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In an attempt to avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of detainees the Guantánamo Bay medical staff have adopted Shakespearean names. Until recently, some of the doctors there used their real names, which made it easy to report them for misconduct. Now the military wants the medical staff to ignore the Tokyo Declaration of 1975, which forbids the force-feeding of mentally competent hunger strikers, and refuse to inform prisoners of the results of their own medical tests.

It’s hard to tell why Shakespeare was chosen as a source of pseudonyms. If it’s from a conviction that his characters are exemplars of civility and good behaviour, that shows little understanding of his work. Perhaps it reflects a dim hope that some of his reputation might rub off. But Shakespeare’s plays provide no whitewash for political calumny; one of their main subjects is man’s inhumanity to man.

Here is the Guantánamo medical team’s dramatis personae:

Senior Medical Officer ... . . Leonato (Much Ado about Nothing)
Force-Feeding Doctor ... . . Varro (Julius Caesar)
Behavioural Health Doctor ... . . Cordelia (King Lear)
Behavioural Health Doctor ... . . Cressida (Troilus and Cressida)
Psychiatrist ... . . Helena (All’s Well That Ends Well / A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Medical Corpsman ... . . Silius (Antony and Cleopatra)
Nurse ... . . Valeria (Coriolanus)
Nurse ... . . Lucentio (The Taming of the Shrew)
Nurse ... . . Lucio (Measure for Measure)

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Vol. 35 No. 22 · 21 November 2013

Dominic Dromgoole and Clive Stafford Smith understandably refrain from applauding the Guantánamo force-feeding of mentally competent hunger-strikers (LRB, 7 November). But, before we claim any superiority, we should remember that for the last 13 years Ian Brady has been the victim of the same treatment in Ashworth Hospital with the explicit approval of our judiciary, confirmed by Mr Justice Kay on Brady’s judicial review of the decision.

Benedict Birnberg
London SE3

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