Free the Guantánamo 20: Photos From a Vigil at the US Embassy in London, As We Also Marked 7,600 Days of the Prison’s Existence

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Last week was a good one for Guantánamo activism. Following the wonderful news about the release of Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, Saifullah Paracha, over 40 people — from the US, the UK and Mexico City, plus five former prisoners in Serbia, Morocco and the Netherlands — took photos of themselves (or had photos taken of them) with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking 7,600 days of the prison’s existence on November 1. All the photos can be found on the Close Guantánamo website here, and also on the campaign’s Facebook page.

Some of the photos were taken the day after, at a well-attended UK Guantánamo Network vigil for the closure of the prison outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms, London. Largely driven by the energy of Sara Birch, the chair of the Lewes Amnesty Group, the UK Guantánamo Network includes members of various Amnesty Groups, Close Guantánamo, the Guantánamo Justice Campaign, the London Guantánamo Campaign and Freedom From Torture, and members have been holding online meetings since last year, working towards raising the profile of Guantánamo in the UK, by seeking to persuade MPs to re-establish an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantánamo (more on that soon), and also through protests and vigils.

For the 20th anniversary, in January this year, the UK Guantánamo Network arranged a march from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square, where, despite torrential rain, there was a vigil, with speakers including John McDonnell MP (who chaired the APPG on Shaker Aamer back in 2014-15, which helped secure the release of the last British resident in Guantánamo), the film director Kevin Macdonald (the director of ‘The Mauritanian’, about Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who read out a message from Mohamedou) and myself. The march and vigil was also supported by several supporters of Julian Assange, whose case is tied in with Guantánamo through WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US files from the prison in 2011, on which I worked as media partner.

In September, the UK Guantánamo Network began holding monthly vigils in Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament, reviving the vigils that took place for many years calling for the release of Shaker Aamer. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and the September vigil was followed by a second vigil in October (with a short video interview with me here), and the third vigil last Wednesday, when we moved to the US Embassy to highlight the shameful ongoing existence of Guantánamo in the run-up to tomorrow’s midterm elections.

As we had laminated placards from our January protest — one for each of the men still held — we decided on the spot to focus our energies on highlighting the plight of 20 of these men (out of the 35 in total who are still held) — those who have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, but who have not been freed. 16 of these men have been approved for release since President Biden took office, with one other approved for release at the end of Trump’s presidency, and three others approved for release in Obama’s first year in office, but still, shamefully, not freed. One of these three men, Toffiq (or Tawfiq) al-Bihani, is the subject of an ongoing Amnesty International campaign.

Our slogan was “Free the Guantánamo 20”, which we’ll be using in future campaigning, and we encourage others calling for Guantánamo’s closure to also use it.

The plight of the Guantánamo 20 is significant because, although they have been approved for release by high-level government review processes (the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009-10, and, since 2013, the Periodic Review Boards), those processes are — or were — purely administrative, and no legal mechanism exists to compel the US government to actually free the men approved for release. Saifullah Paracha, for example, had to wait 17 months after a PRB approved his release to actually be freed, even though there was no evident obstacle to his repatriation in Pakistan. (Note: there is a 21st prisoner awaiting release — Majid Khan — but he, theoretically, has a legal avenue available to him to exert pressure on the administration, as he agreed to a plea deal in the military commissions at Guantánamo, although it remains disgraceful that he is still held, six months after his sentence ended).

It’s shameful that the lack of any legal enforcement encourages inertia in the Biden administration regarding the Guantánamo 20, and we can only hope that the recent appointment, in the State Department, of Tina Kaidanow, a former ambassador, as the administration’s “Senior Representative for Guantánamo Affairs”, who is “responsible for all matters pertaining to the transfer of detainees from the Guantánamo Bay facility to third countries”, will make a difference. She doesn’t seem to have a specific State Department page, but her LinkedIn profile is here, and we also encourage supporters to email the State Department with concerns about the glacial pace of transfers out of Guantánamo.

At our vigil last Wednesday, we were all extremely pleased with the support we received from passing vehicles, holding their horns in encouragement, and we were also aware that our protest must have been noticed by Embassy staff, especially as around half a dozen police officers, clearly assigned to the Embassy, came to check out what we were doing, and whether we had permission (which we did).

As a sign of how monstrously long Guantánamo has been in existence, we imagined a young intern in the Embassy looking out of the window at our vigil, and asking, “What’s Guantánamo?”, because nowadays many people under the age of 25 don’t even know what Guantánamo is, even as many of those who are older mistakenly believe that it was shut by President Obama because, when he took office in January 2009, he promised to close it within a year. It’s a sign, sadly, of how so much of politics works these days — if Presidents and Prime Minsters say they are going to do something, many people conclude that they have been true to their word, even though, in so many cases (as with Guantánamo), fine words are not followed by deeds.

The next vigil is on Wednesday December 7, when we will once more be in Parliament Square, from 1-3pm, so if you’re anywhere nearby, please do come along. We have spare jumpsuits, hoods and placards, and you’ll be made very welcome.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.