Protesters Demand Guantanamo Shutdown

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.