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HAVANA - A group of US and other peace activists including Cindy Sheehan plan to march to the gates of the US Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba on January 11 to protest against abuses at the prison camp for terrorism suspects, organisers said today.
The protest in Cuba is part of planned international protests against the prison camp next week, five years after it opened with the first detainees flown in from the US-led war in Afghanistan that followed the September 11 attacks.
The group of 15 marchers will include former detainee Asif Iqbal, a British citizen who was released after two years with no charges, and relatives of current prisoner Omar Deghayes, a British resident. Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq war, has become a well-known peace activist in the United States.
Cuba's Communist government -- which has long condemned the prison camp run by its political enemy the United States -- has said the protesters can march to the Cuban security fence surrounding the US base, said Matt Daloisio, spokesman for Witness Against Torture.
Witness Against Torture is a Catholic group in New York that helped organized the protest with CODEPINK, a women's pacifist group based in Los Angeles, and Global Exchange, a rights group based in San Francisco.
Washington has faced steady criticism over the Guantanamo prison from human rights groups and foreign governments, because most of the prisoners have not been charged and because of reports of abuse of prisoners. The United States has said it does not use torture, and that the camp was necessary to deal with the particular circumstances of its war on terrorism.
Twenty-two Witness Against Torture members marched in protest to the Guantanamo base in December 2005 but did not get beyond the Cuban security gate some 8 km from the US naval base.
The activists plan a conference on prison abuses and screenings of the award-winning docudrama Road to Guantanamo, which recounts Iqbal's ordeal from his arrest in October 2001 in Afghanistan to his release from Guantanamo with four other Britons in March 2004.
"I am travelling all the way from Dubai because my heart is overflowing with grief over the abuse and ongoing detention of my son," said Deghayes' mother, Zohra Zewawi, in a statement. She says her son has been tortured and blinded in one eye during detention.
The US military has quickened the pace for releasing captives held at Guantanamo. The Pentagon said in December that the prison's population now stands at approximately 395 inmates, out of more than 770 who have been held there since the camp opened in January 2002.
Asked about the planned protest outside the base, Col. Bill Costello, spokesman for the US military's Southern Command, which oversees the Guantanamo base, said, "I think we have demonstrated during the past five years that Guantanamo Bay is a detention facility that is run in a safe, humane, legal and transparent manner."
"There have been scores of soldiers, sailers, uniformed service members and civilians who have operated the camps in just a tremendous fashion," he added.
- REUTERS
