By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA, Jan 9 (Reuters) - The mother of a detainee at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo naval base appealed to U.S President George W. Bush on Tuesday to free her son and hundreds of others held there without charges.

Zohra Zewawi, whose son Omar Deghayes has been held at the prison camp since his arrest in Pakistan in 2002, joined former detainee Asif Iqbal, a British citizen, and American peace activists who plan to march to the gates of the U.S. base in eastern Cuba on Thursday to demand the closure of the prison.

"I came here to ask to shut down Guantanamo and release everybody who is there, and ask George Bush ... who is a father how he would feel to have one of his daughters detained in such a place," the chador-clad Zewawi said, overcome by tears.

Zewawi and her son are British residents, political refugees from Libya, but he was in Pakistan getting a British visa for his Afghani wife when he was detained in 2002.

The march, which includes anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, is part of planned international protests against the prison on Thursday, five years after it opened with the first detainees flown in from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11 attacks.

Washington has faced steady criticism over the Guantanamo prison from rights groups and foreign governments because most of the prisoners have not been charged and due to reports of abuse. About 395 terrorism suspects are being held there.

Cuba's government -- which has condemned the prison as a concentration camp run by its political enemy the United States -- has allowed the protesters to march to the Cuban security perimeter surrounding the U.S. enclave.

ONLY 10 CHARGED

"The burden of Guantanamo is still there. Until the prison is closed down I cannot get on with my life," said Iqbal, 25, a former mail sorter from Tipton, British West Midlands who spent two years there until his release in 2004 with no charges.

Iqbal was 20 when he went to Pakistan to get married and said he was drawn to Afghanistan out of curiosity and a desire to help the Afghan people when the U.S. invasion occurred, but says he was not a fighter.

He was arrested in Mazar-i-Sharif in November 2001, flown to Guantanamo and subjected to endless interrogations, sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and spent days on end in shackles, he said.

After three months in solitary confinement, Iqbal signed a confession that he had been at an al Qaeda rally in Afghanistan in 2000. British police later corroborated Iqbal's account that he had been in Britain at the time.

Only 10 Guantanamo prisoners have been charged before U.S. military war crimes tribunals with conspiring with al Qaeda, though none is charged with direct involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks and no trials have been completed.

U.S. lawyers representing Guantanamo prisoners said the camp has outlived its usefulness as an interrogation center and become a powerful symbol of abuse that thwarts American efforts to cultivate intelligence sources and improve relations in the Middle East.

Gita Gutierrez and other lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based group that represents about 300 Guantanamo prisoners, said the U.S. government has denied the detainees' right to challenge their detention in a court, despite U.S. Supreme Court rulings upholding that right.

"A place without rights has no place in a democratic system that claims it adheres to human rights," Michael Ratner, the center's president, said in a conference call with journalists.

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