Photos and Report: Ten Close Guantánamo Monthly Global Vigils on June 5, 2024 Condemn Lawless and Unending Imprisonment

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On Wednesday, campaigners in ten locations across the US and around the world held the latest monthly coordinated global vigils calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which, on June 23, will have been open for 8,200 days.

The monthly vigils, which I initiated last February, took place in Washington, D.C., New York, London, Mexico City, Brussels, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Detroit, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, and focused, as usual, not just on calls for the prison’s eventual closure, but also for the immediate release of 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release, but are still held because the decisions to release them — taken unanimously by high-level US government review processes — were, nevertheless, purely administrative. This means that no legal mechanism exists to compel the Biden administration to free them, if, as is increasingly apparent, President Biden and Antony Blinken have no interest in prioritizing their release.

As the poster that I update every month shows, as of June 5, these men had been held for between 621 and 1,315 days since the decisions were taken to release them, and, in three outlying cases, for 5,248 days. Any country that tolerates this cannot be said to have the slightest respect for the law, or, indeed, for any fundamental human notions of decency.

Please check out the photos below, for confirmation of what global solidarity, albeit on small scale, looks like. As Natalia, our friend and colleague in Mexico City, says every month, “Small vigils, big hearts!”

Since last month’s vigils, we’ve learned, via four Biden administration officials who spoke anonymously to NBC News, that eleven of the 16 men long approved for release — all Yemenis — were supposed to have been resettled in Oman in October, but that President Biden intervened to stop their resettlement, even though a plane had already been prepared to take them, because of the “political optics after Hamas’ attack on Israel.”

Shamefully, no new date has been set for their release to take place.

I wrote about the disgraceful politicization of these men’s freedom — which only reinforces the lawlessness of their continued imprisonment — in an article following up on NBC News’ breaking story entitled, Guantánamo Scandal: Eleven Men Were Set to Be Freed Last October, Until “Political Optics” Shifted After Hamas’ Attack on Israel, and, needless to say, all of us who care about bringing to an end the horrors of Guantánamo will continue to relentlessly demand the release of these men until they are finally freed.

The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and, next month, take place on July 3, the day before US Independence Day, and the day before the UK General Election. I hope you can join us — or set up your own vigil!

In the meantime, if you’d like to make a gesture of support, please take a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking 8,200 days of Guantánamo’s existence, on June 23, and send it to the campaign’s email address here. We had an unprecedented response to our calls for photos marking 8,000 days in December, 8,036 days on January 11 (the 22nd anniversary of the prison’s opening), and 8,100 days in March, and we hope you’ll join us for this next grim milestone in Guantánamo’s unforgivably long history, to send a message to President Biden that its continuing existence is a virus that eats away at the US’s ability to regard itself as anything other than a grotesque betrayer of the principles that it claims to hold dear.

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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.