At Guantanamo Prison, Hunger Strikes Subside for Now

Only a dozen prisoners remain on hunger strike at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, eight months after the start of their protest fast.

While some detainees may well one day refuse to take food again, for now most have chosen to end their hunger strike, attorneys for the inmates said.

This is true even of one of the most doggedly committed strikers, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident at Guantanamo and one those protesting invasive searches of prisoners and their Korans.

Aamer's lawyer Clive Stafford Smith says his client is a self-styled "professional hunger striker," known for regular protests at the U.S. detention center since his arrival in 2002.

The Saudi, who is married to a Briton and a father of four, lost half his body weight in a 2005 protest, but he is no longer among the 14 strikers who remain, all being force-fed, according to official data.

"He's in physical bad shape, and emotionally, psychologically, he's in the worst shape I've seen him," Stafford Smith told Agence France Presse just after meeting with his client at the war-on-terror facility.

"Just because you get hope and your hope gets crushed. Fifty-one percent have been cleared for release since 2007 but they can't get home, that's outrageous," he added.

"They suffered a lot of it. It was inevitably going to come to an end, it evidently wasn't going to last forever because it's the nature of this thing," Stafford Smith said.

The facility which U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to shut down years back, still holds 164 detainees.

Authorities have called the hunger strike unprecedented in its length and scope.

At its height, 106 detainees had joined in, and as many as 46 were being force-fed with intubation to protest the legal limbo in which detainees are held on a U.S. naval base on the southeastern tip of Cuba.

"From over a hundred , back in the summer, it continuously went down," Commander John Filostrat, the base's spokesman, told AFP.

"A few core detainees that are not eating on a regular basis, about a dozen and, consistent with our policy to keep detainees safe, we are administrating some food enterally," he said, referring to intubation.

"Seven months is a long time to be on hunger strike," said David Remes a lawyer who still has two clients who are being force-fed.

"The men are not going to just go back to life as usual, things are never going be the same," Remes said.

"The (authorities) may have broken the hunger strike but they have not broken the men's spirit."

The jail was opened at Guantanamo to house prisoners seized by U.S. forces in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Even as they press for their freedom, the men continue to protest against their forcefeeding. Aamer and two others have brought their case to a Washington court.

One of the accused in the 9/11 attacks, Mustafa al-Hussawi, "eats very little" but is not counted with the strikers, his lawyer Walter Ruiz told the military court in Guantanamo.

"Hopefully, there will not be another provocation that was the immediate cause of this hunger strike (...) in a context of this underlying frustration," Remes said.

"Everyone had lost interest in Guantanamo until the hunger strike. The hunger strike put Guantanamo back on the map, back on the national agenda," Remes said.

In May, three months into the strike, Obama reiterated his campaign promise to work to close the prison down.

He lifted a moratorium on Yemenis being repatriated and in October appointed a senior official to work on closing the detention center.

Transfers of detainees have proceeded slowly under the Obama administration, resuming in August with two Algerians going home.

But another 84 men -- including 56 Yemenis -- have been cleared to return home by U.S. military authorities, but still remain in limbo. Others are waiting for their status to be reviewed.

Remes maintains the hunger striking seems "to have jump-started the process of transfers."

But the slow pace of transfer could lead to another hunger strike, he warned.

"That's a success," he said. "Now people paid attention to it again, but it doesn't matter if there's no result... if they're ignored, they'll have to do it again."

"These men won't be satisfied with anything short of being transferred -- no half measures for them," he said.