TV News LIES

It’s lunchtime on the communal cellblocks for cooperative captives, and detainees dressed in tan and white camp uniforms are steadfastly refusing the guards’ offer to wheel in food carts.

Only if a prisoner pulls shut a gate to a chute called a sally port can a soldier lock it remotely and send in the meals. And one by one, every block but Delta Block refuses. Some captives call out that they don’t want the food.

As the US Supreme Court prepares to consider the legality of gay marriage next week, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents thousands of pediatricians, took a firm position Thursday in support of gay civil marriages in a policy statement drafted by two Boston doctors.

The group also came out in support of full adoption and foster care rights for all parents, regardless of sexual orientation; the pediatricians said states should not limit adoptions nor foster care placement by single parents to those who are heterosexuals.

The number of detainees conducting a hunger strike at the prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, has risen to 21, U.S. military officials say. At least two of the hunger strikers have required treatment at the prison hospital at the U.S. base at Guantanamo, The Miami Herald reported Tuesday.

As of Monday morning, eight of the 166 people held at the military base in Cuba on terrorism-related charges had missed enough meals and lost enough body weight to require nutritional supplements, the military said in a statement.

A freed Palestinian prisoner has been given a hero's welcome in the Gaza Strip after ending his hunger strike in an Israeli jail and agreeing to a plea bargain that will confine him to the territory for the next 10 years.

After his release from Israeli custody, Ayman Sharawneh arrived at the Erez Crossing in an ambulance with its siren blaring and red lights flashing as it crossed into Gaza on Sunday evening. Dozens of Palestinians waved national flags and chanted slogans calling for freedom.

Sharawneh, 53, appeared weak, shaky and shrunken, and was taken to a hospital in Gaza City.

Forty-five years ago today, March 16, roughly 100 U.S. troops were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.

On this day, I think back to an interview I conducted several years ago with a tiny, wizened woman named Tran Thi Nhut. She told me about hiding in an underground bunker as the Americans stormed her hamlet and how she emerged to find a scene of utter horror: a mass of corpses in a caved-in trench and, especially, the sight of a woman’s leg sticking out at an unnatural angle which haunted her for decades. She lost her mother and a son in the massacre. But Tran Thi Nhut never set foot in My Lai. She lived two provinces north, in a little hamlet named Phi Phu which—she and other villagers told me—lost more than 30 civilians to a 1967 massacre by U.S. troops.

The U.S. military said Friday that it had designated 14 captives at the Guantánamo detention center as “hunger strikers,” and that six of them were being force-fed through tubes in the first admission of a protest claimed by defense attorneys.

The acknowledgement came a day after 51 attorneys wrote Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel of their “urgent and grave concern about a mass hunger strike taking place at the prison, now in its second month.” They sought Hagel’s intervention in “a serious threat to the health and life of detainees.”