Guant-anamo detainees have been holding daily peaceful protests against the jail's continued existence despite pledges from US President Barack Obama to shutter the camp, a lawyer said Friday. Lawyer Ramzi Kassem said he had learned from a client held in Guantanamo that the protests had been going on for the past 13 days to mark the ninth anniversary of the opening of the jail.
But the information from Kassem, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), could not be confirmed by AFP with the prison authorities. "Most of the remaining prisoners in Camps 5 and 6 at Guantanamo have joined together to peacefully protest their indefinite imprisonment with a sit-in and signs," the center said in a statement. The prisoners are refusing to return to their cells for the mandatory nightly lockdown and have been sleeping in the recreation yard and in common areas, the center said. The prisoner who told Kassem of the protests, Said Abdulhadi, has spent nearly nine years in the jail on a US naval base in Cuba.
"We hope that guards, military officials and visiting delegations of Red Cross representatives, congressional members and journalists hear our cry for freedom," Abdulhadi reportedly told Kassem. Kassem added the prisoners have made signs and posters in English, now plastered on their cellblocks, asking "Where are the Courts?", "What About our Rights?", and "Where is Democracy?" Another Guantanamo detainee, who asked to remain anonymous, told the lawyer: "The construction work going on here is giving us the impression that we are going to be here forever."
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