INTERVIEW-Guantanamo will close when Bush goes-lawyer
By Paul Majendie
ALTHORP, England, June 17 (Reuters) - A leading human rights lawyer said he expected Guantanamo Bay prison to close when President George W. Bush leaves office but there were still 14,000 prisoners held by the United States in secret jails around the world.
"Guantanamo has achieved a huge amount -- all bad," said Clive Stafford Smith who criss-crosses the Atlantic trying to liberate detainees from the U.S. prison on Cuba.
Fighting the cases of more than 60 detainees -- he has succeeded in freeing 24 -- provoked Stafford Smith into writing "Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons."
He says cooks, shopkeepers and television cameramen were tortured into admitting they worked for Osama bin Laden.
The United States is holding 380 foreign terrorism suspects at the camp which it opened in 2002. Their indefinite detention has provoked widespread international criticism while U.S. efforts to establish a system to try them have run into legal obstacles.
Stafford Smith said most of the 14,000 prisoners in secret jails were in Iraq.
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