A “LINGERING PROBLEM THAT IS NOT
GOING TO GET BETTER, IT’S GOING TO
GET WORSE. IT’S GOING TO FESTER.”
through,” Mohammed al-Zarnouqi,
a citizen of Yemen who said he had
been on hunger strike since Jan. 19,
wrote in a March 25 letter to his
legal team.
“You can only imagine how a
hunger striker with his weak body
is treated in a harsh way,” he wrote.
He said that when he was taken to
the medical clinic in March, guards
threw him to the concrete floor,
causing him to hit his head. “Six to
seven soldiers press my back, bend
my legs in the knee area and tie my
hands with shackles,” he wrote.
“Really, now it is just pain everywhere. I don’t want to die in
Guantánamo,” Younous Chekkouri,
a detainee from Morocco, told his
lawyer in early April. He said he
had lost 30 pounds.
According to the detainees, the
hunger strike began as a protest
against the way military personnel
were handling prisoner Qurans. The
military disputes the allegations.
Regardless of why the hunger strike
started, however, there’s general
consensus about why it continues.
“The problem is the indefinite
detention,” said Carlos Warner, a
federal public defender representing several Guantanamo detainees.
Eleven years after the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo,
166 remain, with no end in sight.
More than half — 86 — have been
cleared for transfer to other countries, but the process has been
snarled by a mix of congressionally imposed restrictions and executive branch inaction.
Even if President Barack Obama
did have the power to close Guantanamo unilaterally, doing so would
not necessarily mean that the detainees would be set free in other
countries. William Lietzau, the top
detainee policy official at the Pentagon, told The New York Times
recently that he doesn’t believe the
number of detainees being held
without charges would “change
radically,” even if legislative restrictions were removed.
But the lack of progress, especially given Obama’s promise
to close Guantanamo, has worn
on the detainees. They were reportedly particularly upset after
Obama failed to mention Guan-