[Peace-discuss] Protesters Demand Guantanamo Shutdown

[C. G. Estabrook]

[More uncomfortable lessons being drawn from the celebration
of American freedom. --CGE]

   Protesters Demand Guantanamo Shutdown
   Mon Jul 4, 6:59 PM ET

NEW YORK - Feminist author Gloria Steinem on Monday joined
about 200 protesters to demand the closure of the U.S.
detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, saying holding prisoners
indefinitely without charging them violates the values upon
which the United States was founded.

Steinem compared Guantanamo to the kind of autocratic rule
early colonists were trying to flee.

"They came to escape the very things — detention without due
process, bias, a religious government ... that we protest
today," Steinem said.

Some detainees have been held at the camp in Cuba for more
than three years without being charged. The U.S. government
contends the prisoners are enemy combatants and are not
entitled to constitutional protections.

Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional
Rights that has filed lawsuits in federal court challenging
the detentions, also addressed the crowd.

The Bush administration "has claimed the power to kidnap men
anywhere in the world and hold them, interrogate them, detain
them without any process of law," said Meeropol, the
granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed
in 1953 after being convicted of conspiring to commit
espionage for the Soviet Union.