Guantanamo Desperation Seen in Suicide Attempts

He said he knows only that medical personnel apparently were able to revive Dossari, he had surgery and is in stable condition.

Detainees "see it as the only means they have of exercising control over their lives," Colangelo-Bryan said in publicly describing the incident for the first time. "Their only means of effective protest are to harm themselves, either by hunger strike or doing something like this."

Martin said claims that hunger strikers are near death are "absolutely false." He said the latest protest began on Aug. 8 and at one point had 131 participants but is now much smaller.

"This technique, hunger striking, is consistent with the al Qaeda training, and reflects the detainees' attempts to elicit media attention and bring pressure on the United States government," Martin said. The military also has long argued that terrorist groups have instructed fighters to invent claims of abuse if incarcerated.

Dossari has told Colangelo-Bryan that he has endured abuse and mistreatment on par with some of the worst offenses discovered at any U.S. detention facility over the past four years. In declassified notes recording the meetings, Dossari describes abuse and torture that stretches back to his arrest in Pakistan in December 2001, through the time he was turned over to U.S. forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and ultimately to his stay in Guantanamo Bay.

Dossari, 26, said U.S. troops have put out cigarettes on his skin, threatened to kill him and severely beat him. He told his lawyer that he saw U.S. Marines at Kandahar "using pages of the Koran to shine their boots," and was brutalized at Guantanamo Bay by Immediate Response Force guards who videotaped themselves attacking him.

The military says the IRF squads are sent into cells to quell disturbances.

Dossari told his lawyers that he had been wrapped in Israeli and U.S. flags during interrogations -- a tactic recounted in FBI allegations of abuse at Guantanamo -- and said interrogators threatened to send him to countries where he would be tortured.

Dossari maintains that he is not connected to terrorism and does not hate the United States. A fellow detainee said that he saw Dossari at an al Qaeda training camp, his lawyer said.

Colangelo-Bryan is a private New York lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents some of the detainees. The group plans a "Fast for Justice" rally today in Washington to bring attention to the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike.

Colangelo-Bryan said Dossari has tried to commit suicide before. Prolonged solitary confinement has given him almost no contact with others and access to only a Koran and his legal papers.

"In March, he looked at me in the eye and said, 'How can I keep myself from going crazy?'" Colangelo-Bryan said.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.