THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Faced with eternal detention and a newer, more aggressive guard detail, the prisoners of Guanatanamo Bay have gone on a hunger strike.

It’s hunger-strike time at Guantánamo. And while the military and their captives dispute when it started and how widespread it is, it was clear from a three-day visit to the prison-camp compound this past week that the guard force is confronted with its most complex challenge in years.

• By this weekend, the U.S. military had defined 26 of the 166 captives as hunger strikers. Eight were being fed nutritional shakes through a tube snaked through a shackled captive’s nose to his stomach. Two were hospitalized, getting nutrition through a tube and intravenous hydration as well. Lawyers for the captives quote their clients as counting dozens more as long-term hunger strikers, who are getting weaker by the day.

• Communal captives are no longer cooperating with guards at the once-showcase Camp 6. They’ve covered the cameras inside their cells. They’ve quit going to art classes. Both sides report frequent fainting spells — the military calls them “Code Yellows” — although the prison spokesman says they’re fake, staged for visitors.

• More and more men are being moved out of communal confinement to the maximum-security prison, where up to 125 can be kept in 8-by-12-foot cells and where it’s easier to conduct tube feedings. But the Camp 5 commander, an Army captain who wouldn’t give her name, decided it would be too disruptive for a reporter to observe lunch being served there. To watch a guard pass a lunchbox through slits in the cell doors at the disciplinary block, the captain concluded, was too “high-risk.”

HUNGER STRIKER COULD DIE

Although it’s camp policy to prevent a captive from starving himself, the prison staff talks about the possibility that a hunger-striking captive will be found dead one day.

Lawyers for the men say the strike was sparked in early February by an unusually aggressive search of prisoners’ Qurans that to them amounted to desecration. Prison staff says no Qurans were disrespected, no policy changed.

All sides blame long simmering frustration with President Barack Obama’s inability to deliver on his promise to close the facility.

At least they can blame it on President Obama. No one knows where to send them. No one wants them. And no one knows what to do with this last legacy from that GWOT upon the political landscape, George W. Bush.