Only the government knows the exact statistics, but four years after Barack Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and eleven years since the first people were imprisoned there, detainees at Gitmo are involved in what may be the largest and longest single act of civil disobedience in the camp’s history.

“I’ve never seen [a protest] of this magnitude that’s gone on for this long,” says Col. Morris Davis (Ret.), a former Chief Gitmo prosecutor who is suing the government after having lost his position as a congressional researcher for writing an op-ed critical of Gitmo. “It’s unfortunate that in order to get America to pay attention you’ve gotta do this kind of thing.”

Detainees began a hunger strike in February in response to the military searching the detainees’ Qu’rans, saying detainees were hiding weapons in them. Since then, detainee lawyers say, the strike has grown both in scope and intent, from a protest over conditions at the camp itself to a broader protest of the detainees’ years-long confinement without trial and no hope of release. It’s unclear how many detainees are striking, but the military’s official count is 52 detainees on hunger strike and 15 being force-fed (the military counts detainees as being on hunger strike if they’ve missed nine meals in a row). Attorneys for the detainees say that a majority of the men confined at Gitmo—130—are now on hunger strike. “If the detainees are right, it is the largest percentage-wise, if not numbers-wise,” says Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. “This is not just a protest, this is truly an act of despair. This is different.”

A defense department official told Mother Jones that the Pentagon believes “hunger striking to be a peaceful form of protest,” but that “we will not allow a detainee to harm himself.” The defense department official added that “If they present certain medical conditions, we will feed them via enteral means. We believe this is our obligation.” The International Committee of the Red Cross opposes force-feeding. Last week ICRC president Peter Maurer called the hunger strikes at Gitmo a symptom of the larger problem of the political impasse over Gitmo.

“You get this sense that the desperation has reached a new height, because it’s been so many years,” says Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First. “When President Obama came in and promised to close it there was a sense of hope, and that hasn’t happened and things seem to have gotten worse.” More than half of the detainees at Gitmo have been cleared for transfer or release, but legal restrictions passed by Congress, decisions by federal courts, and policy positions taken by the administration have slowed the number of detainees leaving Gitmo to a trickle. “There have been more people who have died there than who have been prosecuted there,” says Davis.

Click here for the full story.