Photos and Report: Marking Three Years of the Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on Feb. 4, 2026

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On Wednesday February 4, campaigners at nine locations across the US and around the world resumed the monthly “First Wednesday” global vigils calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which I first initiated three years ago, and which have been running continuously ever since.

Last month, as happens every January, the vigils moved to January 11, to mark the 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison, when an unprecedented 19 vigils took place, 12 in the US and seven at other locations worldwide, as can be seen here.

Photos from the vigils in Washington, D.C., London, New York, Brussels, Portland, OR, San Francisco, Detroit and Cobleskill, NY are posted below, and please read on for my reflections on Guantánamo in 2026. Mexico City had to cancel their vigil at the last minute, but will be back next month — on Wednesday March 4 — while, in Los Angeles, Jon Krampner held a solo vigil, because his regular companions were unable to attend, but no one helped him commit the vigil to posterity by taking a photo. As he said, “I went to the Downtown Los Angeles Federal Building. Early on, two young Latinas briefly video’d me, making a few supportive remarks as they did so. Later on, a young guy walked past me, saying that the entire base should be given back to Cuba. Some people looked at me, many didn’t even appear to notice.”

As always, I’m hugely grateful to everyone who takes the time to been seen and to make their voices heard regarding the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, largely shrouded in amnesia, even though 15 men are still held, in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.

Six of these men are held indefinitely without charge or trial — three despite having long been approved for release (in once case 16 years ago), while the other three,  including Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s grotesque post-9/11 torture program was developed, have never been charged, but have not been approved for release either, subjected to a version of the “administrative detention” so beloved of the Israeli authorities when it comes to imprisoning Palestinians forever without any kind of due process.

Six others have been charged with terrorist offences, but in the broken military commission trial system, which is incapable of delivering justice, as most of them have been caught up in pre-trial hearings for up to 14 years. Another is in legal limbo, having been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial in August 2023; another, profoundly physically disabled, 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.

As our little global family continues to remember the men still held, and to highlight the moral and legal quagmire of the US government having established a facility in which people can be held indefinitely without charge or trial, it is unlikely that there will be much progress on Guantánamo while Donald Trump remains in office, although just last week, after a long-mooted plea deal for the torture victim and alleged terrorist organizer Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri was turned down by the Pentagon, it has been suggested that his trial may begin this summer.

Primarily, though, the “war on terror” prison and its long-held “detainees” have discovered, since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, that they have been overshadowed by Trump’s lawless decision to revive the long-discredited “worst of the worst” hysteria regarding Guantánamo, but to transfer it instead onto migrants seized in the US and transported to Guantánamo in some sort of appalling “theater of cruelty.”

Around 780 migrants have been held at Guantánamo on and off over the last year, and, to bolster Trump’s rancid “terrorist” illusion, part of the “war on terror” prison has been used to hold many of these men, even though it is illegal to hold anyone in the prison unless they are specifically alleged to have been involved with Al-Qaeda or other international terrorist organizations, and with specific reference to the 9/11 attacks.

In December, a US judge ruled that it was illegal to hold migrants at Guantánamo, but the Trump administration immediately responded by deliberately and shamefully ignoring the ruling, sending more migrants there — Cubans who appear to be nothing more than pawns in what Carol Rosenberg, for the New York Times, described as “a political standoff between the Trump administration and Cuba” after they were flown back to the US mainland, and also Haitians, some of whom still appear to be held.

See more photos below, and, if you appreciate our efforts, please join us next month, on Wednesday March 4, and in the meantime please also consider joining us this coming Friday, February 13, when we will be marking 8,800 days of Guantánamo’s existence with the latest poster from the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo project, marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence via the Gitmo Clock website. Take a photo with the poster, and send it to the campaign here. All the photos will be posted on the dedicated page on the website here.

POSTSCRIPT: Just after I published this article, former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi sent the two photos below from Belgrade, coinciding with a post of a poignant video noting that today, February 9, marks the 24th anniversary of his arrival at Guantánamo.

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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.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.