Photos and Report: Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure on March 6 Demand Freedom for 16 Men Long Approved for Release

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On Wednesday (March 6), campaigners in seven locations across the US, and in London, held the 14th successive coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, with campaigners in Brussels and Copenhagen undertaking vigils on the previous days.

I initiated the monthly vigils last February, following the example set in London, when campaigners (myself included) with the UK Guantánamo Network had begun holding monthly vigils outside Parliament in September 2022, and I feel very honored to have friends, colleagues and comrades in a global community who are prepared to make a stand for Guantánamo, even though our numbers are small, and we are faced with almost complete indifference from politicians, from the media, and from most of our fellow citizens.

To many people, I suspect, the efforts of our small global community may seem pointless. Why protest, they might say, when no one seems to notice, when it seems to make no difference? To those people, however, I would say that they misunderstand the struggle against injustice, which is fundamentally continuous, that they fail to comprehend that our gestures are against an injustice that tears at the heart of what the United States likes to believe about itself, and that they also fail to understand that our efforts carry meaning to those who have suffered the injustices of Guantánamo, and, we hope, will be mentioned to those still held by their lawyers, to let them know that they haven’t been forgotten.

Our vigils this month were spearheaded by activists in Washington, D.C., including members of the campaigning group Witness Against Torture, who, as shown above, gathered at the White House “to remind the President, in case he hadn’t noticed, that his ‘Special Representative for Guantánamo’ has failed to address the plight of the 16 men who have been cleared for release for way too long,” in the words of Helen Schietinger, one of the vigil’s organizers.

Campaigners also gathered in London, in New York (despite heavy rain), in San Francisco, in Cobleskill, NY, in Minneapolis and Detroit, and on the previous days, as noted above, in Brussels and Copenhagen, as shown in the photos above and below. In Los Angeles, Jon Krampner held a solo vigil at the Downtown Los Angeles Federal Building, where, as he said, “No one interacted with me, so I am unable to send you a photo,” although his persistence is much appreciated. Missing from the photos is the bright sunlight of Mexico City, where campaigners had to delay their vigil until next week, although I’ll be adding their photos in due course.

A particular focus of the vigils, as Helen noted, is the plight to the 16 men still held at Guantánamo who have long been approved for release. I’ve been promoting their situation since the monthly vigils began, via a “Free the Guantánamo 16” poster showing the 16 men, and a second poster, updated every month, showing how long they have been held since the US authorities first decided that no longer wanted to hold them. On March 6, shockingly, these men had been held for between 530 and 1,224 days since those decisions were first taken, and in three outlying cases for 5,157 days, as the photo below shows.

I’ve currently profiling these men in a series of ten articles, published alternately here and on the Close Guantánamo website, and you can find the first five articles here, here, here, here and here, with the rest to follow throughout the rest of March.

Please also note that next Thursday, March 15, marks 8,100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, and I’d like to ask you to take part in our ongoing photo campaign, taking a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s 8,100 days poster, urging President Biden to close the prison, which can be found here, on the campaign’s Gitmo Clock website, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open.

We mark every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence via photos with these posters (as well as the anniversaries of the prison’s opening), and have now been running the photo campaign for over six years, with particularly enthusiastic responses for our posters marking 8,000 days of the prison’s existence in December (see here and here), and marking 8,036 days on the 22nd anniversary of its opening, on January 11.

Please do get involved if you can by taking a photo with the poster and sending it to the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you want to be involved with the vigils, they take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and further details can be found here. You’re also most welcome to set up your own vigil, if there isn’t one near you, but please let me know if you do, and take a photo if you can.

POSTSCRIPT March 13: Below are photos from the vigil in Mexico City, which was delayed by a week, and which took place at what Natalia Rivera Scott described as “a very special place in the city, the Arab kiosk in a neighborhood called Santa María la Ribera.” With Nat in the photos (taken by Alli McCracken) were Mary and Nacho, and in the second photo Nat is holding the Spanish version of the poster marking 8,100 days of Guantánamo’s existence on March 15. Please feel free to join us!

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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.