It’s only been a little over a month since the Pentagon was denying that the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay was even a thing, insisting only a couple of people were refusing to eat and that the rest were “cheating.”
Yet with several revisions upward every week and a military offensive against the prison’s common areas to force detainees into solitary confinement, the official figure is getting closer to what lawyers and human rights groups have been saying all along.
The Pentagon is now conceding to 92 hunger strikers out of the 166 detainees held in the prison, and a large number of them are people who were already exonerated, cleared for release, in some cases years ago, with no actual release in sight.
The military had long accused strikers of “cheating” and sneaking snacks when no one was looking. With everybody in solitary cells with no snacks at hand, this pretense is no longer something the spokesmen could maintain, and they are roughly in line with the numbers lawyers where reporting months ago, in the ballpark of 100 hunger strikers, with many in failing health since the strike has been going on since early February.