The Persistence of Memory: The 41st Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo, June 3, 2026

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In a variation on a famous quote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”, which is widely but apparently incorrectly attributed to George Orwell, I recently came up with a phrase that, on an ongoing basis, I’ll be using to describe those of us who continue to try to remind the world of the existence of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, and of the 15 men still held there in varying states of fundamental lawlessness:

“In a time of universal deceit, even the act of remembering is a revolutionary act.”

Guantánamo has long been engulfed in a kind of collective amnesia, barely mentioned by US lawmakers, and largely ignored by the mainstream media, which is why our monthly “First Wednesday” vigils, though small in number, continue to be important. If a grave and ongoing injustice isn’t even mentioned, or marked with people in orange jumpsuits bearing witness to it as an internationally significant ongoing crime scene, how is anyone supposed to even remember that it still exists?

This month, nine vigils took place across the US and around the world — in London, New York, Brussels, Mexico City, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Innsbruck, Austria, and Cobleskill, NY. Our most politically resonant campaigners — at the heart of the dysfunctional warmongering beast, outside the White House, in Washington, D.C. — were largely unable to join us this month, with only one stalwart, longtime Close Guantánamo supporter Steve Lane, attending, and without any photos being taken, but they’ll be back next month, and individual campaigners also sent photos from Oakland, CA and Liège in Belgium.

See the photos below, and read on for more of my thoughts on the importance of remembering, when it comes to ongoing human rights atrocities committed in the name of self-defense, and when faced with concerted efforts to make us forget.

Also on June 3, in Los Angeles, regular vigil attendee Jon Krampner held a solo vigil for which no photographic evidence exists, although his report is worthwhile on its own. He wrote, “I was at the Downtown LA Federal Building from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. There was another, larger protest going on: against ICE detention centers and the 19 people who have died in them this year. There was a die-in, with 19 people lying on the sidewalk. There was also a reporter from Telemundo. She interviewed me after the ICE protest wrapped up; I did mention my affiliation with ICUJP [Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace] and Close Guantánamo. I have no idea if she’ll use my interview or not; I don’t have a TV. I’ll ask ICUJP people to look for it. Because there were a lot of politically hip people there, I was able to get three of them to take photos of me. I figured I should at least get one of them, but none is in my in-box. I checked my spam. I checked my trash. This makes no sense to me, but technology has never been my strong point.”

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Anyone whose eyes and hearts are open right now will recognize that we’re living in a time of, if not universal deceit, then certainly something close to it. Donald Trump, the most lying president in US history, never tires of condemning the truth as “fake news”, and we are bludgeoned, on a daily basis, with a requirement by our political leaders and our mainstream media to deny the soul-shredding truth that the State of Israel is engaged in an ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and to pretend, instead, that it is engaged in legitimate self-defense, and that, to quote Benjamin Netanyahu, the people of Israel are the “children of light”, while the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, slaughtered by bombs largely provided by the US government, are the “children of darkness.”

Telling the truth, in this context, can mean losing your job, being sanctioned, being imprisoned, or facing deportation simply for exercising your right to free speech under the First Amendment. In the UK, climate activists, whose message to governments and the media, to “tell the truth” about climate change, have found themselves imprisoned for even mild forms of disruption to the “status quo”, while, in the courts, the principle of “jury equity” — allowing defendants to tell the truth about why they undertook the actions they did, so that juries can refuse to convict them on the basis of actions undertaken through an exercise of the conscience — has been quashed by right-wing activist judges, not only in relation to climate protests, but also in relation to direct action undertaken to prevent a genocide, at the factories of Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms manufacturer.

When the Israeli-owned British government proscribed a direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terrorist organization, those supporting them, telling the truth by peacefully holding up hand-written signs declaring, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, have been arrested in their thousands.

While telling the truth has become more dangerous than at any other time in living memory, in countries that claim to respect the rule of law, Guantánamo remains a stark example of how telling the truth isn’t even regarded as revolutionary, because almost no one cares, transporting it, instead, into the realm I identified above, in which even the act of remembering is revolutionary.

It won’t get us arrested, because, to reiterate, almost no one cares, and the forces of darkness only mobilize malevolently when they are faced with mass dissent, but it is revolutionary in the sense that indefinite detention without charge or trial — over a period, now, of over 24 years — and fruitless but ongoing attempts to prosecute individuals subjected to sickening torture over many years in “black site” torture prisons run by the CIA has been officially forgotten, papered over like a politically-charged mural, or erased like an inconvenient social media channel amplifying voices that the establishment doesn’t want heard.

Next month, our “First Wednesday” vigils are taking place on Wednesday July 1, just three days before the least appropriate leader imaginable celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when the US’s 13 colonies celebrated overthrowing the forces of executive tyranny represented by the UK, and its monarch, King George III.

We hope you’ll join us to mark not only the irony of this celebration taking place while prisoners are still held at Guantánamo as a result of the US’s own executive tyranny, but also because the would-be tyrant Donald Trump and the dark forces working with him and behind the scenes are, as the flags are being unfurled, undertaking the most sustained assault imaginable on the right of the American people to be free from tyranny, this time undertaken not from without, but from within.

See more photos from the vigils below.

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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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