Photos and Report: Amidst Unprecedented Chaos, the Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure Continue

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Despite unprecedented global chaos caused by just two rogue nations — the US and Israel — who have wilfully eviscerated all the rules regarding the conduct of warfare over the last two and a half years, and massively increasing the geographical scope of their illegal actions over the last six weeks, campaigners across the US and around the world held their 39th monthly consecutive global vigils for the closure of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay last week.

On Wednesday April 1, campaigners gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York City and Detroit, while other campaigners were outside the Houses of Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, and in Mexico City. The Saturday before, on “No Kings Day”, campaigners in San Francisco highlighted the rank injustice of the prison’s continued existence, with other campaigners, in Cobleskill, NY, joining on Saturday April 4, as part of weekly protests reflecting the demands of the times that have been running every Saturday for the last 25 years. There were also solo participants in Oakland, CA and in Liège, Belgium.

Please see below for photos from all of the vigils, and read on for my assessment of the importance of the vigils as part of wider resistance to the collapse into depravity  of all notions of any kind of moral order since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza 30 achingly long months ago.

Our small but dedicated family of campaigners gather once a month to call for the closure of Guantánamo, for freedom or justice for the 15 men still held, and for justice and reparations for those released, most of whom still struggle under the burden of having been held at Guantánamo as “unlawful enemy combatants” without rights, and who continue to bear that taint despite being freed, unable to rely on any of the fundamental rights that most of the rest of the world takes for granted.

Our struggle is not just for these men; it is also because Guantánamo is the last bastion of the global “war on terror” launched by the Bush administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with dangerous repercussions that continue to poison the well of our shared humanity, and to fatally undermine the credibility of the “rules-based order” introduced after the horrors of the Second World War.

Noticeably, George W. Bush designated the prisoners at Guantánamo as “unlawful enemy combatants” without rights under the Geneva Conventions or US domestic laws at the same time that Israel passed its uncannily similar “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”, defining an “unlawful combatant” as “a person who is not entitled to the status of prisoner of war and belongs to a force carrying out hostilities against the State of Israel or has taken part in hostilities against the State of Israel, even indirectly.”

Over the 24 years of Guantánamo’s existence, the legal basis for the prisoners’ detention has also mirrored Israel’s notorious policy of “administrative detention”, inherited from the British, whereby Palestinian prisoners can be held indefinitely without charge or trial via unreviewable military court-issued orders that can be endlessly renewed every six months.

At Guantánamo, apart from the two “golden years”, from 2008 to 2010, when the prisoners were able to successfully petition the US courts for release through the ancient writ of habeas corpus, their release — or the approval of their continued imprisonment without charge or trial — has also been dependant not on legal processes, but on administrative reviews, which, again, are uncannily similar to Israel’s policy of “administrative detention.”

Since politically motivated appeals court judges shut down habeas corpus as a viable route out of Guantánamo, in 2010-11, almost every subsequent release from Guantánamo has been dependent on administrative reviews, established under Obama in 2013, a slow, crawling process, devoid of all independent legal oversight, which led to the release of 36 men under Obama, and 20 under Joe Biden, but which has left five others still held — two approved for release but not freed, and three others held as “forever prisoners”, their ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial remorselessly approved every few years.

One other man — a ghost — is the last man held out of 156 prisoners approved for release under a much earlier administrative review process, in Obama’s first year in office, while the other nine men still held are caught up in the rolling injustice of the military commission trial system, centered on a military court that is also echoed in Israel’s military courts, which exist solely for the dubious and often profoundly lawless prosecutions of Palestinians.

Also of relevance is the template established in the “war on terror” for wars undertaken on the basis of regime change, which shattered the supposed post-WWII obligation on nation states not to invade sovereign countries unless they pose a verifiable and imminent threat to them, and which abhorred regime change as a fundamental betrayal of nation states’ inalienable rights.

Guantánamo was established as a lawless component of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which effected regime change, removing the Taliban government, only to hand back control to them 20 years later, and, most notoriously, the US-led invasion of Iraq, in 2003, which was explicitly focused on regime change, and which involved the use of torture-based “evidence” to manufacture an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction that never existed.

Iraq was the first of seven countries targeted by George W. Bush’s neocon-dominated administration after the invasion of Afghanistan, with the others being Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. Full regime change was noticeably effected in Col. Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, turning it into a failed state, Somalia and Sudan have been wracked with war and instability, and Lebanon has been regularly targeted by Israel, while the Assad regime in Syria, after a decade-long civil war, suddenly collapsed in December 2024 to be replaced by a new, Israeli-pliant government led by a former Islamist terrorist.

As the last 30 months have shown in the most horrific manner possible, the unassailable sense of impunity established in the “war on terror”, regarding both illegal military actions undertaken under false pretences, and the lawless treatment of prisoners, plunged to an inevitable nadir via Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, which began 30 months ago today, under grotesquely false claims of “self-defense”, in which, in addition to the unprecedented slaughter of civilians and the almost complete erasure of Gaza itself, there has also been a massive increase in the numbers of Palestinians imprisoned without due process.

At the end of December 2025, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) “was holding 9,128 Palestinians in detention or in prison on what it defined as ‘security’ grounds, including 1,477 from the Gaza Strip.” 1,235 of these are held under Israel’s “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”, while another 3,375 are held in “administrative detention.”

These figures dwarf the lawlessness and brutality of Guantánamo, both in numbers and in the extent of the regime of torture, rape and murder undertaken in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians over the last 30 months, implemented by the fanatical far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose most malignant dream has just been achieved through the passage, by the Israeli Knesset, of a new law approving the death penalty for Palestinians convicted in military courts, a cherished hope of the Bush administration, for the “terrorists” at Guantánamo, that has still, after 24 years, not been realized.

Over the last six weeks, however, the final target of the neocons, Iran, has been subjected to the most extraordinary lawlessness imaginable, with Donald Trump played by Benjamin Netanyahu to such an extent that, in partnership with Israel, he launched an entirely unprovoked war on Iran, without Congressional approval, and without seeking approval from the UN Security Council, which makes the contortions of the Bush administration’s efforts to justify their illegal invasion of Iraq look positively law-abiding.

As the US and Israel rain down arbitrary death on Iranian civilians, amidst the destruction of as much civilian infrastructure as possible, via the template established in Gaza, and as Israel also does the same in Lebanon, as well as maintaining its genocidal stranglehold on Gaza and its on-the-ground terrorism in the West Bank, it seems likely that, in Iran, the neocons’ malignant regime change dreams — which were always driven in conjunction with Israel, or even on its behalf — have finally, after a quarter of a century, reached a point of hubristic overreach that may well spell long-term disaster for both of the aggressors.

How dispiriting, however, for those us who cherish life, and who have sounded the alarms for over two decades about the grotesquely destablilizing and dehumanizing effects of the “war on terror”, from the cells of Guantánamo to the dungeons of Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s “black site” torture prisons, and the rabid enthusiasm for regime change that is finally meeting resistance on a truly colossal scale.

At our vigils, many of these horrors — as well as Donald Trump’s implementation of massive Guantánamo-style abduction and detention policies for immigrants on the US mainland — inevitably bleed into our campaigning, because everything in the moral collapse of the last 25 years, across the US, Israel and the rest of the western world, is interconnected. If you have a few moments, once a month, to join us, you’ll be more than welcome.

The next vigils take place on Wednesday May 6, and please see below for more photos from this month’s vigils, which will hopefully provide some inspiration.

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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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