By Susan Cornwell and Jane Sutton

(Reuters) – With his renewed vow to close the detention camp for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, President Barack Obama has effectively assigned himself a list of possible ways to take the prison’s population down from 166 to zero.

Some would be more easily achieved than others.

In pledging to look again at an unfulfilled promise dating back to his first election campaign and early days in office in 2009, Obama made plain on Tuesday that it was untenable to keep the 11-year-old camp open.

MIAMI (Reuters) – The Navy sent extra medical personnel to the Guantanamo detention camp because of a growing hunger strike, and the American Medical Association questioned whether doctors were being asked to violate their ethics by force-feeding prisoners.

The reinforcements arrived at the weekend and included about 40 nurses, specialists and hospital corpsmen, who are trained to provide basic medical care, Army Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House, a spokesman for the detention camp said, said on Monday.

WASHINGTON/MIAMI (Reuters) – As detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, press ahead with a widening hunger strike nearly three months old, President Barack Obama has come under increasing criticism for his policy of force-feeding them.

But U.S. law is on his side, an analysis of court rulings shows.

Most U.S. judges who have examined forced feeding in prisons have concluded that the measure may violate the rights of inmates to control their own bodies and to privacy – rights rooted in the U.S. Constitution and in common law. But they have found that the needs of operating a prison are more important.

MIAMI (Reuters) – More than half of the men held at the Guantanamo detention camp have joined an escalating hunger strike to protest their open-ended detention, a camp spokesman said on Monday.

The U.S. military counted 84 of the 166 prisoners as hunger strikers and was force-feeding 16 of them liquid meals through tubes inserted in their noses and down into their stomachs.

MIAMI (Reuters) – Guantanamo war crimes prosecutions of five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked planes attacks will be delayed by two months because of lost files caused by Pentagon computer problems, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday.

A weeklong pretrial hearing had been set to begin on Monday in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and four alleged co-conspirators.

WASHINGTON/MIAMI (Reuters) – An independent task force issued a damning review of Bush-era interrogation practices on Tuesday, saying the highest U.S. officials bore ultimate responsibility for the “indisputable” use of torture, and it urged President Barack Obama to close the Guantanamo detention camp by the end of 2014.

In one of the most comprehensive studies of U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects, the panel concluded that never before had there been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

MIAMI (Reuters) – The indefinite detention of prisoners at the Guantanamo detention camp is “abhorrent and intolerable” and should end by the time U.S. troops leave Afghanistan next year, an independent U.S. task force said in a report released on Tuesday.

The Constitution Project’s task force, which included two retired U.S. generals, urged President Barack Obama to declare the war over when U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

MIAMI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A violent weekend clash between guards and prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the release of harrowing accounts by inmates of force-feeding of hunger strikers brought President Barack Obama’s failure to close the camp under close scrutiny on Monday.

The White House defended a raid carried out by guards on Saturday that highlighted weeks of mounting tensions with prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, but pointed the finger at Congress for keeping Obama from fulfilling his promise to shut the facility.

MIAMI (Reuters) – Guards swept through communal cellblocks at the Guantanamo detention camp on Saturday and moved the prisoners into one-man cells in an attempt to end a hunger strike that began in February, a U.S. military spokesman said.

“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired. There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees,” Navy Captain Robert Durand said in a news release.

MIAMI (Reuters) – Pretrial hearings in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals have been delayed to address the mysterious disappearance of defense legal documents from Pentagon computers, military officials said on Thursday.

The defense lawyers said their confidential work documents began vanishing from Pentagon computers in February and that there was evidence their internal emails and internet searches had been monitored by third parties.