Photos and Report: Eleven Coordinated Global Monthly Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure on September 4, 2024

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Huge thanks to everyone who took part in the latest coordinated global monthly vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on September 4, 2024. My apologies for taking so long to collate the photos and to post this report, but on the day of the vigils I flew out to Sicily on a family holiday, where I was offline as part of a ten-day digital detox — a pause in the relentlessness of the bad news that plagues us on so many fronts, which I can heartily recommend to all activists and campaigners at risk of burnout from atrocity overload.

I initiated the vigils in February last year, on the first Wednesday of every month, in recognition of the need for the plight of the men still held at Guantánamo to be highlighted on a more regular basis than the annual vigils that take place on January 11 every year, marking the anniversary of the prison’s opening, and I’m delighted that, after the first coordinated vigils involving campaigners in Washington, D.C. and London (where monthly vigils had resumed in September 2022 after a long hiatus), other friends and colleagues came on board in the months that followed, including New York City and Mexico City, Brussels, Cobleskill, NY and Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis and San Francisco, from organizations including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture), and the UK Guantánamo Network.

This month, we were delighted to welcome Portland, Oregon to our global family of peaceful warriors against the ongoing and largely ignored injustices of Guantánamo, with Dan Shea of Veterans for Peace Chapter 72 organizing the first vigil in the US Northwest.

Please check out the rest of the photos — and more reports from the organizers — below.

Also taking part in the vigils was Jon Krampner, who undertook a solo vigil in Los Angeles, and stated, “Like Horatio at the bridge, I stood in front of the Downtown Los Angeles Federal building from 12:15 to 1:20 pm this afternoon in my orange jumpsuit and black hood, with my AI Close Guantanamo sign. Two people took photos of me. Following protocol, I handed them a slip of paper with my e-mail address on it in 16-point bold type. When I got home, there was nothing from either of them in my e-mail. I seem to need to approach five people to get one response, and I don’t always get that many people. This happens every month. My theory is that they’re concerned giving their e-mail address to a stranger walking around in a prison jumpsuit is not such a good idea. I’ll try the Westwood Federal Building next month — more traffic, I’m sure, but a crosstown drive looms.”

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At the vigils, some of those involved highlighted the plight of 16 of the 30 men still held who have long been approved for release, but who, shamefully, continue to be held because those decisions were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the Biden administration to actually free them if, as is apparent, they can’t actually be bothered to prioritize their release.

As was revealed in May, eleven of these 16 men (Yemenis who cannot be sent home because US law prevents their repatriation) were supposed to have been freed almost a year ago, in October 2023, when a plane was on the runway at Guantánamo, ready to take them for resettlement in Oman. However, that flight was called off at the last moment after the Biden administration concluded that the “political optics” had shifted after the attacks by Hamas and other militants in Israel on October 7.

No new date has been announced for their release, and in the meantime Oman’s reputation as a safe haven for former prisoners in need of resettlement was dealt a serious blow last month when 28 Yemenis resettled between 2015 and 2017 were repatriated, mostly unwillingly, with no reason provided by the Omani authorities, and with a US government spokesman alarmingly claiming that the US government had “never had an expectation that former Guantánamo detainees would indefinitely remain in receiving countries”, even though that position failed to explain where resettled prisoners are supposed to go if their resettlements are finite — or, indeed, how, in the cases of the Yemenis, it was somehow regarded as acceptable for them to be repatriated, even though that is illegal under US law, if those repatriations took place through temporary resettlement in a third country.

As the injustice of Guantánamo grinds on, I’m grateful to everyone who continues to highlight its glaring injustices, and the indifference of the US government, the mainstream media and most of the American people.

I hope you can join us for the next vigils, on Wednesday October 2 — and if there isn’t a vigil near you, please feel free to set up your own! I also hope that you will join us the day before, wherever you are, in taking a photo of yourself with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s latest poster, available via the Gitmo Clock website (which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open), marking 8,300 days of Guantánamo’s existence on October 1, and calling on President Biden to close it without further delay. For some inspiration, check out the photos of people across the US and around the world holding up previous posters from this year here and here.

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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.