Free them or put them on trial. Thus urges a petition to President Barack Obama over the prisoners held at Guantanamo, jailed and in limbo for more than a decade.
The petition launched by Guantanamo's former chief military prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis has been signed by more than 145,500 people for the president to bring some kind of closure to the fate of the terror suspects at the US prison on the eastern tip of Cuba.
At Guantanamo prison, the men in indefinite detention seek to draw attention to an unprecedented hunger strike nearly two-thirds of them are waging. Today, the stir enters its fourth month with prison officials saying that 100 of the "war on terror" detainees were observing the strike, out of a total of 166.
Afghan prisoner Obaidullah echoed the sentiment of many of his fellow inmates when he said he was "losing all hope".
"Eleven years of my life have been taken from me," he said. His testimony was declassified Friday.
Twenty-three of those refusing food were being fed with tubes running down their noses and two were hospitalised even though their lives were not in danger, said prison spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House.
Lawyers for the inmates say there are actually 130 hunger strikers, some of them refusing food since February 6.
Of the prisoners still languishing at the US military prison, more than half - 86 - have been cleared for transfer to their home nations, some of them for the past five years.
Why have these men ended up in "no man's land" in Cuba, as Obama puts it?
"There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction is your ticket home," Davis said in his petition.
His petition drew 117,000 signatures in just 48 hours.
"At the bottom line, Guantanamo is just a massive, a massive failure," said Smith.
One of Smith's colleagues, Omar Farah, said it was time for Obama to correct "this horrible mistake" and "speak louder than the prisoners".
Mustapha al-Hawsawi of Saudi Arabia, who stands accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, and two other "high-value" inmates are also taking part in the hunger strike, he said, declining to name the other two.
