Photos and Report: The Latest Coordinated Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on July 5, 2023

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Last Wednesday, July 5, coordinated vigils took place around the world calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. My apologies for posting the photos and this report so late, but I took a week’s holiday beginning the day of the vigils, which involved a healthy seven days of digital detox, and I’m only just now back online.

The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and began in February, when I put a call out to friends and colleagues across the US, and in Mexico City, Brussels and Copenhagen, to join the monthly vigils that campaigners in London had been undertaking since September last year, drawing on a long tradition of vigils for the closure of Guantánamo outside the Houses of Parliament.

For the development of the vigils, please see the photos and reports from March, April, May and June.

Ten vigils took place last Wednesday — in London, Washington, D.C., New York City, Mexico City, Brussels, Copenhagen, Cobleskill, NY, Minneapolis, Detroit and Los Angeles (a lone campaigner, unphotographed), and with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also taking part in his apartment in Belgrade, in Serbia, where he was resettled from Guantánamo seven years ago.

In London, where the vigils are organized by the UK Guantánamo Network (involving numerous Amnesty International groups and other campaigners), and where, in general, at least a dozen campaigners are involved, from across London and further afield, four Labour MPs also stopped by to show their support — Richard Burgon, Apsana Begum and John McDonnell, all members of the recently formed All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility, and Mick Whitley, the MP for Birkenhead.

In New York City, an enthusiastic coalition of groups including the World Can’t Wait, Amnesty International USA, the Raging Grannies, and NYC Veterans for Peace have established what is now a kind of mini-festival on the steps of the Public Library in Manhattan — a lively mixture of speeches and music, and busy engagement with the many passers-by.

On Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where it was very hot, dedicated, long-term opponents of Guantánamo’s existence — from Witness Against Torture and Close Guantánamo — had, as ever, the most powerful backdrop, although as Steve Lane, Close Guantánamo’s Washington, D.C. coordinator, explained, visitors were not, in general, very interested in the monstrous and ongoing injustice of Guantánamo.

As Steve described it, “One guy I talked to exemplified the problem. I gave him a flyer with the names and pictures of the cleared men, and told him that they were still in prison, even though they were approved for release by high-level government review processes. ‘Oh, no, they are guilty!’ he said. ‘That’s why they are in there.’ No way you can reason with someone like that, and there are millions like him.”

Steve is right, of course, but hostility, or, more generally, indifference, are nothing new when it comes to responses to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, particularly in the US, and I hope you find, as I do, that, despite this, there is something inspiring about seeing people come together around the world to demonstrate the importance of taking a stand, and refusing to respond to the colossal injustice of Guantánamo either through silence or invisibility.

This was especially important in the week after Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, issued a devastating report about Guantánamo, in which she asserted that, despite some improvements in conditions under President Obama and President Biden, the prison’s ongoing brutality and dehumanization, and its structural failure to provide adequate medical and mental health care to the prisoners, “amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

I hope you can join us for the next vigils, on Wednesday August 2, as we continue to call for the prison’s closure, and, most urgently, for the 16 men approved for release but still held to be freed, and for proper medical and psychological care to be implemented for all of the 30 men still held. As a poster I prepared for the vigils explained, as of July 5, the men approved for release (by high-level US government review processes, and on a unanimous basis) had been held for between 285 and 4,912 days since the US authorities decided that they no longer wanted to hold them, which rather makes a mockery of the entire notion of them being “approved for release” at all.

* * * * *

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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

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