A Guantanamo detainee who died Saturday was a former hunger striker who had recently been placed in a disciplinary cell after splashing a guard with a "cocktail"-- typically containing urine, a U.S. military official tells NBC News. 

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the death of the detainee, whose identity and country of origin will not be released until his family is notified, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the U.S. detention facility.

But Durand provided some new details about the detainee's death -- the ninth to occur at Guantanamo since the prison opened in early 2002 and the first since an Afghan prisoner committed suicide in May of last year.

The detainee was found unconscious in his cell in Camp 5 on Saturday afternoon and was taken to the Naval hospital at Guantanamo where efforts to revive him failed. There were no cuts on his wrist or any other obvious signs of self-inflicted wounds, Durand said.

The detainee also had no serious medical problems. He had participated in a hunger strike last spring but ended it in June and was examined as recently as Aug. 22 when he was at 95 percent of his body weight, Durand said.

He had "fairly recently" thrown the "cocktail" at a prison guard, causing him to be placed in a solitary cell at Camp 5, said Durand. 

Although the death occurred on Saturday, military officials did not announce it until Monday in order to give officials time to notify the host country and family members of the detainee. That process has not yet been completed, but officials decided to release some details Monday because of concerns that some visitors to the base-- such as defense lawyers -- would learn about it anyway, Durand said. 

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The Miami Herald reported that a pathology and mortuary team was brought to the base on Sunday to attend to the body. A Muslim imam was summoned in order to give the man Islamic rites.

The dead man’s remains will be returned home after an autopsy, the Navy said.

The detention camp was set up to hold non-American captives suspected of involvement with al-Qaida, the Taliban or other Islamic militant groups after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Of the 779 men held there, 167 remain.

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Two of the earlier deaths were from natural causes and six were designated as suicides, most of them by hanging.

NBC News staff and Reuters also contributed to this report.

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The Justice Department announced Thursday that it has ended a lengthy investigation into the CIA's interrogation and treatment of prisoners without bringing any criminal charges. 

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the investigation into the deaths of two suspected terrorists  who died in CIA custody -- one in Iraq and another in Afghanistan -- was ended without charges because "the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt." 

The two cases include the highly publicized case of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in a shower stall at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq while in CIA custody.  Several U.S. soldiers, who were photographed with al-Jamadi's body, packed in ice inside a body bag, were later prosecuted and convicted in military courts for prisoner abuse. 

The investigation spanned more than four years. It began with an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of aggressive interrogations of terrorist suspects, but was later expanded to include the deaths of the two detainees. 

In all the Justice Department investigated the treatment of 101 detainees who been held in U.S. custody since 9/11. 

CIA Director David Petraeus issued a statement thanking everyone at the CIA who supported the Justice Departments investigations.  

In an apparent effort to put the incidents and investigations to rest, Petraeus added, "As intelligence officers our inclination of course is to look ahead to the challenges of the future rather than backwards at those of the past."

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Members of the Cook County Sheriff's Department walk out of the Cook County Jail Tuesday in February 2006 in Chicago.

Chicago’s Cook County Jail, a harsh holding cell stuffed with up to 11,000 prisoners at any given time, is about to become even more crowded, according to The Chicago News Cooperative.

Tom Dart, The Cook County Sheriff, told The Chicago News Cooperative on Monday that of those 11,000 prisoners, about 2,000 have some form of serious mental illness. But he fears the situation could get much worse: Chicago has plans to shutter half of its 12 city-run mental health centers by the end of April in a bid to save $2 million, and that could leave many mentally ill patients without the treatment they need.

“It will definitely have a negative impact on jail populations,” Dart told The Chicago News Cooperative. “It will have direct consequences for us in my general jail population and some of the problems I have here, because a lot of the people with these issues act out more, as you would expect, so that’s a direct consequence.”

Without resources to treat them, those with mental health issues are more likely to have run-ins with the police, reported The Chicago News Cooperative.

Related: For mentally ill inmates, care behind bars can be lacking

“It’s going to increase the number of calls they get,” Amy Watson, associate professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois, Chicago, said of the Chicago Police Department, “because it is the only place left to call.”

It costs about $143 per day to house a typical detainee at Cook County Jail, the media organization reported. To house a detainee with mental health issues costs two to three times as much, the sheriff said.

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U.S. Navy guards escort a detainee after a "life skills" class held for prisoners at Camp 6 in the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010.

A new lawsuit seeks to force the U.S. government to make public “extremely disturbing” videotapes of a Saudi national whose abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison has been called “torture” by a former Bush administration official.

The suit, filed in New York federal court on Monday, comes 10 years after the first prisoners in the United States’ global war on terror arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The prison, within a U.S. Navy base, was considered by Bush administration lawyers outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The controversial prison was ordered closed within a year by President Barack Obama when he took office, but stiff resistance in Congress over housing detainees in the United States and trying them in civilian courts has left most of 171 detainees in limbo as the base remains open.

Indeed, 46 of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have been designated as too dangerous to be released at all by the Obama administration and have been assigned for indefinite detention without charges or trial. Through the years, 779 detainees have been incarcerated there with Bush releasing more than 500 and Obama 67.

“Sadly, Guantanamo is becoming a fixture,” Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees, told msnbc.com. “We come to think that during wartime that there are these blips of decreased civil liberties, but eventually we restore ourselves to normalcy. That dynamic 10 years on is not happening now. …The president who so eloquently criticized it has accepted its existence.”

The Obama administration disputes that characterization. A State Department spokesman told NBC News that it has made clear that closing Guantanamo is in the interest of national security and is continuing its efforts to close the facility.

Benjamin Wittes, of the conservative-leaning Brookings Institute, has suggested that Guantanamo has changed since the Bush years.

"Alone among facilities used by the military to detain enemy forces in the war on terror," Wittes wrote, "detentions at Guantanamo are supervised by the federal courts in probing habeas corpus cases. Detainees there, unlike at any other detention facility, have access to lawyers. Their cases are followed closely by the press, and many hundreds of journalists have been to Guantanamo."

Harsh interrogation techniques
In their lawsuit filed Monday, Lawrence Lustberg and Sandra Babcock seek to shed light on the treatment of their client Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 and was whisked to Guantanamo Bay, where government investigators later identified him as a man who had planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

The case of Qahtani first came to light in 2005 when Time magazine published secret log files from Guantanamo that detailed harsh interrogation techniques on the Saudi suspect.

In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder, but on May 11 of that same year those charges were dropped. The reasons at the time were not made public.

• Slideshow: Life goes on in Guantanamo

In 2009, a Bush administration official revealed the reason to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

"We tortured Qahtani," Susan J. Crawford said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Now, Qahtani's attorneys, who have been to Guantanamo, seek to shine more light on what happened nearly a decade ago.

"It’s important at this juncture for the public to have access to visual images of what happened at Guantanamo,” Babcock told msnbc.com. “I think people have become desensitized to the plight of the men that came to Guantanamo. They don’t see them as human anymore. It’s easy to distance yourself to what happened."

• From Oct. 2006: Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo

The tapes remain classified, according to Lustberg and Babcock, but the lawyers have viewed them and say the government should release them.

"I can’t tell you what’s in the tapes," Babcock told msnbc.com, citing their secrecy. "But I can tell you that they are extremely disturbing and I think they could change the tenor of the debate in this country about our nation’s interrogation and detention practices."

Lustberg points out that "the Army field manual still allows our government to engage in some of the same abuse that was visited on Qahtani. We think that when this sort of thing goes on, detainee abuse should continue to be a robust debate."

The lawsuit says Qahtani's treatment included severe sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations and isolation. It also cites threats by military dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures and religious and sexual humiliation.

A spokeswoman for government lawyers told The Associated Press that there would be no comment. 

Other cases at Guantanamo are still pending. Five prisoners accused of helping to organize the Sept. 11 case are expected to be arraigned at the base in 2012 in what would be the most high-profile U.S. war crimes tribunal since the World War II-era. The five, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are facing charges that include murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

There is no judge yet in the Sept. 11 case.

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