Judge orders feds to prepare release of Gitmo force-feeding videos

A federal judge on Friday ordered the government to prepare for release videos showing the force-feeding of a Guantánamo Bay detainee by the end of the summer.

In the latest chapter of a long-running case over the controversial videotapes, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler criticized the government’s slow-walking of releasing the tapes and ordered them to be made ready for release.

{mosads}The government will have until the end of August to edit the videos and redact some of the information on them, Kessler ordered.

However, “there will be no extensions of time,” she wrote.

Friday’s order comes after a lengthy fight over the tapes, which show U.S. officials force-feeding Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab. Dhiab, a Syrian national, was detained in the facility from 2002 until December, when he was released to Uruguay. Along with other detainees, he had launched a months-long hunger strike to protest the extended confinement.

To feed him, U.S. officials forcibly removed him from his cell and inserted a tube into his nose running down to his stomach.

Kessler first ordered the release of the tapes last year, after a legal push from a coalition of media companies including The Associated Press, The New York Times, ABC and Bloomberg. But they have remained secret during an attempted appeal.

That appeal — which Kessler called “truly frivolous” — ultimately failed, landing the case back in Kessler’s court.

In the last nine months, however, the government “has made almost no progress in completing its redactions,” Kessler wrote on Friday, while hammering the Justice Department for dragging its feet.

The only thing consistent about the government’s position has been its constant plea for more time,” she wrote.

There are 32 tapes at issue in the case. In her order on Friday, Kessler told the government it needed to prepare eight of them to be released by the end of August, as the Justice Department had said it could do.  It will have one extra month to perform redactions on two separate compilations of material, the longer of which is one hour and 15 minutes.