Doral protesters target Guantánamo

As many as 60 protesters -- some wearing trademark orange jumpsuits -- staged a street demonstration in Doral Friday morning to mark the sixth anniversary of the opening of the prison camps at Guantànamo Bay, Cuba.

Rush-hour motorists mostly whizzed by the demonstrators, who were chanting, ''Hey-hey, ho-ho, U.S. out of Guantànamo'' and ''Stop torture now,'' at a busy intersection at Northwest 87th Avenue and Doral Boulevard.

A few drivers honked their car and truck horns as protester Rae Newman of Miami waved a sign declaring, ``Honk 4 Peace.''

''People are somewhat complacent,'' she said, adding that the horn-honking ``goes in waves, actually. When one person honks, it gives others the courage to honk.''

The local demonstrators, joined by the national anti-war Code Pink movement, are protesting near the Pentagon's Southern Command headquarters as part of a coordinated series of demonstrations called by Amnesty International.

Six years ago Friday, the first 20 detainees arrived at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba to open the offshore detention and interrogation center.

The Defense Department, which had no official comment on the anniversary, calls the prison camps a war-on-terror necessity and says captives are treated humanely.

Southcom is the Pentagon's outpost for operations in Latin America and the Caribbean and supervises the prison camps, where the United States currently holds 275 men as ``enemy combatants.''

The Doral demonstrators fanned out on a sidewalk with banners that also declared, ''Torture is terror'' and ''Close Guantànamo.'' About a third wore the jumpsuits and held photos of war-on-terror detainees, both men since freed and some still in the prison camps.

The group of protesters then marched up a sidewalk toward Southcom, the jumpsuits and banners serving as quirky street theater in generally businesslike Doral.

One protester brought a pet rooster, saying it symbolized ``a wake-up call for America.''