(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.

A hunger strike at the camp at the U.S. Naval Base on Cuba began in February, has been joined by 100 of the inmates and has led to force-feedings to keep the weakest prisoners alive, sparking fresh outrage from rights groups over a prison opened under Republican President George W. Bush in 2002.

There were about 245 prisoners at Guantanamo when Obama, a Democrat, took office in 2009 and that has dropped to 166. But releases have slowed to a trickle under restrictions imposed by Congress, including a ban on any of them being brought to the United States. No prisoners have left Guantanamo this year.

Among current inmates, nine have been charged with crimes or convicted, 24 are considered eligible for possible prosecution, 47 are considered too dangerous for release but are not facing prosecution, and 86 have been cleared for transfer or release.

Obama has several options, although it could take a combination of several to clear the camp.

PUT SOMEBODY IN CHARGE

In January, the State Department reassigned the special envoy who had been in charge of trying to persuade countries to take Guantanamo inmates approved for release, Daniel Fried, and did not replace him. That was widely seen as a signal that Obama was giving up on closing the prison any time soon.

Fried arranged for the transfer out of scores of prisoners, but the departures slowed to a crawl after Congress imposed restrictions on them. White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Wednesday the administration was considering naming a senior diplomat to renew the focus on repatriation or transferring detainees.

Christopher Anders, the senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said such a “point person” was sorely needed as a first step to manage the administration’s effort – but that the person should be from the White House. “For the last three years at the White House, it’s been like no one home” on Guantanamo, he said.

USE EXCEPTIONS IN LAW TO LET PRISONERS GO

Obama has blamed Congress for interfering with his plan to close Guantanamo. Starting in 2011, Congress began restricting transfers out, saying the Defense Department first had to certify a number of things, including that the destination country was not a state sponsor of terrorism and would take action to make sure the individual would not threaten the United States.

Starting last year, Congress let some restrictions be waived if it was in the “national security interests” of the United States. Obama has not used the waiver or certification provisions.

“For the past two years, our committee has worked with our Senate counterparts to ensure that the certifications necessary to transfer detainees overseas are reasonable. The administration has never certified a single transfer,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard McKeon, a Republican, said this week.

The White House could have pushed harder for officials at the Pentagon to process certifications, said the ACLU’s Anders.

Wells Dixon, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York organization that has represented a number of Guantanamo prisoners, said Obama could order the Pentagon to begin certifying transfers out. But he also noted potential risks for the president. “There’s no political upside” if Obama certifies that a prisoner can leave and then that prisoner later attacks U.S. interests, Dixon said.

SEND PRISONERS BACK TO YEMEN

Congress has prohibited the transfer of detainees to countries with troubled security situations. But the United States could decide that new Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour has taken adequate measures against al Qaeda and made the country stable enough to resume repatriations to Yemen.

Repatriations were halted in 2010 after a man trained by militants in Yemen tried to blow up a U.S.-bound plane in 2009.

Of the 86 prisoners cleared for transfer or release, 56 are Yemenis. The Yemeni government says it wants them home and is building a facility to hold them for rehabilitation.

That option also has a potential danger – if a repatriated Yemeni eventually attacked the United States or its interests.

USE THE PERIODIC REVIEW BOARD PROCESS

Two years ago, Obama signed an executive order establishing extra review procedures for Guantanamo detainees to determine if continued detention were warranted, but the Periodic Review Boards have not been used.

This option looks fairly simple, since it involves carrying out the president’s own executive order. But there may have been no rush to establish more reviews boards since prisoners cleared by earlier review boards are still being held.

USE COURT RULINGS TO GET PEOPLE OUT

Dixon suggested the administration could use court rulings to help get prisoners released. Two members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority were resettled in El Salvador in April 2012, four years after a U.S. District Court in Washington ruled there were no grounds to hold them.

When prisoners challenge their detention in federal court, the government could decide not to contest the case, paving the way for a court order effecting the prisoner’s release, said Dixon. He said that could happen in any of the more than 100 detainee “habeus corpus” cases filed in federal court.

Obama could instruct the Justice Department to stop contesting those cases.

SEND PRISONERS OUT IN A PRISONER EXCHANGE

The United States tried to work out a deal to transfer five senior Taliban prisoners back to Afghanistan in return for U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Berghdal, who has been a prisoner of Taliban militants since 2009. The talks were suspended last year. But there will be pressure to return the Afghan prisoners when the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan ends in 2014.

This option would depend on how relations evolve with Afghanistan. But the Taliban prisoner release plan also met strong resistance among some members of Congress, especially Republicans, who might object if it resurfaces.

CALL ON CONGRESS

The legal restrictions on transfers will expire at the end of the fiscal year, on September 30, so Obama could urge Congress not to renew them – and make clear he considers that a political imperative.

If the restriction on transferring prisoners to the United States were allowed to expire, Obama could not only transfer Guantanamo prisoners to foreign countries, but could bring some back to the United States for trial in federal court.

But some Democrats as well as Republicans argue that bringing Guantanamo inmates to the United States is a security risk. Republican leaders in both chambers have made that a high-profile issue, and Republicans control the House of Representatives.

So the option could be bogged down in Washington politics.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell in Washington and Jane Sutton in Miami; Editing by Frances Kerry; Desking by Peter Cooney)

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.

He said 100 of the 166 detainees had joined a hunger strike that began in February to protest their continued detention at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in eastern Cuba. Twenty-one of those had lost enough weight that they were being fed liquid supplements via tubes inserted in their noses and down into their stomachs, House said.

Five were in the hospital for observation but did not have life-threatening conditions, he said.

On Thursday, the president of the American Medical Association sent a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reiterating its long-held position that it is a violation of medical ethics to force-feed mentally competent adults who refuse food and life-saving treatment.

The letter from the AMA’s president, Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, stopped short of asking Hagel to halt force-feedings at Guantanamo.

It urged the defense secretary “to address any situation in which a physician may be asked to violate the ethical standards of his or her profession.”

Hagel had just returned from a trip to the Middle East and it was unclear whether he had seen the letter, said Pentagon spokesman Army Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale.

Asked if military doctors had raised ethical concerns about being asked to perform force-feedings, Breasseale said, “I can tell you there have been no organized efforts, but I cannot speak for individual physicians.

“I can tell you that we will not allow detainees to harm themselves, and this includes attempts at suicide – including self-induced and peer-pressured starvation to death,” he said.

The military has said that some prisoners are pressuring others to join the hunger strike, and that some of those being tube-fed occasionally eat regular meals or voluntarily drink nutritional supplements when they are removed from their cell blocks and are alone with medical personnel.

“It has been the case all along,” House said. “Some will eat one meal, and are tube-fed during another, while drinking nutrient at another meal … Once they are approved (for tube-feeding) they are given the choice.”

Military officials say the feedings are done gently, using soft, flexible, lubricated tubes.

Attorney David Remes, who was notified by the military that his Yemeni client, Yasin Ismael, was being tube-fed, gave a starkly different description.

“It can be extremely painful. One of my clients said that it’s like having a razor blade go down through your nose and into your throat,” Remes said.

He said detainees who resist tube-feedings were forcibly removed from their cells by soldiers in riot gear. “It’s really like the way you would treat an animal,” he said.

All sides blame the hunger strike on detainee frustration over the Obama administration’s failure to carry out its promise to close the detention camp by 2010.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Lewnes in Washington; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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.

Courts generally view a prison hunger strike as a suicide attempt, and they have ruled wardens have authority to stop suicide attempts as part of their mandate to preserve order.

“If prisoners were allowed to kill themselves, prisons would find it even more difficult than they do to maintain discipline, because of the effect of a suicide in agitating the other prisoners,” Judge Richard Posner wrote for a Chicago-based appeals court in 2006 in a case involving a Wisconsin prison that punished a disobedient inmate by refusing him food.

As of Thursday, 94 of the 166 prisoners were on a hunger strike in Guantanamo, meaning they had refused at least nine consecutive meals. According to a military count, 17 had lost enough weight to be force-fed liquid meals through a nasogastric tube, and three were in the hospital for observation.

Army Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House, a spokesman for the detention camp, said none of the detainees in the hospital had a life-threatening condition.

Striking inmates began refusing to eat around early February, alleging rough handling of the Koran during searches for contraband and protesting their prolonged imprisonment. General John Kelly, head of U.S. military forces in Latin America, said assertions about the Koran were untrue.

OPPOSITION VOICED

A New York Times opinion piece last week by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni man detained at Guantanamo since 2002, launched debate over the forced feedings. Like others there, he was captured abroad on suspicion of supporting terrorism.

“I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way,” Moqbel said in the op-ed dictated through an interpreter to his lawyers.

As described by Guantanamo officials, a feeding tube is lubricated and inserted through the nose down to the stomach for the two hours it takes liquid food to pass through. In general, hunger strikers continue to drink water.

Human rights advocates and many doctors decry forced feeding of hunger strikers as a violation of personal liberty and medical ethics with risks of medical complications such as discomfort, bleeding, nausea and throat sores. The 65-year-old World Medical Association, made up of 100 national medical associations, has said it is unethical and never justified to force-feed a mentally competent adult.

Carlos Warner, a federal public defender who represents 11 Guantanamo detainees, including Kuwaiti hunger striker Faiz al Kandari, said detainee lawyers are split on the issue.

Some “have a clear position that the government should not be force-feeding,” and have unsuccessfully made their argument in federal court in Washington, D.C., Warner said. “Other lawyers are of the opinion that their clients should not die of hunger before we have a chance to free them.”

The Constitution Project, a U.S. legal group that includes Democrats and Republicans, said last week that forced feeding at Guantanamo “is a form of abuse and must end.”

George Annas, a Boston University professor of health law who opposes the forced feeding of hunger strikers on medical ethics grounds, said U.S. law is “very permissive” of the practice. He described the attitude of American prisons as: “Do we care about indignity? No, you’re a prisoner, we’ll treat you the way we want.”

BARRIERS TO LEGAL CHALLENGE

The U.S. military argues forced feeding is not only legal but also humane. A federal judge agreed in 2009, ruling against Mohammed Bawazir, a Yemeni national held at Guantanamo since 2002. Bawazir called forced feeding torture.

Bawazir cited pain he experienced and use of a chair with “six-point restraints” that kept in place his forehead, limbs and torso. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington, D.C., said officials acted out of a need to preserve life.

A further barrier to any suit is the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which bars U.S. courts from hearing cases about Guantanamo detainee treatment. Even if they were to hear a challenge to forced feeding, the overriding evidence is the courts would rule against the detainees.

International law, which prohibits the inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners, is not necessarily any help to Guantanamo detainees either.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled at least twice that forced feeding amounted to torture, in a 2005 case out of Ukraine and in a 2007 case out of Moldova, but it stopped short of barring the procedure. The court said it may be used to preserve the life of hunger strikers if shown to be medically necessary and not done for punitive reasons.

Other reports of non-U.S. countries using forced feeding are rare, although experts said there is a lack of data. The practice has been described in news reports in Bahrain, China and Greece during the past decade.

Ten British-held Irish Republican Army prisoners, including former IRA commander Bobby Sands, starved to death in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland during a 1981 hunger strike during which they sought recognition as political prisoners. It ended when the families of the remaining hunger strikers authorized doctors to begin life-saving intravenous feeding as soon as the prisoners lost consciousness.

One early U.S. case involved Mark David Chapman, convicted in the 1980 killing of former Beatle John Lennon. Chapman broke a 26-day fast in 1982 only under a New York court-ordered threat he would be force-fed. Now 57, he is serving a prison sentence of 20 years to life.

Chapman had said he wanted to draw attention to starving children, but the court ruled the state’s obligations to protect life and maintain order in its institutions outweighed Chapman’s rights to free expression and to privacy.

BALANCING TEST

Most federal and state courts have agreed.

In Rhode Island, for example, finding that prisons have a duty to protect inmates’ health, the State Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that “it would be in total disregard of this duty to stand idly by while a healthy adult decided to end his or her life by starvation just as it would if he or she decided to end his or her life by some more dramatic means such as hanging, slashing of wrists, or swallowing some type of poison.”

Courts in three states – California, Florida and Georgia – have been exceptions, restricting forced feeding on various grounds, Mara Silver wrote in a 2005 Stanford Law Review article on the constitutional question of self-starvation.

California was the most sweeping. Prison officials must demonstrate “a threat to institutional security or public safety,” not merely the conjecture of one, before denying an inmate the choice not to eat, the state’s high court ruled.

Those are the exceptions however.

“The federal courts analyze the issue by balancing the prisoner’s right to autonomy against the prison’s right to maintain order, and they nearly always find that force-feeding is constitutional,” said Margo Schlanger, a University of Michigan law professor with expertise in prisons.

(Editing by Howard Goller and Claudia Parsons)

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.

Six were hospitalized for observation, said Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House, a spokesman for the detention operation at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in southeastern Cuba.

Asked if there were enough doctors and nurses to keep up with the twice-daily tube-feedings, House said, “We currently have enough medical personnel on site, and have identified additional medical personnel, should they become necessary in the future.”

Hunger strikes have occurred at Guantanamo since shortly after the United States began detaining suspected al Qaeda and Taliban captives there in January 2002.

The current hunger strike began in early February, after guards seized photos and other belongings during a cell search. Prisoners said the guards had also mistreated their Korans during the search, which the U.S. military denies.

The military has declined to say what prompted the cell searches but similar searches have been conducted in the past.

Though the cell search was the immediate trigger, military officials and lawyers for the prisoners have said the protest generally reflects frustration with the failure to resolve the prisoners’ fate. Most have been held for more than a decade without charge or trial and Congress has blocked Obama administration efforts to close the camp.

“It’s escalated because the men are desperate and they’ve hit a breaking point,” said Carlos Warner, a federal public defender from Ohio who is part of a team representing 11 Guantanamo prisoners.

“Really what is behind all this is the president abandoned his promise to close Guantanamo. The men know that, they’re desperate.”

Forty-three prisoners had joined the hunger strike by April 13, when guards in riot gear swept through a communal prison and forced the detainees into one-man cells where they could be better monitored. Camp officials said the detainees had covered the security cameras and windows, blocking guards’ view.

The number refusing meals has grown steadily since then, and two prisoners tried to kill themselves by making nooses with their clothing, House said.

Lawyers for the prisoners have said the hunger strike is more widespread than the military acknowledges, with between 100 and 130 detainees taking part.

More than half of Guantanamo’s prisoners have been cleared for release but Congress has put stringent restrictions on transfers. About two-thirds of those cleared for release are Yemenis and the Obama administration has halted repatriations to their homeland because of instability there.

(Reporting by Jane Sutton; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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.

The judge overseeing the case postponed the hearing until June 17 at the request of defense lawyers who said three to four weeks’ worth of their confidential work files had disappeared from Pentagon computer systems.

Prosecutors opposed the delay, but the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, said a postponement was “in the interest of justice” under the circumstances.

A near-catastrophic server failure caused both defense lawyers and prosecutors to lose documents, said Army Colonel Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman.

Backup servers failed and the problem was further complicated because lawyers use one secure computer system in their Washington-area offices and another in their offices at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, he said.

The data disappeared as technicians tried to set up a means of automatically saving new documents and updates on both systems.

Pohl had already delayed pretrial hearings in another Guantanamo case for the same reason. Hearings had been scheduled this week in the case against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who is charged with masterminding a bomb attack that killed 17 sailors aboard the USS Cole in 2000, but were postponed to June 11.

Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, an attorney who represents Saudi defendant Mustafa al Hawsawi in the 9/11 case, said some files had been restored but that 7 gigabytes of data – about three to four weeks worth of work – had been irretrievably lost since mid-February.

“None of the problems have been fixed,” Ruiz said. “It creates big hurdles.”

He said the lawyers had older versions of some documents but that more recent updates had disappeared. “We can’t really tell if we have the accurate one until we go through it all,” he said.

(Reporting by Jane Sutton; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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.”

“It is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture,” the 11-member task force, assembled by the nonpartisan Constitution Project think tank, said in their 577-page report.

The scathing critique of methods used under the Republican administration of former President George W. Bush also sharpened the focus on the plight of inmates at Guantanamo, which Bush opened and his Democratic successor has failed to close.

Obama banned abusive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding when he took office in early 2009, but the widely condemned military prison at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba has remained an object of condemnation by human rights advocates.

A clash between guards and prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay camp last weekend and the release of harrowing accounts by inmates about force-feeding of hunger strikers threw a harsh spotlight on the predicament of the inmates, many held without charge or trial for more than decade.

The task force called the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo “abhorrent and intolerable” and called for it to be closed by the end of 2014 when NATO’s combat mission in Afghanistan is due to end and most U.S. troops will leave.

By then, the 166 Guantanamo prisoners should be tried in civilian or military courts, repatriated or transferred to countries that would not torture them, or moved to U.S. jails, the task force’s majority recommended.

But the 2014 goal will be hard to achieve because of legal, legislative and political obstacles Obama faces. While the White House says he remains committed to shutting Guantanamo, he has offered no new path to doing so in his second term.

The release of the encyclopedic report comes in the midst of the latest round of allegations of abuse at Guantanamo – which has become an enduring symbol of widely criticized Bush-era counterterrorism practices – where military officials say 43 prisoners are currently on a hunger strike.

“TRUTH COMMISSION”

Members of the task force described themselves as the closest thing to a “truth commission” since Obama decided early in his presidency against convening a national commission to investigate post-9/11 practices.

The panel, which included leading politicians from both parties, two U.S. retired generals and legal and ethics scholars, spent two years examining the U.S. treatment of suspected militants detained after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Panel members interviewed former Clinton, Bush and Obama administration officials, military officers and former prisoners, and the investigation looked at U.S. practices at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan and Iraq and at the CIA’s former secret prisons overseas.

The task force was chaired by Asa Hutchinson, a Republican former congressman and undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration, and James Jones, a Democratic former congressman who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

In a finding the panel said was its most notable and was reached “without reservation,” the report said, “Torture occurred in many instances and across a wide range of theatres.”

But the panel concluded there was “no firm or persuasive evidence” that the use of such techniques yielded “significant information of value.”

“The nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture,” the report said, though it did not name names.

The task force, while concluding that U.S. and international laws were violated, did not recommend legal action against any of those involved but it did press for tighter rules to prevent a recurrence of torture.

“We as a nation have to get this right,” Hutchinson told a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

The panel urged the U.S. government to release as much classified information as possible to help understand what went wrong and cope better with the next crisis.

“Publicly acknowledging this grave error, however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad,” the report said.

The sweeping report catalogued abusive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and chaining prisoners in painful positions.

The task force also concluded that force-feeding hunger striking detainees is a form of abuse and should end. “But at the same time the United States has a legitimate interest in preventing detainees from starving to death,” the panel said.

The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross last week expressed opposition to the force-feeding of prisoners and said he urged Obama to do more to resolve the “untenable” legal plight of inmates held there.

The hunger strike began in February to protest the seizure of personal items from detainees’ cells. About a dozen are being force-fed liquid meals through tubes.

Guards swept through communal cell blocks at the camp on Saturday and moved the prisoners into one-man cells.

“The action was taken to ensure the health and safety of the detainees not to ‘break’ the hunger strike,” said Navy Captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention centre.

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Cynthia Osterman)

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.

By then, the 166 Guantanamo prisoners should be tried in civilian or military courts, repatriated or transferred to countries that would not torture them, or moved to U.S. jails, the task force’s majority recommended.

The release of the report comes in the midst of the latest round of allegations of abuse at the detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba where military officials say 43 prisoners are currently on a hunger strike.

The Constitution Project is a bipartisan organization of policymakers, lawyers and judges, military officials and diplomats. Its 11-member task force spent two years examining the U.S. treatment of suspected militants detained after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Panel members interviewed former Clinton, Bush and Obama administration officials, military officers, and former prisoners, as well as searching myriad public documents.

“The caveat is we did not have access to classified information. In terms of a review of the documents that are in the public domain, I don’t think anybody has ever put together anything as comprehensive,” said Larry Akey, spokesman for The Constitution Project.

The task force was chaired by Asa Hutchinson, a Republican former congressman and undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration, and James Jones, a Democratic former congressman who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

The task force concluded that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” using interrogation methods that violated U.S. and international laws.

It urged the U.S. government to release as much classified information as possible in order to help understand what went wrong and how to cope better with the next crisis.

“Publicly acknowledging this grave error, however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad,” the 577-page report said.

The encyclopedic report catalogued abusive interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and chaining prisoners in painful positions.

The task force also concluded that force-feeding hunger striking detainees is a form of abuse and should end. “But at the same time the United States has a legitimate interest in preventing detainees from starving to death,” the panel said.

The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross last week expressed opposition to the force-feeding of prisoners and said he urged Obama to do more to resolve the “untenable” legal plight of inmates held there.

Many of the detainees have been held for more than a decade without charge or trial.

The hunger strike began in February to protest the seizure of personal items from detainees’ cells. About a dozen are being force-fed liquid meals through tubes.

Guards swept through communal cell blocks at the camp on Saturday and moved the prisoners into one-man cells in an attempt to end the hunger strike.

Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons and in response, guards fired four capsules of small rubber pellets, the military said.

(Editing by David Adams and Jim Loney)

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.

Many prisoners captured in counterterrorism operations abroad after the September 11, 2001 attacks have been held in legal limbo – without charge or trial – for over a decade and some despair of ever leaving.

“Instead of a swift execution, we are being subjected to a cruel, slow and cold-blooded death,” Musa’ab al Madhwani, a Yemeni hunger striker wrote in a recent court affidavit dictated to his defense lawyer.

“Gitmo is killing me” was the headline of op-ed published on Monday in the New York Times and written by another Yemeni man who described in dramatic detail being strapped down and force-fed intravenously.

The hunger strike to protest against indefinite detentions escalated into violence between guards and prisoners during a weekend raid aimed at halting it.

Guards swept through communal cells and forcibly moved prisoners into individual cells, firing off four rounds of small, rubber pellets against those who resisted or fought back with makeshift weapons.

“We’ve been monitoring of course the situation at Guantanamo closely,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters when asked about the weekend raid. He said the prisoners were forcibly moved to “ensure their health and security.”

Carney said Obama, who originally promised to close the prison within a year of taking office in 2009, remained committed to shutting it, but the president has offered no new path to doing so in his second term.

“Obstacles have been raised by Congress and that remains a reality,” he said.

Obama has approved use of military tribunals to try some of the most dangerous suspects. But only nine of the current prisoners have been charged or convicted of crimes, according to military records.

Congress has made it difficult to repatriate others. The United States will not send some back to their homelands because of instability or concerns over mistreatment, and most countries are reluctant to accept them for resettlement when the United States itself will not take any.

Some legal experts say Obama could take action to close Guantanamo using his executive powers. If he were to do so, he would face serious opposition from both sides of the political aisle.

FORCE FEEDING

The prisoners’ accounts of their treatment and those of their captors have always been at odds. Prisoners and their lawyers say more than 100 men are taking part in the hunger strike, which began two months ago.

But the military counts only 43 prisoners as being on a hunger strike. It says about a dozen have lost enough weight that they are being force-fed via tubes inserted in their noses and down into their stomachs – a method that human rights advocates strongly oppose as a violation of personal dignity.

Military doctors say the process is done gently, that the feeding tubes are lubricated before insertion – one said he used olive oil – and that the prisoners can choose which flavor of Ensure liquid meals they want.

The military has acknowledged that prisoners are sometimes strapped into restraint chairs, with their head and limbs immobilized to keep them from removing the tubes.

Yemeni hunger striker, Samir Najal al Hasan Moqbel, gave a harrowing account of his force-feeding on Monday in the New York Times.

Moqbel said he had lost about 30 pounds since joining the hunger strike on February 10. He said that in March, the Extreme Reaction Force, Guantanamo’s version of a SWAT team in riot gear, burst into his cell, took him to the camp hospital and tied his hands and feet to the bed.

“They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.”

“As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t,” Moqbel said in a description dictated to his lawyer. “There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.”

Madhwani said he had lost 30 pounds since joining the hunger strike and had to use a rubber band to keep his pants from falling down. He said guards had tried to break the hunger strike by denying prisoners access to drinkable water, and by cranking up the air conditioning so high they shivered.

Navy Captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for the detention camp, called those allegations “absolutely false.”

Moqbel and Madhwani have both been held at Guantanamo for more than 11 years but said they had no affiliation with al Qaeda and had done nothing wrong. They were sent to Guantanamo from Afghanistan and surrounding nations where they were swept up in counter-terrorism operations.

Moqbel said the U.S. military had initially accused him of being a guard for Osama bin Laden but that, “They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.”

Eighty-six prisoners have been cleared for release but are among the 166 men still held at Guantanamo. Most are Yemenis and the United States halted repatriations to that country in 2009 after a Yemeni-trained al Qaeda operative tried to set off an underwear bomb aboard a U.S.-bound plane.

“I believe that President Obama must be unaware of the unbelievably inhumane conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison, for otherwise he would surely do something to stop this torture,” Madhwani said.

The situation at Guantanamo, which was opened by Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, to hold foreign terrorism suspects after the September 11, 2001, attacks, is expected to be a focus of criticism in a independent report to be issued on Tuesday by a bipartisan task force that has investigated U.S. detention practices.

(Additional reporting by David Ingram; editing by Jackie Frank)

“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.

He said the action was taken because detainees had covered windows and surveillance cameras to block the guards’ view into the cellblocks.

“Round-the-clock monitoring is necessary to ensure security, order, and safety as detainees continued a prolonged hunger strike by refusing regular camp-provided meals,” Durand said.

He said medical personnel had examined each detainee afterward.

The detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba holds 166 men, most of them captured more than a decade ago in counter-terrorism operations.

Saturday’s early-morning sweep took place in Camp 6, a medium-security building where 80 to 100 detainees lived in cells that open into communal bays where they could eat, pray and watch television together. As part of the hunger strike, prisoners had been refusing to let food carts enter some of the bays.

Earlier in the week, Durand said 43 prisoners were taking part in a hunger strike, including 11 who were being force-fed liquid nutrients through tubes inserted into their noses and down to their stomachs.

The hunger strike began in February to protest the seizure of personal items from detainees’ cells. Some prisoners told their lawyers that their Korans had been mistreated during the cell searches, which the U.S. military denied.

Attorneys, military officials and human rights monitors have all said the hunger strike was partly an expression of frustration over the prisoners’ unresolved fate.

About half of them have been cleared for release or transfer, but Congress has made it increasingly difficult to move prisoners out of Guantanamo and President Barack Obama has failed to implement his 2009 order to shut down the detention camp.

(Reporting by Jane Sutton; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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.

They want all the hearings in both death penalty cases halted until the issues have been satisfactorily addressed.

A weeklong hearing was scheduled to start on Monday in the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who is charged with masterminding an attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors aboard the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000.

That has been pushed back to June 11, the judge overseeing the war crimes court at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base said in an order on Thursday.

Defense lawyers said they also would ask the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, to delay a week of pretrial hearings set to begin on April 22 for five prisoners charged with plotting the September 11 hijacked plane attacks.

Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, who represents 9/11 defendant Mustafa al Hawsawi, said “three to four weeks’ worth of work is gone, vanished.”

He said what appeared to be a computer folder of prosecution files had turned up on the defense lawyers’ system, though none of them had opened the files.

The chief defense counsel for the tribunals, Colonel Karen Mayberry, ordered military and civilian defense lawyers on Wednesday night to stop using their government computers for sensitive information or drafts of their work.

“I’ll be filing a hand-written motion very shortly to ask for an abatement of the proceedings,” in the 9/11 case, said defense attorney James Connell, who represents defendant Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

In another case, system administrators were searching files at prosecutors’ request and were able to access more than 500,000 defense files, including confidential attorney-client communications, the lawyers said.

That incident involved an appeal on behalf of Ibrahim al Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who had finished his sentence at Guantanamo and gone home, they said.

Defense lawyers said their files began disappearing after a February hearing during which intelligence agents outside the courtroom cut the closed-circuit feed that was broadcasting the proceedings to spectators and journalists. The judge ordered technicians to dismantle the system that allowed them to do that.

During that hearing, the Guantanamo detention camp’s legal advisor also disclosed that what appeared to be smoke alarms in the rooms where defense lawyers met with their clients were actually microphones. He said private attorney-clients conversations had not been monitored, a claim met with skepticism by defense lawyers.

Human Rights First, a longtime critic of the Guantanamo tribunals, called the latest disclosures “absolutely outrageous.”

“This is just further evidence that the military commission system is a sham and that all terrorism trials should be held in real U.S. federal courts on U.S. soil, where the rules are clear, defendants’ rights are respected and the verdicts will have credibility,” said Daphne Eviatar, who has monitored the tribunals for the rights group.

(Reporting by Jane Sutton; Editing by David Adams and Vicki Allen)