WASHINGTON, June 14 (Xinhuanet) -- US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on Tuesday, following recent calls for closing the detention facility.

    "The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was established for the simple reason that the United States needed a safe and secure location to detain and interrogate enemy combatants. It was the best option available," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.

    He said in operations since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the Untied States, the American military had arrested thousands of "enemy combatants" and several hundred were determined to be "particularly dangerous and valuable from an intelligence perspective."

    According to the defense secretary, people detained at Guantanamo included "terrorist trainers, bomb-makers, extremist recruiters and financiers, bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, and would-be suicide bombers."

    "But as long as there remains a need to keep terrorists from striking again, a facility will continue to be needed," he said.

    The government had spent over 100 million US dollars on the construction of the detention facility, and was spending between 90 million to 95 million dollars a year to operate the facility, he noted.

    Rumsfeld's remarks came one day after Vice President Dick Cheney said the government had no plan to close the prison at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

    "At present, there's no plan to close Gitmo (the prison at Guantanamo). The president says we review all of our options on a continuous basis," Cheney said in interview with Fox News, which was broadcast Monday.

    There have been calls for the closure of the Guantanamo prison over the past few weeks, after reports of alleged prisoner abuse and Koran desecration at Guantanamo have attracted worldwide attention.

    Former President Jimmy Carter said at a human rights conferencelast week that closing the prison would demonstrate the US commitment to human rights at a time when Washington's reputation has suffered because of reports of prisoner abuses.

    About 520 detainees are still being held at Guantanamo, most ofwhom were captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan. Some havebeen detained there for more than three years without charges or access to lawyers. Enditem