Photos and Report: The 38th Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo on March 4, 2026

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

On March 4, the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place in Washington, D.C., New York City, Detroit, London and Brussels, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade, and with campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joining us on Saturday March 7, when Gavrilah Wells, an Amnesty campaigner from San Francisco, also sent photos from AIUSA’s Human Rights Conference and AGM in Washington, D.C.

These were the 38th successive monthly vigils for the prison’s closure, after I initiated them in February 2023, following the example established by campaigners in London five months before, securing the support of friends and colleagues across the US, and in Brussels and Mexico City, who, ever since, have shown an implacable commitment to keeping Guantánamo and its many injustices visible, in defiance of the tendency of politicians and the mainstream media to behave as though it no longer exists.

I’m hugely impressed that so many vigils took place given the proximity of the date to the all-encompassing horror of the launch of the illegal and unprovoked joint US-Israeli “war” on Iran just four days before, which, like a black hole of injustice, has understandably swallowed up almost everyone’s time and energy.

Please see the photos below, and read on for my assessment of why the vigils remain important, and for more photos.

On the face of it, holding monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure can seem like a distraction from all the other horrors taking place in the world right now, but Guantánamo remains significant for two particular reasons, both of which have contemporary relevance.

Firstly, Guantánamo was established to hold people indefinitely without charge or trial, a hallmark of dictatorships and not of countries that claim to respect the rule of law. Over the last two and a half years, as critical attention has focused as never before on the State of Israel, as a result of its ongoing genocide in Gaza, more people than ever before have also recognized similarities between its brutal prisons for Palestinians, where indefinite detention without charge or trial has long been normalized, and Guantánamo, whose lawless detention policies were clearly influenced by Israel’s model of “administrative detention.”

More recently, since Donald Trump returned to the White House for the second time and launched what he intended to be the largest deportation program in US history, he has, primarily under the influence of his vile national security advisor Stephen Miller, been replicating the Guantánamo model — including, monstrously, at Guantánamo itself — for vast numbers of immigrants.

Most of the people have been arbitrarily swept up in immigration enforcement raids and police state-style abductions on the streets of US cities, which are horribly similar to the random raids and arbitrary detentions that led to the long imprisonment of so many men and boys at Guantánamo. They are also held with no regard for whether or not they have committed any crime — again, as at Guantánamo — pending proposed deportation in an ever-growing gulag of prison facilities from which there may be no escape, and where brutal treatment and neglect — yet again, as at Guantánamo — is widespread.

In Trump’s America, yesterday’s foreign “enemy combatants” have become today’s “domestic terrorists” — immigrants whose only “crime” may have been to seek work in the US, thinking, laughably, that it was indeed “the land of the free.”

From a wider perspective, Guantánamo is the sole remaining bastion of the “war on terror” launched by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Although George W. Bush subsequently sought and secured Congressional approval and UN Security Council approval for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and although all of the monstrous, lawless secret prison torture facilities that emerged alongside these invasions and occupations have been shut down, apart from Guantánamo, the invasion of Iraq in particular marked a deadly departure, as it was so clearly a regime change operation based on a lie that has never been officially repudiated — that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that posed an imminent threat to the west.

After Bush, Obama largely reimagined the “war on terror” via drone attacks on countries with which the US was not at war, extrajudicially executing those regarded as legitimate targets without any proof being provided, which, of course, further eroded the legal basis for foreign military intervention.

Both men therefore bear significant responsibility for the situation in which we now find ourselves, in which Donald Trump, after kidnapping President Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, has now joined with Israel to launch an illegal and unjustifiable “war” on Iran — crucially, without Congressional approval, and without UN Security Council approval — but for which he has drawn on the precedents established in the Iraq invasion and in Obama’s drone assassination program, whereby the US openly undertook war crimes without ever being punished for it.

Please see below for further photos from the vigils, and please feel free to join us next month, on Wednesday April 1, for the next “First Wednesday” vigils.

If there isn’t a vigil near you, feel free to set up your own with a few friends, or even on your own, but if you do so please send photos so we can publicize your involvement. The numbers attending aren’t important. It would, of course, be wonderful if hundreds or thousands of people took part, but we’ve learned over the long years of Guantánamo’s existence that almost nobody cares.

What matters, however, is that we make a point of standing up to pierce the fog of amnesia that perpetually engulfs Guantánamo, on two points of principle that remain of huge significance: that no one should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and that no wars should be launched that are fundamentally illegal, and that are deliberately undertaken to bypass all constraints, whether through depriving those detained of their liberty without recognized due process, or through targeting and murdering people without any justification at all.

* * * * *

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.