Medics suggest Yasiin Bey video inaccurate

The supposed medics of Guantanamo Bay have taken time out of their busy schedule of force-feeding people to complain that Yasiin Bey's depicition of their work is wrong. Yahoo News listens politely:

In reality, the medics said, detainees are strapped down at the legs, waist and hands by guards, but their heads are not restrained. The slender, flexible feeding tubes are lubricated with olive oil or a pain-numbing lidocaine gel and some of the prisoners help out by swallowing them down into place. None has vomited or cried, the medics said.

Army Sergeant 1st Class Vernon Branson, a watch commander at one of the prisons, said one of his fellow guards underwent a tube-feeding to see what it was like.

"My soldier took it like a champ. He was laughing and talking the whole time," Branson said.

Branson said he used to be a Mos Def fan but the video changed that. "I deleted his music off my iPod. I was a little upset about it," he said.

That's curious, isn't it? A mindset that giggles as a tube coated in lindocaine is shoved into your gullet, but gets so wounded by someone criticising you that you rush away and wipe all traces of them from your iPod.

It's difficult to see how a process which requires pain-numbing gel to be involved doesn't actually hurt, but the army guys seem to imply the people they're pumping nutrients into actually enjoy the process:

Navy doctors, nurses and hospital corpsmen said most of the 44 hunger strikers they tube-feed are calm, accepting and eager to get on with what has become a daily routine.

"Most are asking us to hurry up, make it go faster," said Lieutenant Junior Grade "Lucentio," a Navy nurse.

Oh, yes. Encouraging the violation of your body to be done quickly really does show an embrace of the process.