Photos and Report: August’s Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Mark What Is Now A Doubly Forgotten Prison

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Last Wednesday (August 6), our small but dedicated global family of campaigners came together for the 31st successive month at our “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Nine vigils took place — five in the US, in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit, with others in London, Brussels, Mexico City and Belgrade, where the former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi held a solo vigil. Campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joined us on the Saturday (August 9).

My thanks as always to the dedication of everyone involved, from organizations including numerous Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations.

Please see below for photos from the vigils, and read on for my analysis of the current situation at Guantánamo, and why I stated in the headline that it is now a “doubly forgotten” prison.

Regular campaigners for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay are used to its very existence being engulfed in a fog of amnesia, even though, on July 28, it had been open for 8,600 days, and even though, amongst the 15 men still held there, apparently interminably, are five men allegedly responsible for, or involved in the most significant terrorist attacks in US history, the attacks of September 11, 2001, whose 24th anniversary is just a month away.

Although six of the 15 men have active charges against them, one is in limbo after a DoD sanity board found him unfit to stand trial, one agreed to a plea deal, and another is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial in 2008 in which he refused to mount a defense, the six other men have never been charged.

Three have long been approved for release by high-level US government review processes — one in the early days of Obama’s presidency, although he is a stateless Rohingya Muslim who has never sought legal representation, and apparently refuses to cooperate with the authorities.

The three other are “forever prisoners”, never charged but not approved for release either — Abu Zubaydah, the first and most notorious victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, a Libyan about whom little is known, and an Afghan who was the last man to arrive at the prison in March 2008.

Despite condemnation of the treatment of these men by various UN Special Mandate holders, pressure exerted on the Biden administration, while securing the release of 25 men during his presidency, left the remainder in various unacceptable states of legal limbo, or complete abandonment, and this situation, unsurprisingly, has not changed under Donald Trump, who spent his first term in office almost entirely ignoring Guantánamo (and freeing only one man through a court order), after even his own advisers told him that his plan to “fill it up with bad dudes”, as he had intended, was a bad idea.

Guantánamo, then as now, is not a place for justice, but this time around Trump came up with a new idea: using it to hold migrants as part of the mass deportation program that he promised on the campaign trail and began delivering on his first day in office. In February, Trump seemed enthusiastic about using Guantánamo as a theater of performative cruelty, even illegally co-opting part of the “war on terror” prison to hold nearly 200 Venezuelans, who were all described as dangerous gang members, even though those claims evaporated on contact with reality, and the Venezuelans were soon deported back to their home country.

Hundreds more came and went in the months that followed, but after a flurry of additional interest in June, when a leak from within the administration indicated that plans were being discussed to deliver 9,000 migrants, including 800 Europeans to Guantánamo — a plan that may have well have been leaked to derail it, as numerous European countries publicly expressed outrage — the migrant story largely went quiet, even though a new and alarming twist was revealed in July.

As I reported at the time, following up on a CBS News story, 72 migrants were held at the time, including, according to a Department of Homeland Security list that was made public, 26 named individuals from a variety of countries, including the UK, who had all apparently been convicted of serious crimes.

The news more or less coincided with successful efforts by the administration to send other convicted criminals to third countries — specifically, South Sudan and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), which received eight men and five men respectively. The focus on migrants with criminal records was undoubtedly in response to the entirely self-inflicted embarrassment the administration had suffered through lying repeatedly about migrants it sought to abuse and deport being criminals and gang members, when no  evidence existed to back up their claims, however hysterically they were repeated.

Despite this, however, it remains profoundly alarming that the administration is so desperate to inflict cruelty on migrants that, by locating men with criminal records, and sending them to third countries, it is essentially replicating the “extraordinary rendition” program of the Bush administration in the “war on terror”, and showing complete contempt for the long-established legal prohibitions on sending anyone, regardless of whatever crimes they may have committed, to third countries without guarantees that they will be safe from torture, “disappearance” or even death.

No protections seem to have been put in place by the Trump administration, which appears content to let the host countries do what they want with these men, and while this in itself is unacceptable, it also suggests that the 26 migrants at Guantánamo with criminal records are also being lined up for a one-way trip to a country that is not their home. It is, moreover, quite startling that nothing more has been heard of these men for the last six weeks, not even the British national.

As I await further news, I hope you’ll join us for the next vigils, on Wednesday September 3, when, as well as highlighting the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, we’ll also be calling for no more migrant detentions at Guantánamo, and no more third country deportations, and opposing the expansion of ICE facilities on the US mainland, including the notorious Guantánamo-like “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades.

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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