Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Terrorism/Guantanamo weigh-ins

The DoD has published some height and weight records.

General impressions

Emaciation?

Some captives' weight records showed they arrived at the camp at apparently dangerous low weights. Many others arrived at normal weight, or slightly overweight. A few captives remained at a low weight, or dangerously underweight, for the duration of their stay. Most captives who were at low weight on arrival, gained weight, at remained at normal or above normal weight for their height.

Amputations

Some captives are known to have had limbs amputated, either through press reports, or because or it was mentioned during their CSR Tribunal or review board hearings. I read that as many as sixty or more captives were amputees. Pre-existing amputations could explain a with an otherwise apparently dangerously low arrival weight. An amputation due to complications with a captive's wounds could explain an otherwise dangerously precipitous weight loss.

Wild weight fluctuations

Some captives weight fluctuations give strong indications that medical staff sometimes recorded captive's weights in other captive's files. Other times the fluctuation seems more likely to be a reflection of a medical problem, ination, or hunger strike.

One captive was already overweight when he arrived, weighing well over 200 pounds. His record showed what would have been a steady increase of about four pounds a month, until his weight leveled off at almost twice his arrival weight -- except that there were three periods of wild fluctuation. The hardest fluctuation to believe was a loss of almost three hundred pounds, over just a few days, followed by twenty days of weigh-ins at a third of his earlier weight. He then shows a weight gain of three hundred pounds over the course of a single day.

Indications of the 2005 hunger strike

The largest and most widespread hunger strike started in May or June 2005. Some captives records show that, as their weight dropped, they started to be weighed in more frequently, ever week, or every day, or, sometimes, multiple times per day. Other captives stopped having their weights recorded at all, for the period July through December 2005.

Alarmingly, when captives had multiple weigh-ins recorded on a single day, the record showed that their weights could vary by ten pounds or more. The simplest explanation for this is that medical technicians topped them up with five litres of liquid nutrient between the two weigh-ins.

Missing records

With the exception of the 14 "high value detainees", less than half a dozen captives had weigh-in after December 2006.

Some captives had no weigh-ins between their initial weigh-ins and January 2004.

Several dozen captives' records do not list a height, an arrival processing date or an arrival weight.

Careless errors

Some weighs-ins only give the year and month of the weigh-in. Others give the day of the month as well. Personally I suspect that many of the weigh-ins recorded on the first, or fifteenth of a month that day of the month is the result of an interpolation when the height and weight reports were compiled.

refused weights

Most captives records have a list of one or more dates when they refused to be weighed. Even including these dates, there are months when there is no record that medical staff weighed them. More alarmingly, even when a month was listed as a month when they refused to be weighed, they sometimes had weights recorded anyhow

The height and weight reports seem to be printouts from a simple spreadsheet. And, as is typical of stupid spreadsheets, when the list of refused weights got too long it was folded not onto the next line, but onto the next page.