Archive for December, 2025
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza: The Equivalent of 3,500 9/11s Or Ten Million Dead Americans
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Sunday, December 14, marked 800 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and yet you could be forgiven for not knowing anything about what is, by any objective measure, an unforgivably grim milestone, because no news network or newspaper in the western world could be bothered to report it.
If you’re reading this because of the headline, then yes, the death toll of the genocide is equivalent to 3,500 9/11s, or the equivalent of ten million Americans having been killed, but I’ll be discussing that in more detail at the end of the article, after running through every aspect of how the last two months of the “ceasefire” don’t constitute any meaningful kind of conclusion to Israel’s atrocities at all.
Since Donald Trump, to his credit, managed to stop Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing of Palestinian civilians two months ago, in return for Hamas handing over the last 20 surviving hostages seized on October 7, 2023, and, subsequently, all but one of the 28 dead hostages, most of the countries of the west, many of whom had started to become a little uneasy about Israel’s naked genocidal intent, have been behaving as though the genocide — or the “war”, as they manipulatively prefer to call it — is over, even though that is patently untrue.
Judge Condemns the Trump Administration’s Illegal and “Impermissibly Punitive” Use of Guantánamo to Hold Migrants
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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
The wheels of justice may grind slowly in the US court system, for reasons that involve various forms of inefficiency, but also the requirement to conduct detailed research into legal precedents. Nevertheless, throughout the Republic’s 249-year history, the courts have repeatedly, if, at times, in a glacial manner, performed a key role in ensuring that the checks and balances in the Constitution — the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government — are enforced.
On December 5, ten months after a particularly noxious example of executive overreach began — the detention of migrants with final deportation orders from the US in detention facilities on the grounds of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a judge in the District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s policy of holding migrants at Guantánamo was both “impermissibly punitive”, as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and was also completely unauthorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
The ruling came in a class action lawsuit, Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, that had first been submitted in June by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals who were held at Guantánamo at the time, but also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class”; namely, “all immigration detainees originally apprehended and detained in the United States, and who are, or will be held at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”
Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights
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Yesterday, December 10, was Human Rights Day, marking the anniversary of the proclamation and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hugely commendable and aspirational template for a better world, in which, to quote from its Preamble, “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” were recognized as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Translated into 577 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, the UDHR is, as the UN explains, “the most translated document in the world”, and is “generally agreed to be the foundation of international human rights law”, having “inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”
These include, as I discussed in an article year ago, entitled, Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (more generally known as the Torture Convention), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Photos and Report: The Last Close Guantánamo Vigils of 2025 Before the 24th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening on Jan. 11, 2026
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Last Wednesday, December 3, groups of stalwart campaigners gathered across the US and around the world for the 35th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The “First Wednesday” vigils took place outside the White House in Washington, D.C., and in London, New York City, Brussels, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, OR, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also holding a solo vigil in Belgrade. Further vigils took place in Cobleskill, NY on Saturday December 6, and outside the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday December 7.
As usual, 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, including NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture), whose banners feature prominently at some of the vigils.
Please see below for the photos, and comments from the participants, and read on for my reflections on the grimness of this particular milestone, as we near what ought to have been unthinkable — the 24th anniversary, on January 11, 2026, of the opening of the Guantánamo prison, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
