Bearing Witness to Unending Injustice: The 40th Global Monthly Close Guantánamo Vigils, May 6, 2026

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The monthly “First Wednesday” vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, on Wednesday May 6, marked the 40th successive month that campaigners across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit and Los Angeles, and around the world, in London, Brussels and Belgrade, have come together to call for freedom or justice for the 15 men still held — down from 34 when our vigils started — and for the prison to be closed.

Campaigners in San Francisco joined us on Friday May 8, and in Cobleskill, NY on Saturday May 9, and Ed Charles in Oakland, and Lizzy in Arizona, also sent photos. Campaigners in Mexico City had to postpone their vigil, while, in Los Angeles, Jon Krampner held an unrecorded solo vigil, and wrote, “Neither Julie nor Kate could make it, so I was by myself and went to the Downtown LA Federal Building from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m., with my jumpsuit, hood and Amnesty ‘Close Guantánamo’ sign. One young man hurrying into the building said he supported me, but, being in a hurry, declined my request for him to photograph me. Not much interaction beyond that; just a few people pausing to look at me and the sign. This is not much of a report, but at least I showed up.”

Please see below for the photos, and read on for my now monthly reflections on what the vigils mean, and why they continue to be important, followed by further photos. Next month’s vigils will take place on Wednesday June 3, when you’re welcome to join us, and I hope will also take part in the latest phase of Close Guantánamo’s ongoing photo campaign, making every 100 days of the prison’s existence, by taking a photo with the poster marking 8,900 days of Guantánamo’s existence on May 24, and sending it here. All this year’s photos can be found on a dedicated page on the Close Guantánamo website here.

What I have grown to love about our vigils is how they stand as a still point in time, repeated every month, as the ever-changing chaos of the world swirls around them.

In sun, rain and snow, under Joe Biden and Donald Trump, we have, mostly quietly, but sometimes with song, and always with outreach to passersby, borne witness to the ongoing crimes of Guantánamo — endless imprisonment, mostly without charge or trial, of Muslim men seized mostly in an arbitrary manner, in a prison founded on a depraved notion that the entire world can legitimately be considered a battlefield.

Our vigils regard Guantánamo both in isolation — as a specific, geographically fixed ongoing crime scene, the last bastion of the “war on terror” — but also as a bleak beacon of profound injustice and lawlessness that has been contaminating the whole of the world ever since.

Please, if you can, share a moment to think about the 15 men still held, who are all held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness, and who have almost all been deprived of their liberty, or of anything resembling justice, for between 20 and 24 years, mostly at Guantánamo, but previously, in some cases, in the network of “black site” torture prisons that the CIA established around the world.

Despite the grotesqueness of these men’s predicament, they have mostly been forgotten by US politicians and the US mainstream media, who, for the most part, behave as though Guantánamo no longer exists.

Of the 15 men still held, six have never been charged with a crime, and continue to be held through one of the most baleful innovations of the “war on terror”, when the US, a country that claims to be founded on the rule of law, and to respect the rule of law, told the world proudly and openly that it had the right to hold people endlessly without charge or trial, behavior that, in contrast to their assertions, is a hallmark only of regimes that are dictatorships.

We can all see, I hope, how the continuation of this policy has played into the hands of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, who now treat immigrants on the US mainland as the equivalent of Guantánamo’s “enemy combatants”, to be rounded up and detained in vast warehouse prisons, without any form of due process, and with no indication of when, if ever, they will be released if their home countries refuse to take them back.

Three of the six men at Guantánamo who have never been charged with a crime have been long approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but are still held because no mechanism exists to compel the government to actually release them. One, Muin al-Din, is Guantánamo’s pre-eminent ghost, a stateless Rohingya who was approved for release in 2009, but has no one to represent him, because he refused to accept representation by a pro bono US attorney, and refuses to engage with the authorities.

The two others, Ismael Ali Bakush, a Libyan, and Guled Hassan Duran, a Somali, were approved for release in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Bakush has an attorney, but has despairingly withdrawn from any engagement in his case, while Duran, initially held in CIA “black sites”, is represented by attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who recently submitted a lawsuit asking a US court to order the government to free him.

Three others are “forever prisoners”, men explicitly held indefinitely without charge or trial, their ongoing imprisonment cursorily reviewed every few years by Periodic Review Boards, one of the two administrative review processes established under Obama. One is Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was first developed, although the US has since walked back from all of its fantastical claims about his significance, but still refuses to release him. The two others are Abu Faraj al-Libi, a Libyan, and Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan, whose mother recently called on Donald Trump to free him.

Of the nine others — all caught up, in various ways, in the military commissions trial system that was unwisely dredged up from the history books when Guantánamo opened — six are facing trials, or, rather, are caught up in endless pre-trial hearings that are the result of a critical failure by successive administrations to understand that the use of torture is fundamentally and irrevocably incompatible with the exercise of justice.

Four of them — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash and Ammar al-Baluchi — are charged with involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and yet the Biden administration, in its dying days, obstinately, and with a counter-productive obsession with vengeance, refused to accept plea deals negotiated with three of these men, hurling them back into an endless Groundhog Day of ongoing pre-trial hearings with no end in sight.

The trial of another of the six, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, was supposed to finally begin on June 1, but has been “indefinitely delayed”, according to a New York Times report yesterday, while the fifth man, Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali), the alleged mastermind of several South East Asian terrorist attacks, continues to also languish in Guantánamo without a trial date in sight.

One other man, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an alleged 9/11 co-conspirator, is in legal limbo, having been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, because of his torture, in 2023, while  another, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (Nashwan al-Tamir), the most profoundly physically disabled prisoner in Guantánamo’s history, agreed to a plea deal in 2022, but won’t be freed until 2032, if a country can be found that will be prepared to take him in and give him lifelong care, as it is unsafe for him to be returned to his home country of Iraq. The last of the nine, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence, largely in unintended solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense.

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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