: re: A Practice Goes on Trial: Force-Feeding a Detainee

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:11 PM
Subject: re: A Practice Goes on Trial: Force-Feeding a Detainee
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

    More than any man, John Locke shaped the government of the U.S. It should therefore be of more than passing interest that he found a right to die to be a fundamental, inalienable right. It was precisely because a prisoner could opt to die (and because the State has the legitimate power to execute a convict) that internment was--in his analysis--a legitimate power of the State. Force feeding violates this fundamental right, that the prisoner--much less the detainee who has been convicted of nothing--has not given up.

   To detain these men in Guantanamo without charges or trial is criminal. To prolong it even past the will to live itself is abomination.

Barry Haskell Levine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/us/a-practice-goes-on-trial-force-feeding-a-detainee.html?_r=0