No More Drones and Close Guantánamo: Protest Photos at CIA Headquarters

On January 12, 2013, during my ten-day visit to the US to campaign for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo on the 11th anniversary of its opening, I joined around a hundred protestors, from groups including Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, Episcopal Peace Fellowship DC, Northern Virginians for Peace & Justice, Pax Christi and World Can’t Wait to protest against the Obama administration’s use of drones in its ongoing “war on terror,” and also to protest about the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, the day after the 11th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

The protest took place outside one of the entrances to the headquarters of the CIA, in McLean, Virginia, and I was delighted to be asked to address the crowd, drawing connections between Obama’s use of drones and Bush’s use of torture, “extraordinary rendition” and the indefinite detention to which the prisoners at Guantánamo are still subjected. Before and after, I was reunited with various friends in the activist community, and also met others for the first time, as I wandered around with my camera, capturing the photos in this set.

It was a pleasure, as ever, to be in the company of such wonderful people, and afterwards I felt honoured to join the activists of Witness Against Torture, who had been fasting for a week, as, after marching from the entrance to CIA HQ, they broke their fast at a nearby Quaker church, belonging to Langley Hill Friends.

For further information about Guantánamo, and the ongoing need to close it, see my article, “Eleven Years of Guantánamo: End This Scandal Now!” Also see my photos of the protest in Washington D.C., here and here, and also see the videos of my speech outside the White House and the panel discussion I took part in at the New America Foundation with the attorney Tom Wilner (my colleague in the “Close Guantánamo” campaign), and Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, who resigned in 2007 in protest at the Bush administration’s use of torture.

POSTSCRIPT: See below for the video of me speaking outside CIA headquarters, filmed by Justin Norman. All 27 videos by Justin from January 2013’s actions are here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.