After the embarrassing exposure of the military's abusive treatment of detainees, the administration fears the world's reaction if detainees starve themselves to death. But the military can't argue with desperation like this:

[British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith] said that Mr. Deghayes, a Libyan who has lived in London, told him: "Look, I'm dying a slow death in this place as it is. I don't have any hope of fair treatment, so what have I got to lose?"

The military's public face is more upbeat than the reality of force feeding (the military prefers "assisted feeding") detainees, keeping them alive so that they can be imprisoned indefinitely.

The comments of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, probably because their accounts conflict with the more positive descriptions in official military accounts, generally mirrored the statements of lawyers for the detainees, who have received their information from face-to-face interviews with their clients.

The presence of lawyers at Guantánamo allows a flow of accurate information that the administration would prefer to suppress.

Before the advent of lawyer visits, the military had total control over information from Guantánamo. There is now general acknowledgment that there were hunger strikes in 2002 and 2003, but they were largely unknown at the time. The only parties who had solid information when the strikes were occurring were the military authorities and Red Cross officials, who had pledged not to reveal what they learned in their visits in exchange for continued access.

Because lawyers have been telling the truth about what they learn at Guantánamo, the administration has tried to keep them from their clients.

[Kristine Huskey, a lawyer with Shearman & Sterling,] said that the government tried to prevent lawyers from her firm from visiting their clients in recent weeks. She said officials had to be pressed to allow the visits by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court in Washington in at least three telephone conferences.

Clive Smith says that the military agreed to negotiate with a committee of detainees, but it disbanded the committee days later. The military denies that there were "meetings with detainees refusing to eat" but is otherwise declining to comment on the situation. The Geneva Conventions require a country to meet with representative prisoner committees, but the administration contends that it isn't bound by the Conventions at Guantánamo.