Omar Deghayes' fellow inmates at Guantanamo Bay have embarked on a mass hunger strike.
The US Navy said 13 prisoners were being force-fed through tubes in their noses as a response to the strike.
Family and friends of Mr Deghayes, who lived in Brighton for 15 years before being arrested in Pakistan, said they did not think he was one of the prisoners refusing food.
Lawyers representing the former Saltdean law student said his fellow prisoners were protesting at the isolation and harsh conditions of a new maximum security unit.
US authorities began transferring detainees in December to the new £19 million Camp Six, where inmates are locked in windowless cells with steel walls for 23 hours a day.
The force-feeding regime has been widely criticised by human rights groups and is credited with breaking the last mass hunger strike at Guantanamo in 2006.
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