LEAD: Hundreds protest Guantanamo on its tenth anniversary

By Matthew Rusling (dpa) Jan 11, 2012, 20:30 GMT

Washington - Hundreds of human rights activists, some in orange jumpsuits, on Wednesday marked the tenth anniversary of Guantanamo prison, chanting 'hey hey, ho ho, Guantanamo has got to go!'

A crowd of revved-up protesters, from young adults to senior citizens, gathered in front of the White House and marched to the US Supreme Court amid a cold drizzle.

Around 100 wore orange jumpsuits with hoods masking their identity in portrayal of detainees held in the controversial facility at a US Naval base in Cuba, which continues to hold detainees without trial or charge. Among the current 171 detainees are 11 who have been held there since January 11, 2002, without hearing charges or being tried.

One demonstrator sat in a cage across the street from the White House, with ankles and wrists shackled, to protest what demonstrators called inhumane treatment of Guantanamo detainees.

Debate about Guantanamo has been largely overshadowed by more pressing issues such as high unemployment and next year's presidential elections, but the protests drew people from as far away as South Carolina and New York.

Protesters held orange-lettered banners that read 'Obama Close Gitmo,' and sprouted umbrellas against the persistent rain.

Participants included Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International and the Centre for Constitutional Rights.

Amnesty International released a 60-page report to mark the anniversary, detailing the history of Guantanamo since former president George W Bush opened Guantanamo and laying out what it says are the daily and blatant violation of human rights that occur there.

It calls the Obama administration's failure to close the facility a 'toxic legacy' for human rights and recites details of some individual detainees, 11 of whom have been held since opening day without charges brought or trials held.

But it is perhaps a sign of the times that there is not more public interest in the remaining detainees, aside from human rights activists.

Indeed, Osama bin Laden is dead, the Iraq war is over and the conflict in Afghanistan is drawing to a close. Americans are now concerned about jobs, in an economy were Labour Department figures tag the number of unemployed people at 13.1 million.

In the years just after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the US fight against terrorism dominated the headlines and Guantanamo was a hotly-debated topic.

Rights groups still bill the institution as a blight on the US international reputation and the US legal system that guarantees rights to suspects of a speedy trial and assumption of innocence. Supporters of Guantanamo detention say the facility is needed due to security concerns over bringing detainees to the US mainland for trial.

The Amnesty report highlights what the group calls a decade of unlawful treatment of detainees, including the Obama administration's January 2010 decision that four dozen Guantanamo inmates will neither be prosecuted nor released and will remain in indefinite military detention.

Ten years after it opened on January 11, 2002, the detention facility, housed in the US Guantanamo Bay naval base on a corner of Cuba, operates a multi-level security regime for the 171 prisoners still there.

Over the past decade, at least 780 suspects have been held in Guantanamo. The facility, which is operated by a joint task force of the various US military branches, was set up by the George W Bush administration to hold suspected members of al-Qaeda and others picked up on battlefields in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere who were not members of a state sponsored army.