Photos and Report: The Ten Coordinated Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on July 3, 2024

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My thanks, as always, to the campaigners in ten different locations across the US and around the world who came together on Wednesday (July 3), to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — in Washington, D.C., London, New York City, Mexico City, Brussels, San Francisco, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, from organizations including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait and the UK Guantánamo Network, and with supporting organizations including the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

The vigils in Minneapolis and Los Angeles took place without being recorded. From Minneapolis, Aaron Tovo wrote, “Our hands were full holding up banners so nobody was about to get a picture. Overall, traffic was light because of the July 4 holiday but the weather was beautiful and we had a good time out there.” In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Jon Krampner went down to City Hall in his orange jumpsuit, with his Amnesty placard, but found it largely deserted, although a group of young black women asked him if he had just gotten out of jail. As usual, because he has no phone or camera, he asked people to take photos of him and to send them to him, but nothing arrived in his inbox.

It was a historic day — for different reasons — in the UK and the US. In the former, those of us who gathered in Parliament Square, opposite the Houses of Parliament, were aware that it was, almost certainly, the last day of 14 ruinous years of Tory rule, an expectation that was fulfilled the day after, when the Tories were wiped out, and the Labour Party secured a massive majority.

In the US, meanwhile, those who gathered outside the White House and across the country were aware that it was the day before Independence Day, when, this year in particular, the promise of freedom from executive tyranny, first enacted 248 years ago, was cruelly betrayed just two days before, when, on July 1, the Supreme Court, tipped into a fascist majority by Donald Trump’s three appointments, continued their remorseless progress towards reinventing the US as a kind of Gilead (the misogynist religious dictatorship at the heart of Margaret Attwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”) by ruling that no laws can prevent the president from doing whatever he wants in the claimed pursuit of his role as commander in chief — or, to put it another way, that any “official acts” a president takes — even beyond the office’s “core constitutional functions” — enjoy “presumptive immunity” from prosecution.

To be fair, although this ruling is an abomination, it isn’t news to those of us campaigning against the existence of Guantánamo for the last 22 years, because the establishment of that enduring symbol of US lawlessness was an early indicator of executive overreach, a dream come true for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who, when serving under Ronald Reagan, had embraced the notion of the Unitary Executive Theory, which, as they saw it, meant that neither Congress nor the federal courts can tell the President what to do or how to do it, particularly regarding national security matters.

As always on our vigils, we were not only calling for the closure of Guantánamo, which will have been open for 22 and a half years on Thursday, but also, specifically, for the release of the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release, but are still held because the decisions that were taken to approve them to be freed were purely administrative, and no legal mechanism exists to oblige the government to release them if, as is apparent, they have no interest in prioritizing their release.

Every month I update a poster showing how long these men have been waiting to be freed since those decisions were taken, which showed that, on July 3, they had been waiting for between 649 and 1,343 days to be freed, and in three outlying cases for 5,276 days, and this poster can be seen in the second of the additional London photos below.

The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of the month, and you’re most welcome to join us at the next vigils, on August 7.

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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.

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