than a third of the 300 prisoners brought to Cuba from Afghanistan skipped breakfast — usually a culturally sensitive meal like fruit and oatmeal — after one of them was forced to take off a makeshift turban he had fashioned out of a bedsheet on Tuesday. By lunch today, the number of strikers had risen to 194.
Marine Maj. Steven Cox said a detainee observing his Muslim prayers ignored a guard and a translator when asked to remove the turban.
"They don't like being distracted during prayer observance," Cox said.
Guards restrained the prisoner to remove the headdress, Cox said, raising howls of protest from the other prisoners who could see what was happening through the chain-link fence walls of the facility.
"They saw, heard and communicated about what took place," he said.
The turban incident may have triggered the strike, but Cox said officials who interviewed detainees today say that the real cause is the uncertainty of their situation.
"The real issue is the natural tension associated with not knowing what the future holds for them," he said. "They don't know what's going to happen to them, when it's going to happen, or where they're going to end up."
Cox said that the situation in the camp was calm at midday today and that officials were waiting to see whether the prisoners would eat later in the day.
Bin Laden DNA Requested
Meanwhile, the United States has asked the family of Osama bin Laden for DNA samples to help them determine whether the accused terrorist mastermind was among the casualties of a U.S. missile strike earlier this month.
Because one of the men killed in the Feb. 4 attack was unusually tall, there has been some speculation that bin Laden himself — who is reportedly between 6'4" and 6'6" — may have been among the casualties.
However, U.S. officials feel confident bin Laden is still alive — perhaps in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
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