But the relative calm on display to visiting reporters last week was deceiving. Days earlier, guards had raided Camp Six and locked down protesting prisoners who had blocked security cameras, forbidding them to congregate in a communal area. A hunger strike is now in its third month, with 93 prisoners considered to be participating — more than half the inmates and twice the number before the raid.
“They are not done yet, and they will not be done until there is more than one death,” said a Muslim adviser to the military, identified as “Zak” for security reasons, who fears there may be suicides. Only one thing, he predicted, will satisfy the detainees: if someone is allowed to leave.
The spark for the protest is disputed. Detainees, through their lawyers, say that when guards conducted a search of their cells on Feb. 6, they handled their Korans in a disrespectful way. Prison officials dispute that.
But both military officials and lawyers for the detainees agree about the underlying cause of the turmoil: a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home.
While President Obama made closing the prison a top priority when he entered the White House, he put that effort on the back burner in the face of Congressional opposition to his plan to move the detainees to a Supermax facility inside the United States.
The prisoners “had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed,” Gen. John F. Kelly, who oversees the prison as head of the United States Southern Command, recently told Congress. “They were devastated when the president backed off — at least their perception — of closing the facility.”
That disappointment was heightened by Mr. Obama’s decision in January 2011 to sign legislation to restrict the transfers of prisoners. More than half the inmates were designated three years ago for transfer to another country if security conditions could be met, but the transfers dried up. And early this year, the Obama administration reassigned, without replacing, the diplomat who had negotiated the transfers.
“President Obama has publicly and privately abandoned his promise to close Guantánamo,” said Carlos Warner, a lawyer who represents one of 17 hunger strikers being kept alive by force-feeding through nasal tubes. “His tragic political decision has caused the men to lose all hope. Thus, many innocent men have chosen death over a life of unjust indefinite detention.”
In interviews with nearly three dozen current and former administration, military and Congressional officials, lawyers for the detainees, and outside policy specialists, a clear consensus emerged on the result of the impasse over Guantánamo’s future: It has become a place where no new prisoners arrive and no one can leave, and it makes little sense.
“The situation is not sustainable,” said Kenneth Wainstein, the top national security official at the Justice Department in the Bush administration. “There are strong, principled arguments on both sides, but all of us across the spectrum have to acknowledge that this is far from an ideal situation and we need an exit strategy.”
Administration defenders blame Congress — especially Republicans who used Mr. Obama’s effort to close the prison as political ammunition — for the quagmire. Still, even if Mr. Obama had sent the inmates to a domestic prison, the problems raised by the perpetual imprisonment of detainees deemed risky but untriable would persist.
William Lietzau, the top detainee policy official at the Pentagon, argued that the difficulty the administration has had in closing the prison — which it sees as a propaganda symbol for terrorists and as a much more expensive facility to operate than a domestic one — should be considered separately from its effort to develop “principled, credible and sustainable” detention policies.
When the two become linked, he said, “it sometimes feeds the implicit narrative that having detainees at Guantánamo is somehow inherently unlawful or immoral.”
“But the Supreme Court has upheld wartime detention,” Mr. Lietzau said, “which is the humanitarian alternative to killing in war. We want to close Guantánamo, but not because detaining in war is immoral.”
The Bush administration brought 779 prisoners to Guantánamo, and 240 were still here when Mr. Obama took office. Of the 166 who remain, the Obama administration considers several dozen too dangerous to release but impossible to prosecute. A smaller number are designated for trial, but recent court rulings curtailing military commissionsmay have shrunk that number to as few as a dozen.