Guantánamo: Vigils Mark the 24th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison on January 11

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With all the horrors going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and yet, this Sunday, January 11, campaigners around the world — myself included — will be marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of this uniquely lawless facility, which opened on January 11, 2002 when the first flight of 20 prisoners arrived from US prisons in Afghanistan.

We’ll be marking this grim anniversary with vigils across the US and around the world, at which we’ll also be calling for freedom or long-delayed justice for the 15 men still held, and for an end to Donald Trump’s illegal use of the prison to hold migrants seized in the disgraceful, racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office for the second time nearly a year ago, promising the largest deportation program in US history, and setting loose armed and unaccountable thugs on the streets of US towns and cities.

Although the existence of the “war on terror” prison has been largely lost in a fog of amnesia for more years than most of us care to remember, it still remains hugely significant that, for 24 years now, and on an ongoing basis, successive US governments have lawlessly claimed that they have the right to hold people at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if they are to be charged and tried, to do so in a broken system, the military commissions, that, after 24 years, must be irrevocably judged to have proven itself incapable of delivering justice.

779 men — and boys — have been held by the US military at Guantánamo since it opened. 532 were released by George W. Bush, 196 under Barack Obama, and just one – reluctantly, because of a plea deal — in Donald Trump’s first term in office. 25 more were released under Joe Biden, but no one has any expectation that any of the 15 men still held will be freed in Donald Trump’s second term in office, because, as in his first term, his only interest in the “war on terror” prison is to keep the men held there entombed forever.

Instead, as became horribly apparent shortly after he took office for the second time, Trump’s addled mind picked up on a suggestion that Guantánamo was a good place to establish a theater of performative cruelty in his “war on migrants”, inspired by the rhetoric and the visible cruelty of the “war on terror.”

Since February last year, around 730 migrants have been held at Guantánamo, although all or almost all of them have subsequently been repatriated or sent back to ICE detention facilities on the US mainland, after it became apparent that the deprivation of rights enacted against foreign nationals in the “war on terror” was not possible with migrants who had previously been held on US soil, as confirmed in a court ruling last month.

Of the 15 men still held in the “war on terror”, none are detained on anything resembling a legally sound basis.

Three are held indefinitely despite having long been approved for release, including one man, a stateless Rohingya Muslim, who may have been born in Myanmar, and who may or may not, at some point, have been granted a Pakistani passport. The US authorities mistakenly thought he was from the UAE, but, although he was approved for release in 2009, during the deliberations of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, a high-level inter-agency review board established under Barack Obama, he has refused to engage with the authorities and has never reached out to any pro bono attorneys to represent him, and, as a result, he has, uniquely in the US’s entire prison system, slipped through every net of accountability to become a ghost prisoner for whom release is impossible.

Three others, including the stateless Palestinian Abu Zubaydah, the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, are explicitly held without charge or trial — in Zubaydah’s case, despite successive US administrations having walked back from initial claims, under Bush, that he was a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda with inside knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. His ongoing imprisonment was condemned as arbitrary by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in April 2023.

Six others — including four men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks — are trapped in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in the military commissions, caught between prosecutors trying to hide evidence of their torture in CIA “black sites” prior to their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006, and their defense teams, who recognize that the use of torture is incompatible with justice.

Four years ago, prosecutors recognized this insoluble problem, and began working with the defense teams and the commissions’ overseer, the Convening Authority, to establish plea deals that would take the death penalty off the table in exchange for life sentences and full confessions, but, when these emerged in August 2024, they were immediately challenged and scuppered by Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who, unforgivably, preferred to preserve the illusion of successful capital prosecutions than to accept reality and to bring some measure of justice and closure to the 9/11 bereaved.

One other man, formerly a co-defendant in the 9/11 proceedings, is in legal limbo after being judged mentally unfit to stand trial in 2023, as a result of his torture, while two others have been convicted in the commissions — one, who is profoundly disabled as a result of inadequate medical treatment, via a plea deal, while the other is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial 17 years ago in which he refused to mount a defense.

Please join us if you think all of the above is so relentlessly sickening that it cannot be allowed to continue — or, indeed, cannot be allowed to have been almost entirely airbrushed out of history. If you can’t make it to one of the vigils listed above, you can show your support by taking a photo with a poster marking how long Guantánamo will have been open on January 11 — 8,767 days — and sending it to the Close Guantánamo campaign, as part of an ongoing photo campaign, running since 2018, which features posters marking every 100 days of the prison’s existence, as well as the number of days on the anniversaries of its opening. All the photos from 2025 can be found here, and I’ve just created a new page for the 2026 photos here.

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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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