Army Col. Greg Julian told the Miami Herald the feeding would continue following the policy of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "We will not let the detainees die," he said. The problem is, the detainees aren't in prison. And that is why beyond respecting the holy month by waiting till nightfall to ram a tube filled with nutritious goo into their bodies, a tougher legal question remains. The government can't argue it must keep the men alive in order to punish them. All four men were cleared for release in 2010. They are Ahmed Belbacha and Nabil Hadjarab — both from Algeria — Abu Wa'el Dhiab of Syria, and Shaker Aamer, a Saudi with family in Great Britain.

"Their detention and their force-feeding has nothing to do with military necessity," the men's lawyers say in the court filings. "Their detention is solely a function of a political stalemate between the president and the Congress.... There cannot be a legitimate penological interest in force-feeding petitioners to prolong their indefinite detention... It facilitates the violation of a fundamental human right. The very notion of it is grotesque."

Eighty-six men were cleared for release three years ago, but 56 of them couldn't leave, because they were from Yemen. The U.S. had barred the detainees from being sent back there until Obama said he'd end that ban in May (several bureaucratic hurdles remain). The men remain in the camp because no one in Congress or the Obama administration wants to be blamed if they're released and inexplicably take up arms against the nation that's treated them so well for so many years.

(Above, a shackled detainee reads during his "Life Skills" class in 2010.)

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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