Photos and Report: The Coordinated Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on October 4, 2023

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UPDATE October 12: Added below are four photos from the UK Guantánamo Network‘s vigil in Parliament Square, in London, which took place a week late, on Wednesday October 11, because of a train strike on October 4.

On Wednesday October 4, the latest monthly coordinated vigils for the closure of Guantánamo took place in eleven locations worldwide — Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, Raleigh, NC, Mexico City, Brussels, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, and Minneapolis, although in the latter location no photographer was available. In London, we delayed our vigil for a week until October 11, because of a train strike, and I’ll be adding photos next week.

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

For the previous vigils, please see my reports from March, April, May, June, July, August and September, all accompanied by numerous photos.

While all the campaigners were calling for the closure of Guantánamo, a specific focus of vigils is to urge the Biden administration to stop dragging its heels when it comes to freeing the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have been unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes. At some locations campaigners were holding a poster I prepared showing how long they have been held since those decisions were taken — as of October 4, shamefully, between 376 and 1,041 days, and, in three cases, 5,003 days.

The only reason the US can continue to hold these men, despite having approved them for release, is because those decisions involved administrative processes, which have no legal weight, meaning that the prisoners cannot appeal to a judge to order their release when the administration has so dispiritingly failed to free them. What that means, sadly and shamefully, is that they are effectively still held as fundamentally without rights as they were when Guantánamo opened, 7,940 days ago today.

The next vigils are on Wednesday November 1, and Wednesday December 6 — and that latter date also marks 8,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence. For many years now, via the Close Guantánamo campaign, I’ve been inviting people to send in photos of themselves with posters marking every 100 days of the prison’s existence, so December 6 will be the perfect opportunity to have 8,000 days posters at the vigils, to accompany what I hope will be a significant response from other individual supporters around the world. Please do join us!

See below for the poster by Gavrilah Wells, adapted from a poster initially prepared by Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International USA, advertising next month’s vigils. And if a location near you isn’t listed, please do set up your own — but don’t forget to let me know, and to send photos.

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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 (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.