Archive for September, 2025

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Last Wednesday, September 3, the 32nd consecutive monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place at five locations across the US — in Washington, D.C., New York, Portland, OR, Los Angeles and Detroit — and in London and Brussels.

In Kansas, Amnesty International USA death penalty abolition campaigners also joined in, as did former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade, and two dedicated Close Guantánamo supporters in Irvine, CA, and, on Saturday September 6, campaigners in Cobleskill, NY also took part. Mexico City had to cancel this month, but will be back on October 1, and there was no photo from Detroit where, as organizer Geraldine Grunow explained, “Several regular vigilers were away, so we were only three this month. But we got several encouraging honks from passing vehicles.”

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 report, which this month focuses on the 24th anniversary, today, of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which not only led to the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and a network of CIA “black site” torture prisons around the world, but also led to a fatal erosion of the rules governing warfare and the treatment of individuals deprived of their liberty that haunt us to this day.

I was away for the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure last week, on a much-needed trip to Italy with my family, where I undertook a thorough digital detox, switching off from all news of the outside world for eleven days, which I recommend to anyone who struggles not to be overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the 24/7 live-streamed horrors of the world in 2025.

My return, and my belated publication of these photos from the day, coincides, fortuitously, with the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001, which continues to cast a baleful shadow on all of the supposed protections established after the Second World War governing the parameters of warfare and the acceptable treatment of prisoners, even if the relentless focus on it that was repeated every year has now faded away, as almost no one under the age of 30 in the US has any memory of it whatsoever.

The prison at Guantánamo Bay is the last corrosive bastion of the discredited flight from international and domestic laws and treaties that George W. Bush initiated when he launched a global “war on terror” in the wake of the attacks.

Just 15 men are still held — out of the 779 in total held by the US military since the prison was established four months after the 9/11 attacks, on January 11, 2002 — but all are still victims of the chaos that ensues when internationally agreed rules and laws are jettisoned in pursuit of vengeance; in the “war on terror”, via the claim that the severity of the the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 people were killed, was such that it represented a “new paradigm” for the conduct of warfare, in which “quaint” notions like the Geneva Conventions became irrelevant, torture was permissible, the entire world was regarded as a battlefield, and, as then-Vice President Dick Cheney memorably and chillingly declared shortly after the attacks, the US would cross over to “the dark side” to seek revenge and to ensure its future security.

The “black sites” may be long gone, but the damage caused by the recklessness, lawlessness and cruelty of the “war on terror” lives on, both at Guantánamo itself, where six of the 15 men still held — some previously tortured in the “black sites” — have, monstrously, been imprisoned for over two decades without charge or trial, and where the other men — most also previously tortured in the “black sites” — continue to be denied any fundamental justice. Although they have been charged with crimes, the method chosen for their prosecution, the military commissions, unwisely dredged up from the history books by the Bush administration, is so flawed that most of the cases remain deadlocked in a Groundhog Day of endless pre-trial hearings, in which the defense teams seek to expose the full details of the torture to which the men were subjected, while prosecutors do their utmost to prevent it.

Even for those freed — almost all as a result of administrative review processes, rather than any recognized legal basis — many, if not most, remain dogged to some extent by the taint of Guantánamo, with limited rights and limited freedom of movement, despite never having been charged with any crimes.

In numerous cases, men resettled in third countries, because successive US governments have regarded it as unsafe to repatriate them, have found that the elusive freedom they were promised has never materialized, and some have found post-Guantánamo life to be even more arduous and unjust than their experiences at Guantánamo itself, as their host countries have reneged on whatever promises were made in their secret resettlement agreements with the US, while the US itself has largely shown little or no interest in their fate, despite their continuing obligations under international humanitarian law.

Beyond the specific victims of the “war on terror”, the US’s flight from reason, law and decency post-9/11 has also made the world a much darker place, normalizing torture, normalizing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, and normalizing a perilous notion of global warfare in which borders — and notions that any kind of military aggression can only be conducted between two parties that are officially at war — have become irrelevant.

Notoriously, the US itself not only launched two wars of aggression and occupation in response to the 9/11 attacks — in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also behaved as though it was also perfectly acceptable to kidnap people anywhere on earth, to establish torture prisons in other countries, and also to undertake air strikes and drone attacks on countries with which it was not at war.

On this particular anniversary, it’s appropriate, I think, to reflect on how much of the poisonous legacy of the US’s “war on terror” continues to reverberate in particular in the State of Israel, whose long and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people provided a template for the US’s post-9/11 policies of indefinite, extrajudicial imprisonment without charge or trial via the “administrative detention” policies that it has long used to hold Palestinians without charge and without rights in its vast network of abhorrent prisons in which the use of torture is also rife.

In Gaza, where, unthinkably, Israel is nearing the second anniversary of its relentless genocide of the Palestinian people in response to the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — and which President Biden, to his shame, explicitly compared to the 9/11 attacks — it’s worth reflecting that, although not explicitly described as such, Israel’s entire justification for its grotesque slaughter of civilians and its almost entire erasure of Gaza’s built environment is that it is engaged in its own “war on terror”, a war on Hamas in which it has deliberately blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, and frames its grotesque genocidal actions as a legitimate assault on “terrorists.”

In addition, while Israel has never shied away from extrajudicially pursuing and executing individuals abroad who it regarded as enemies — which it was engaged in long before 9/11 — it’s also difficult not to see its actions over the last 23 months — not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also via its targeted assassinations of individuals in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and, most recently, in Qatar and Yemen — as being explicitly perceived within Israel (and in large parts of the US political establishment) as justified by the US’s post-9/11 assertion that, in pursuit of “terrorists”, the entire world is a legitimate battlefield.

If the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks was a disturbing assault on the post-WWII “rules-based order”, Israel’s actions over the last 23 months would seem to amount to the final nail in its coffin. The human cost has also been immense. By even the most conservative estimates, the US-led post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq killed 200 times as many people as were killed on 9/11. Officially, Israel has, to date, killed 60 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed on October 7, but, as experts have definitively established, that is a serious undercount, and Israel may already have passed that unforgivable ratio, confirming that, in the new world disorder that began the day after September 11, 2001, the relentless brandishing of the word “terrorist” is apparently sufficient to justify mass slaughter as revenge on a truly heartbreaking and unforgivable scale.

Hopefully, by next year, when we mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the genocide in Gaza will somehow have been brought to an end, but, even if it is, the monstrous crimes of both the US in its “war on terror” and Israel in its opportunistic reimagining of it (fully backed, of course, by the US and other western countries) need to be so robustly condemned that the blood-stained tide of 21st century history — in which powerful but fundamentally deranged nations have conceived of mass genocidal slaughter as “counter-terrorism” — are fundamentally held accountable so that “never again” might mean what it was meant to mean in the wake of the Nazis’ atrocities in the Second World War.

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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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