Watch Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) Experience Guantánamo Force-Feeding
It’s not in the news as much anymore, but people are still being detained at Guantánamo Bay, and as Ramadan begins, many of them are staging hunger strikes. To break those hunger strikes, it’s standard military practice to force-feed many of those detainees through an absolutely awful process that involves a feeding tube up the nose. Yasiin Bey, still known to most of the world as Mos Def, recently agreed to undergo that same procedure, on camera, for the human rights organization Reprieve, with the filmmaker Asif Kapadia documenting it. Bey went through only a couple of minutes of a process that normally takes two hours, which normally happens twice daily, and it reduces him to screaming and tears. The resulting video is really hard to watch, and it serves as some small indication of what the American military regularly puts people through. Watch it at The Guardian.