US "peace mom" Cindy Sheehan called for the closure of the US military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, as she and other activists arrived on Saturday to draw attention to the nearly 400 terror suspects still held at the remote site.
Sheehan is among 12 human rights and anti-war activists who will travel across Cuba next week, arriving at the main gate of the Guantanamo base on Thursday -- five years after the first prisoners were flown in.
"Anyone who knows me knows that I am not afraid of anything," Sheehan said when asked about the possibility of US sanctions for traveling to communist-run Cuba, which remains under a US trade embargo.
PHOTO: EPA
"What is more important is the inhumanity that my government is perpetrating at Guantanamo," she told reporters.
Sheehan, 49, of Vacaville, California, became an anti-war activist known as the "peace mom" after her 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004. She drew international attention by camping outside US President George W. Bush's ranch to protest the war, and has been arrested numerous times for trespassing.
Sheehan arrived in Havana early on Saturday evening with trip organizer Medea Benjamin, of the California nonprofit groups Global Exchange and Codepink.
Benjamin said the protesters believe they are exempt from US travel restrictions on Cuba because they were traveling as professional human rights activists who will attend a daylong international conference in the Cuban city of Guantanamo on Wednesday.
Arriving in the same group was former Army Colonel Ann Wright, who resigned over the war in Iraq; Tiffany Burns of Gold Star Families for Peace, representing relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Adele Welty, mother of firefighter Timothy Welty, who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
The other seven activists were expected to arrive in Havana over the weekend.
"In the names of my son and all the others who died in 9/11, great acts of inhumanity are being perpetuated in Guantanamo and Iraq," Welty said.
The US military still holds about 395 men on suspicion of links to the Taliban or al-Qaeda, including about 85 who have been cleared to be released or transferred to other countries. The military says it wants to charge 60 to 80 detainees and bring them to trial.
Wright said that the group's protest outside the Guantanamo base will coincide with demonstrations around the world calling on the US to shut the remote prison.
"There needs to be justice, just not with a military prison," she said.
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