Photos and Report: 19 Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on the 24th Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening

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Between Saturday January 10 and Monday January 12, an impressive 18 vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world, marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with a 19th taking place on January 15.

Eleven of these vigils were by campaigners who have been taking part in the monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” global vigils that I initiated three years ago, and that have been taking place every month ever since.

Seven of these are at locations in the US — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, and Portland, OR — while the other four are in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade.

Eight more groups also joined us. Five of these were in the US — in Augusta, ME, Cleveland, OH, Greenfield, MA and Raleigh, NC, where annual vigils take place on a regular basis, and in Honolulu in Hawaii, while three others, initiated by Mansoor, took place in Rome, Italy, in Warsaw, Poland and at Shannon Airport in Ireland.

Please see below for photos from all these vigils, and read on for my analysis of the significance of the anniversary, and the requirement for those who us who still care about the existence of the prison, the men held, and the need for it to be closed to continue to raise our voices and to make our presence felt, especially as, in general, Guantánamo has been largely forgotten, even though 15 men are still held there, in varying fundamental states of lawlessness that bear all the hallmarks not of a constitutional republic, but of an overt dictatorship.

The significant number of vigils taking place — 12 in the US, and seven worldwide — was a testament to the strength of feeling of campaigners who have refused to succumb to the amnesia or indifference that generally engulfs Guantánamo, as well as the conflicting demands on campaigners at this time; in particular, via Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his wife, threats to annex Greenland and the terror that is currently being inflicted on the people of Minneapolis by violent and unaccountable ICE agents.

The reason we remember Guantánamo, however, becomes more not less important with the passage of time, which is what makes the collective amnesia of politicians and the media so infuriating. There may be just 15 men still held, out of the 779 men and boys held there by the US military since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, but the passage of time only compounds the multiple fundamental forms of injustice to which they continue to be subjected.

Six of the 15 men have never been charged with a crime, meaning that they have been arbitrarily detained for nearly a quarter of a century. Three have long been approved for release by high-level US government review processes, including one who was told 16 years ago that the US authorities no longer wanted to hold him, while three others — including Abu Zubaydah, the first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program — have accurately been defined as “forever prisoners”, their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial approved every few years by review boards whose legal justification is non-existent, and which most closely resemble the lawless process of “administrative detention” inflicted by the State of Israel on Palestinian prisoners.

Of the nine others, six are facing charges in the military commission trial system that successive administrations have chosen over federal court trials, even though they are a poor facsimile of justice. These men are caught up in endless pre-trial hearings as their attorneys seek to disclose crucial information about the torture to which they were subjected in CIA “black sites”, while the government tries to keep that information hidden.

One other man is in legal limbo, having been judged mentally unfit to stand trial by a DoD Sanity Board, as a result of his torture, while two others, who have been convicted, have been no better serviced in terms of justice. One, the facility’s most disabled prisoner, agreed to a plea deal in 2022, and is meant to be freed in 2032, while the other is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial in 2008 in which he refused to mount a defense.

All of these men face isolation that is unprecedented. They are not allowed family visits, even if family members could somehow make their way to the remote naval base on Cuba where they are held — and their ability to communicate with family members via phone calls or Zoom calls is both sporadic and intrusively monitored. In addition, over the last year, the government shutdown and adverse climactic conditions have impeded visits by attorneys, who are the prisoners’ only lifeline to the outside world apart from occasional visits by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

To add to the submerged but ongoing horror of the “war on terror” prison, for the last year Donald Trump has been illegally using part of the prison to hold migrants as a component of the vile, racist mass deportation program that he initiated when he took office for the second time a year ago. Trump evidently relished the false association he could imply between the “war on terror” and his own “war on migrants”, and those held have credibly reported ill-treatment drawing on the abuses of the “war on terror” rather than being subjected to typical immigration detention policies, but they are, at least, not indefinitely detained.

After days, weeks or months, most of those held have either been repatriated or sent back to ICE facilities on the US mainland, although, as we marked the anniversary, 54 migrants were held there, despite a court ruling last month prohibiting its use for any migrants transferred from the US mainland. Spitefully, and with complete contempt for the court, Trump sent 22 Cubans there after the ruling, who have since been joined by 32 other migrants whose nationalities have not been disclosed. In total, around 775 migrants have been held at Guantánamo over the last year, a number that, ironically, is almost identical to the number of prisoners held in the “war on terror” prison over the last 24 years.

Next month, the “First Wednesday” vigils resume, on Wednesday February 4, and I hope you can join us, or that you’ll consider setting up your own vigil if there isn’t one near you, and even if it’s just a solo vigil. We may be small in number, but every effort we make reflects the concerns of many, and also helps to keep alight a beacon of outrage, however small. Without it, there would be only darkness.

See below for more photos.

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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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