Photos and Report: The 43rd Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo, the Source of So Much of the 21st Century’s Depravity

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In a world of endless, pointless distractions, of 24-hour rolling news that means that people can’t even remember what happened yesterday, of a gloating genocide in Gaza that is tearing our hearts apart, but that no one can stop, and of extreme heat and drought that is telling us, globally, that our days on our unique, miraculous planet are well and truly numbered, because of our inability to stop burning fossil fuels, it’s nothing short of a miracle that, once a month, a handful of diligent activists across the US and around the world get together to hold coordinated vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The vigils — outside the White House in Washington, D,C, outside the Houses of Parliament in London, outside the European Parliament in Brussels, and in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Mexico City and Belgrade — began 43 months ago, in February 2023, as a concerted effort to prevent Guantánamo, routinely engulfed in the collective amnesia of the political and media establishments, from being entirely forgotten.

Please see the photos below, of activists from, amongst other groups and organizations, Amnesty International, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, and read on for my assessment of why remembering Guantánamo and calling for its closure is still so essential, followed by more photos.

At the time our vigils began, in February 2023, Joe Biden was the president, the genocide in Gaza had not yet begun, and 34 men were still held at Guantánamo, mostly without charge or trial, and all in varying states of fundamental lawlessness. Our efforts throughout 2023 and 2024 helped to keep a flicker of interest in Guantánamo alive, and to secure the release of 19 of these men before Biden left office, even though those successes were completely overshadowed by the “ironclad” support for Israel that he clung to as his ailing mind collapsed.

Since last January, when Donald Trump returned to the White House, the 15 men still held at Guantánamo have almost entirely fallen off the radar. Trump, as in his first term, has no interest in releasing any of them, even though six of them are still held without charge or trial. Instead, he briefly used Guantánamo as a grotesque prop in the “war on immigrants” that he declared when he took office, holding hundreds of hapless migrants there until he was challenged in court, and lawmakers began noticing how absurdly expensive it was to use Guantánamo as a largely symbolic theater of cruelty.

In January, the prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 25 years — a quarter of a century — and, despite Trump’s lack of interest in it, it continues to cast a shadow over the whole of the 21st century.

It is the last bastion of the global “war on terror” that the Bush administration declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (whose 25th anniversary is just a month away), when the entire world was declared to be a battlefield, and when transnational kidnapping, the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial became normalized.

All of the above has had disturbing ramifications that can be seen most clearly in the actions of the State of Israel, whose torture prisons for Palestinians — held in vast numbers without charge or trial under ‘administrative detention” or as “unlawful combatants” — echo Guantánamo, with its own forms of “administrative detention” and its insistence that those held were “unlawful enemy combatants”, as well as the CIA’s “black site” torture prisons, and whose contempt for borders, and for any kind of limits on military action, is as marked as that of the US.

Guantánamo has also provided a baleful template for Trump’s “war on immigrants”, extending far beyond its temporary use for migrants last year. The entire model of the mass abductions of immigrants on US soil, by unaccountable ICE agents, and their imprisonment in facilities from which they may, or may not ever be released, designed and driven by the horrific Nazi-like Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, is turning the whole of the US mainland into a venue for proliferating Guantánamos.

This is a national scandal on an almost unimaginable scale, as 400,000 people — most guilty of nothing more than seeking to get to the US in search of work — have been detained and “disappeared” since Trump took office, 500 times as many people as have been held at Guantánamo throughout its history. The majority of these people have been deported, but 68,000 are currently held, and a problem that no one in the administration wants highlighted is what will happen if their home countries refuse to cooperate in taking them back, or if lawyers and the courts manage, against the odds, to establish in some cases that it is unsafe for them to be repatriated.

The administration has, in some cases, as happened with Guantánamo prisoners, sought to send some of these immigrants to third countries, but that is absurdly expensive, and also runs the risk of failing foul of the US’s obligations, under torture legislation, not to send anyone anywhere where they face the risk of torture, disappearance or even death.

As we continue to raise our voices not only for those held at Guantánamo, but also for the Palestinians, and for the victims of ICE, we’ll be marking 9,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence on September 1, via the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo project. Do join us if you can, by taking a photo with the 9,000 days poster and sending it to us. All this year’s photos to date can be seen here.

The day after, Wednesday September 2, will mark the 44th global monthly vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, and we’re also beginning to prepare for the 25th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, when I hope to finally launch a long-planned project, the Guantánamo Accountability Project, to serve as a focal point for efforts to eventually hold the US government to account for its quarter-century of crimes at its shameful offshore gulag.

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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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