Rapper Yasiin Bey Undergoes Painful Force Feeding To Draw Attention To Guantanamo

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Brooklyn-born rapper and actor Yasiin Bey – formerly known as Mos Def – has been drawing attention to a prisoners' hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay with a graphic video in which he volunteers to be force-fed as the prisoners are.

Bey said in the video that he is demonstrating the procedure for which the prisoners on the hunger strike are being force-fed.

Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, Bey is handcuffed and shackled before being strapped into a chair with a leather belt around his head.

Warning: Disturbing Imagery:

He is seen wincing, groaning and coughing painfully as a feeding tube is placed into his nose. As would-be prison orderlies remove the tube and prepare it for a second use, Bey cries, "Please, please, please, please, please don't! Don't!" before he screams as the orderlies hold him down and restrain him around the neck.

The video ends with Bey breaking down in tears, after he says he can't handle any more.

To the accompaniment of Bey's sobs, a graphic says the procedure is carried out twice a day and usually takes two hours to complete.

Afterward, he explains his reactions were real.

"When the tube went in, the first part of it is not that bad. But then you get this burning. I got this burning. And then it just gets to be really unbearable; it's like something is going into my brain and it starts to reach the back of my throat, and I really couldn't take it," he said.

The video, published by the London-based organization Reprieve, is intended to rally support for prisoners who are on hunger strikes, and asked supporters to take on their own hunger strikes in support of the prisoners.

More than 100 prisoners have been on a hunger strike since February to protest their detention at the prison, Reprieve claimed.

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