U.S. Ups Medical Staff amid Guantanamo Hunger Strike

Extra medical staff have been sent to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba amid a hunger strike that has spread to nearly two-thirds of the detainees, authorities said Monday.

Some 40 U.S. Navy medical personnel, including nurses and specialists, arrived over the weekend at the U.S. base in Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House, a military spokesman at Guantanamo said.

"The influx of personnel was planned several weeks ago as increasing numbers of detainees chose to protest their detention," he said.

House said 100 of the 166 inmates at Guantanamo are striking, a number that hasn't changed since Saturday.

Of those, 21 are approved for feeding through nasal tubes, the spokesman said, one more than on Saturday.

Five are hospitalized, he added in the statement, without specifying whether any were in life-threatening condition.

However, he told Agence France Presse that none were "close to death," officially denying allegations by British Guantanamo expert Andy Worthington, who had said Monday on his blog that he'd received a report from a "credible source inside Guantanamo" that "four prisoners are close to death as a result of the prison-wide hunger strike."

One of those inmates, Worthington said, was Khiali Gul, one of 86 prisoners cleared for release, yet jailed indefinitely.

The rapidly growing protest movement began on February 6, when inmates claimed prison officials searched Korans in a way they considered blasphemous, according to their lawyers. Officials have denied any mishandling of Islam's holy book.

But the strike has now turned into a larger protest by prisoners against their indefinite incarceration without charge or trial over the past 11 years.

House said recently that while detainees have a right to protest, "it is our mission to provide safe, secure and a humane environment, and we will not allow our detainees to starve themselves to death."

Friday, the White House said it continues to closely monitor the hunger strikers and that President Barack Obama remained "committed to closing" Guantanamo.

"A fundamental obstacle to closing this detention facility ... remains in Congress," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Lawyers for the detainees have said around 130 inmates are observing the hunger strike, more than officially acknowledged.