Human Rights Groups Plan Gitmo Protests

HAVANA -- Two years after his release from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Asif Iqbal is headed back _ to the other side of the barbed wire.

The British Muslim has returned to Cuba with a group of 11 peace activists and relatives of detainees to denounce alleged abuses at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects and demand it be closed.

"It doesn't feel anything like Guantanamo now _ I'm free," Iqbal, 25, told a news conference Tuesday in Havana. "But if I can see the cages, it's going to be a bit emotional."

The group, which includes American "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan, planned to fly to the Cuban city of Guantanamo Tuesday night and march outside the gates of the U.S. base on Thursday, five years to the day since the first detainees arrived from Afghanistan. The demonstration is one of many planned in the United States and around the world to mark the anniversary.

"I've come and joined this delegation to say to the people in Guantanamo Bay that we have not forgotten about you," said Iqbal, who spent 2 1/2 years at the prison. "Until that place is closed down, I cannot forget what happened there."

About 395 men are detained at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or Taliban, including about 85 who have been cleared to be released or transferred to other countries. The U.S. military says it wants to charge 60 to 80 detainees and bring them to trial.

Iqbal said he spent three months in an isolation cell and endured painful positions, screeching music, strobe lights, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures. The treatment was torture, he said, and forced him and two other British friends at the camp into falsely confessing they were members of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden's terror network.

The men's experience is portrayed in the movie "The Road to Guantanamo," which recounts how Iqbal went to Pakistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to meet the woman his mother had arranged for him to marry. His friends soon joined him there. They say they heeded a call for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, arriving just as the U.S. began its assault on the Taliban regime for sheltering bin Laden and his followers.

The men were captured by U.S. allied Afghan troops and turned over to U.S. forces, who held them in Pakistan then transferred them to Guantanamo in early 2002.

British officials eventually learned all three were home in England at the time U.S. interrogators claimed they attended a bin Laden rally in Afghanistan. They were finally released in 2004, and have a lawsuit pending against the United States.

"We were lucky," Iqbar said, adding that he's worried about the other detainees who could be innocent but have no way to prove it. No one at Guantanamo has had a fair trial, he said.

"Everyone has basically been labeled a terrorist and guilty," he said. "That's not the way that democratic countries work. Five years without a trial is not acceptable, especially from the United States of America."

The mother and brother of British citizen Omar Dehayes, a current detainee, traveled from the United Arab Emirates to join the protest against the prison camp. They insisted he was innocent.

"I ask every mother and every father to ask them to shut down this prison now and release everyone there so they can go back to their families and to their mothers," said Zohra Zewawi, breaking into tears.

"I ask George Bush, if he had his child in this place, wouldn't he feel the same?" she asked.

In an earlier press release, Zewawi said her son had been tortured and blinded in one eye since he was imprisoned in September 2002. He still has not been charged or tried.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004, said she was "deeply ashamed" of how the U.S. has handled the "war on terror" and called Bush and his administration "enemies of humanity."

The 49-year-old from Vacaville, Calif., urged Congress to "restore our right to habeas corpus, remove the barbarians of the Bush administration from power and make America a country we can be proud of again."