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.

As always, I’m deeply impressed that, across the US and in other locations globally, many dozens of people are prepared, once a month, to invest their time in taking a stand to try to pierce the veil of amnesia that has largely engulfed the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Our reasons are as essential as ever. The “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay is the last bastion of a terrifying lawlessness that gripped the US after 9/11, when, largely under the direction of George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who escaped any future hope of accountability when he died last month at the age of 84, the entire world was reimagined as a “battlefield”, all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners were discarded, a global kidnap and torture program was established, and the 779 men and boys sent to Guantánamo to be held by the US military slipped into a legal black hole.

At Guantánamo, the Bush administration asserted that all these prisoners, rounded up in a largely arbitrary and indiscriminate manner, could be held indefinitely without charge or trial, even though no effort was made to establish whether there were any grounds for having detained them in the first place. For those regarded as significant enough to face trials, a parallel justice system — the military commissions — was established in a fortunately failed effort to swiftly try and execute men using information derived through the use of torture.

I’’m pretty sure that all of us who have campaigned for many long years — even decades — for the closure of Guantánamo find that our actions are inspired by a message popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., drawing on the words of the 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Fundamentally, addressing longstanding injustices requires not only patience, but also hope, an essential antidote to either despair or an indifference brought about through a perceived, and deliberately engineered sense of powerlessness from those who claim to be our leaders, and the mainstream media who support them, which has become ever more dominant throughout the 21st century, as attempts to distract us from ever-increasing greed, barbarism and inequality have become ever more pronounced.

It is, however, sometimes hard to hold onto hope, to believe that, against the odds in a moral landscape dominated by increasing savagery and unfairness, justice can eventually prevail.

In Gaza, for example, where a western-backed genocide still rages, it can be difficult to imagine that, after 77 years of the brutal colonial occupation of the Palestinians’ land by Israeli settlers, that moral arc will ever locate justice.

At Guantánamo, the persistent injustice is fresher, even as we prepare to mark 24 years of its existence, but it is still an extraordinary amount of time for such an icon of chronic injustice to still be in existence — and still with no end in sight to its incessant erosion of the rights of the men still held.

On a more optimistic note, however, as I will be writing about in more detail soon, the moral arc of Guantánamo’s more recent additional use — as a cynical way station for migrants deported by the Trump administration via the invented urgency of an entirely manufactured “war on migrants” — has located justice in a much shorter period.

In June, in Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, a case in the District Court in Washington, D.C., various NGOs challenged the Trump administration’s use of Guantánamo to hold migrants with final deportation orders, and on December 5, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s policy 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.

It remains to be seen if the Trump administration will appeal, but for now it is commendable that the moral arc of justice has been recognized in a court of law with regard to Guantánamo and immigration detention, and, although the ruling has no impact on the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison, and entombed under Donald Trump, it is also reassuring that, in her ruling, Judge Sooknanan made a point of noting that, since the prison opened, it “has been synonymous with pervasive mistreatment and indefinite detention.”

We hope you can join us next month, to mark the 24th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, which is a Sunday. As usual, we’ll be moving our “First Wednesday” vigils to the day of the anniversary — or, in some locations, the day before, Saturday January 10 — before resuming the “First Wednesday” vigils on Wednesday February 4.

Note: Thanks to Popular Resistance for re-posting this article on December 9.

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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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