Photos and Report: The Ten Coordinated Global Monthly Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on August 7, 2024

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On Wednesday (August 7) campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay marked 18 months of monthly coordinated global vigils for the prison’s closure at seven locations across the US — Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cobleskill, NY and Los Angeles — and in London and Brussels, with a delayed vigil taking place the day after in Mexico City. The campaigners represent numerous organizations committed to the closure of Guantánamo, including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture) and the UK Guantánamo Network, with numerous other supporting organizations.

In addition, in Los Angeles, Jon Krampner held a solo vigil outside the US Post Office in the Los Feliz (90027) neighborhood of Los Angeles, but no one was available to take a photo of him. Describing his vigil, Jon stated, “The main person who engaged me, a pleasant middle-aged man with a vaguely Mittel-European accent, said I should emphasize how absurdly expensive it is per prisoner, rather than the human rights angle, since no one seems to care much about human rights these days.”

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I initiated the vigils last February, initially with just London and Washington, D.C. on board, although other locations swiftly joined in, following up on monthly vigils initiated in London in September 2022 , which were themselves a revival of an extraordinary run of weekly vigils in Parliament Square that used to take place when British prisoners were still held. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and anyone anywhere around the world is welcome to join us. If there isn’t vigil near you, feel free to start your own!

My intention, when I initiated the vigils last February, was not just to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, beyond the annual vigils that take place on January 11 every year, marking the anniversary of the prison’s opening, but also to provide a local focus every month for campaigners to regularly find and celebrate solidarity with each other through their shared interest in the largely forgotten scandal of Guantánamo, but also to celebrate this through a global sense of solidarity, in which each local group is empowered by knowing that, elsewhere, other like-minded people are doing the same.

It’s fair to say, I think, that it has been successful in this intent, even though the mainstream media remain resolutely uninterested. There may not be many of us involved, but we have become a global community, reminding each other that the effort to highlight the monstrous, chronic and ongoing injustice of Guantánamo is always worth the effort, and that, although our numbers are small, our hearts are big, and anything that helps shine a regular light on Guantánamo, lost in the mists of the United States of Amnesia, is fundamentally worthwhile.

On the vigils, we continue to focus not just on demands for the closure of the prison, but also particularly on the plight of the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but who continue to be held because the decisions taken to release them were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the Biden administration to free them if, as is apparent, they have no desire to prioritize their release. As of August 7, these men had been held for between 684 and 1,378 days since the decisions to approve them for release were taken, and in three outlying cases for 5,311 days.

The Biden administration’s indifference to these men’s continued imprisonment particularly became evident in May, when news broke that eleven of the men had been supposed to be freed in October, and resettled in Oman, which has successfully resettled dozens of former prisoners, but that their flight had been cancelled, while their plane was on the runway at Guantánamo, because of the perceived “political optics” following the attacks in Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7. Shamefully, no new date has been set for their release.

We were also all acutely aware, at this particular vigil, that the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, had just revoked plea deals for three of the other men still held, all accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This was profoundly dispiriting news, because the plea deals, which prosecutors have been working on for the last 27 months, represent the only grown-up realization that successful prosecutions are impossible, as a result of the torture to which the men were subjected in CIA “black sites.” This position, taken by those who’ve been bogged down in pre-trial hearings for 12 years, is in marked contrast to the position taken by Lloyd Austin, who, for nakedly political reasons, has refused to acknowledge this painful truth.

We hope you can join us next month, on Wednesday September 4, as we continue to call for Guantánamo’s closure, for freedom for the 16 men approved for release, and for justice for the other 14 men still held.

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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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