8,000 Days of Guantánamo: Vigils Take Place Around the World and 170 Former Prisoners, Lawyers, Politicians and Campaigners Join Photo Campaign

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.

Wednesday December 6 was a big day for Guantánamo activism, as it marked 8,000 days since the prison opened, and also coincided with the date for the latest global vigils, calling for the closure of Guantánamo, which I initiated in February, and which have been taking place across the US, in London, Mexico City, and elsewhere, every month since.

To mark 8,000 wretched and unforgivably long days of the prison’s existence, I encouraged anti-Guantánamo campaigners around the world to take a photo with the 8,000 days poster, hosted on the Gitmo Clock website, an initiative of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established nearly 12 years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo.

The Gitmo Clock has been counting, in real time, how long Guantánamo has been open for nearly six years, since the 16th anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, 2018, when the lamentable Donald Trump was president, and when the prison had been open for 5,845 days.

Since then, supporters of the long struggle to get Guantánamo closed — including former prisoners, lawyers and academics and the odd politician and celebrity, as well as many hundreds of grass-roots activists — have taken photos with posters marking every 100 days of the prison’s existence, as well as each anniversary of the prison’s opening. We marked 6,000 days on June 15, 2018, and 7,000 days on March 11, 2021, and I’m sure we’re all hoping that, after marking 8,000 days this week, we won’t have to mark 9,000 days of the prison’s existence on September 1, 2026.

If you have the time, please do check out the 170 photos we received (80 here, and another 90 on a second page here) to mark 8,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence, which include photos from four former prisoners, two lawyers, the great Irish independent MEPs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace (who hosted an extraordinary event about Guantánamo at the end of September), as well as a whole range of campaigners from around the world, but particularly from the US and the UK.

I’d like to give a special mention to Gavrilah Wells, a tireless activist in San Francisco, who took nearly 50 of the photos, on various protests over the last month, as well as at Amnesty International meetings. As I wrote to her in an email, “I am so impressed by your dedication, and your photos quite beautifully capture a cross-section of those involved in protest and human rights in San Francisco, providing a brilliant snapshot of the other America — left-wing, multi-cultural — that we don’t always hear about. They should be featured in an SF paper or magazine, if such a thing exists anymore.”

Gavrilah wrote back, “Your collection of photos are absolutely fantastic, WOW. Not only do they call out to President Biden but they also help all of us feel connected and in community with each other, it is great to see everyone’s beautiful and kind faces including Mansoor, Mohamedou, you, family members, Clive Stafford Smith, Clare Daley and so many others!”

The 8,000 days vigils

As well as coordinating and publishing the photos (which took me until 4.30am on Thursday morning), I also attended the London vigil on the Wednesday and also sourced and sifted through the photos from the other vigils to present this snapshot of coordinated protest around the world — in Washington, D.C., in New York City, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, in Brussels, Copenhagen, Cobleskill, NY and Detroit.

These photos are posted above and below, along with a selection of other 8,000 days photos, and I hope you find them inspiring, and will join us on January 11, 2024 — in just five weeks’ time — when the prison will have been open for 8,036 days.

To mark the 22nd anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, the date of next month’s coordinated vigils has been moved to Thursday January 11 (with the exception of London, where a march and rally is taking place on Saturday January 13). Normal service will, however, be resumed in February, with vigils taking place on Wednesday February 7, and, thereafter, on the first Wednesday of every month.

With President Biden about to enter his last year in office, we hope you will join us, in whatever way you can, to try to exert pressure on him to at least make progress towards the closure of Guantánamo in what little time remains, primarily by securing the release of the 16 men still held (out of 30 in total), who have long been approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but who are still held.

As I noted in a poster I update every month, on December 6, disgracefully, these men had been held for between 439 and 1,133 days since the US authorities first decided that they no longer wanted to continue holding them indefinitely without charge or trial — and, in three cases, for an almost incomprehensible 5,066 days.

How can they do this? Sadly, it’s because the decisions taken were purely administrative, meaning that the men and their lawyers cannot appeal to a judge if the authorities find it inconvenient or difficult to set them free, or, in the majority of cases, to find third countries that are prepared to offer them new homes, because of provisions in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that prevent their release to their home countries.

Help us to tell President Biden as forcefully as possible how unforgivable it is that these victims of “administrative detention” continue to be held, with no idea of when, if ever, they will actually be freed.

* * * * *

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.