Hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners who are force-fed a liquid nutritional supplement undergo a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires them to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours, according to documentation obtained by Al Jazeera. The prisoners remain this way, with a 61cm - or longer - tube snaked through their nostril until a chest X-ray, or a test dose of water, confirms it has reached their stomach.

At the end of the feeding, the prisoner is removed from the restraint chair and placed into a "dry cell" with no running water. A guard then observes the detainee for 45-60 minutes "for any indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting". If the prisoner vomits he is returned to the restraint chair.

Now he's an excerpt from an article about the forced feeding of imprisoned suffragettes in Great Britain one hundred years ago:

The forcible feeding of women was a brutal and life-threatening procedure conducted against the wishes of the "patient". The hunger striker was held down on a bed by wardresses or tied to a chair which they tipped back. Then a rubber tube was either forced up the nose or down the throat and into the stomach. The latter method was particularly painful because a steel gap was pushed into the mouth and screwed open, as wide as possible. Tissue in the nose and throat was nearly always damaged, while sometimes the tube was accidentally inserted into the windpipe, causing food to enter the lungs and endangering life. This invasion of the body, accompanied by overpowering physical force, suffering and humiliation made many women feel they had been raped, with the words "violation" or "outrage" being commonly used.

Forcible feeding became particularly cruel and dangerous after the notorious Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 which allowed a hunger striking suffragette who became ill to be released into the community, in order to regain her health, only to be re-arrested when she was well enough to complete her sentence. The process often extended the period of the sentence. Many women, such as Grace Roe and Kitty Marion, were force fed more than 200 times. Some wrote accounts of their horrendous experiences for the WSPU organ the Suffragette or the few sympathetic newspapers that would print their story. That an all-male "Liberal" government inflicted such torture upon women who were excluded from the parliamentary process added to the sense of revulsion that many women and some members of the public felt. It was not until the outbreak of the first world war in August 1914 that the procedure stopped when the WSPU leadership called a temporary suspension to all militancy and the government granted an amnesty to all suffrage prisoners.

You could almost transpose the material from these articles and they'd deliver the same message.

"I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture."

"Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction."

- President Obama