"In an attempt to avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of detainees the Guantánamo Bay..."

“

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.

[…]

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)

”

- Dominic Dromgoole & Clive Stafford Smith in the London Review of Books. There is something utterly absurd about this, beyond the absurd grotesqueness of Guantanamo itself.