Photos and Report: The 34th Monthly Global Close Guantánamo Vigils on Nov. 5, Also Marking 8,700 Days of the Prison’s Existence

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On Wednesday November 5, campaigners calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay — and an end to its more recent use to hold migrants seized in Donald Trump’s disturbing “war on migrants” — gathered at significant locations across the US and globally for the 34th successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils.

The “First Wednesday” vigils took place in Washington, D.C., London, New York, Brussels, Portland, Detroit and Los Angeles — with San Francisco following on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8 — and former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sending a photo from an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art in Giessen, in Germany.

As ever, the vigils involved committed campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Veterans for Peace, 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, and I’m immensely grateful to our small but dedicated family of global activists for their dedication to shining a light on an enduring injustice that, shamefully, has largely been swallowed up in amnesia and inertia.

The vigils also coincided with another grim milestone in Guantánamo’s seemingly interminable history — 8,700 days since the prison opened, on January 11, 2002. As part of an ongoing initiative that I’ve been running for nearly eight years via the the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I co-founded in 2012, and its Gitmo Clock website, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open, I promote posters marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, and encourage supporters to take photos with the poster and send them to us. All this year’s photos can be found on the website here, and some are included in the photos from the vigils posted below.

Please also read on for my reflections on the context for this month’s vigils, which coincided with the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, but which was overshadowed by Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York Mayoral Election, and the death, the day before, of Dick Cheney, former US Vice President (under George W. Bush), and the architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the CIA’s torture program and the illegal invasion of Iraq.

In the run-up to this month’s vigils, I had feared that a shadow might hang over them because November 5 was the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second Presidential Election victory. In the end, however, Trump’s anniversary was entirely eclipsed — negated even — by the resounding victory in the New York Mayoral Election of Zohran Mamdani, the young, articulate Muslim socialist immigrant, whose positive message of hope triumphed over the racism and negativity of his opponents — his discredited former opponent Andrew Cuomo, and high-profile interlopers including Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

At the press conference following his victory, Mamdani, to uproarious applause, stated, unequivocally, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants — and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”

A second event also overshadowed Trump on Wednesday — the death, the day before, of Dick Cheney, the Vice President under George W. Bush, at the age of 84. Cheney was the architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program — which he chillingly hinted at in an interview on “Meet the Press” just after 9/11, when he said that the government was going to “have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will” — and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

In relation to the torture program and the Iraq invasion, I have always found it particularly significant that, as I explained in 2009, “when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of the Khalden military training camp in Afghanistan, was captured at the end of 2001 and sent to Egypt to be tortured, he made a false confession that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.” As I added, “Al-Libi later recanted his confession, but not until Secretary of State Colin Powell — to his eternal shame — had used the story in February 2003 in an attempt to persuade the UN to support the invasion of Iraq.”

As I further explained, “The failure of torture to produce genuine evidence was exactly what was required by those, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and other Iraq obsessives, who wished to betray America doubly, firstly by endorsing the use of torture in defiance of almost universal disapproval from government agencies and military lawyers, and secondly by using it not to prevent terrorist attacks, but to justify an illegal war.”

While a handful of the 15 men still held at Guantánamo primarily owe their decades of lawless imprisonment to Cheney’s partner in crime, the late and equally unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, who died in June 2021 and was the defense secretary when Guantánamo was established, most of them were the victims of Cheney’s beloved CIA torture program, held in notorious “black sites” until their arrival at Guantánamo, mostly in September 2006.

Cheney was also the driver of the military commissions, the notorious trial system dredged up from the history books, which initially envisaged executions following swift trials using information obtained through torture. Although the Supreme Court shut down this first version of the military commissions in June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, they still linger on, in twice-reconstituted versions that remain unfit for purpose.

In addition, Cheney’s baleful influence impacted everyone held at Guantánamo, through his push for all the prisoners to be deprived of the protections of the Geneva Conventions (only overturned in Hamdan), which led to the men held — as “enemy combatants” — to be deprived of all rights, as though the US was no longer a constitutional republic, but an overt dictatorship.

Ironically, although Cheney turned against Donald Trump in his later years, it was his obsession with unfettered executive power (an obsession that he shared with Rumsfeld, forged in their formative political years in the wake of the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon) that helped to facilitate the contempt for all forms of restraint and for the checks and balances in the Constitution that Trump and those backing him (particularly in the malignant Project 2025 underpinning his presidency) are currently inflicting on the entire US political and judicial system.

It is thoroughly dispiriting that, while Cheney passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, not only evading all accountability, but also feted by the mainstream media as a “giant of Republican politics” (that quote is, shamefully, from the Guardian), his victims continue to languish in Guantánamo, prematurely aged by the torture they endured, subjected, as they always have been, to chronic and deliberate medical neglect, and with no sign of when, if ever, any of them will either be released, or delivered anything resembling justice.

Do join us if you can for the next vigils, on Wednesday December 3, the last vigils before the 24th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2026. That’s a Sunday, and, as usual, we’ll be moving the vigils to that date, and joining with other groups across the US and around the world, before returning to our regular “First Wednesday” vigils on February 4.

But for now, please see below for the rest of the photos from this month’s vigils.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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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