Guantanamo

My report about the shocking expansion of the Trump administration’s migrant deportation program to third countries, following up on a recent Channel 4 News broadcast from Liberia, featuring three migrants, from Brazil, Honduras and Venezuela, who are amongst 14 recently deported migrants, none of whom have any connection to the west African country. One, Carlos, told the presenter, Jamal Osman, that he was torn away from his family without any notification, and despite a withholding order from a US judge preventing his return to Venezuela. When I first focused on third country deportations last summer, the Trump administration was seeking to make it palatable by focusing on the deportations of individuals with criminal records, but just as those lies about the deportation program in general have dissolved on contact with reality, so too the third country deportation policy has morphed into an unconscionable program of sending migrants on a one-way trip to far-flung countries with which they have no connection, solely on the basis that legal obstacles had been raised preventing them from being sent home. According to research by the admirable Third Country Deportation Watch, established by Refugees International and Human Rights First, around 25,000 migrants have been deported to 28 countries around the world with which they have no connection — in Europe, Asia, Africa and Central and South America. 80% of them have been deported by land to Mexico, but the other 5,000 have been flown, at vast expense, to be dumped in countries with whom the US has undertaken secretive deals, and with, crucially, no guarantee that any of these blameless migrants will be treated humanely or looked after in the long term. Judges have been pushing back against this outrageous policy since last March, most notably via District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston. Just last week, an appeals court upheld Judge Murphy’s latest ruling, that the deportations violate due process because they fail to give the migrants any notice about the decisions to deport them, or the opportunity to legally contest them, but it is expected that the administration will appeal to the Supreme Court. As I explain in my conclusion, “The struggle for justice continues”, but in the meantime the thousands of migrants sent to third countries without any form of due process “continue to suffer from the unconscionable effects of what, at its heart, is a kind of ‘extraordinary rendition’ policy engineered by the US government under Stephen Miller, whose horrors are so monstrously racist and indiscriminate that they almost defy comprehension.”

26 photos from, and my report about the 44th “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and worldwide on September 2, 2026, coinciding with 9,000 days of the existence of Guantánamo. The photos include some of the 50+ photos of campaigners photographed with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s 9,000 days poster (part of a photo campaign ongoing, every 100 days, since January 2018), and in the accompanying text I analyze the fundamental lawlessness of Guantánamo over these 9,000 days, and provide summaries of the cases of the 15 men still held.

22 photos from, and my report about the 43rd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and worldwide on and around Wednesday August 5, 2026. In the accompanying text, I summarize the history of the vigils, and discuss the significance of Guantánamo beyond its shamefully enduring manifestation as the last bastion of the Bush administration’s hideous “war on terror” — as a barbaric affirmation of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 regime of torture prisons for Palestinians, and as the inspiration for the sickening mass abduction and imprisonment of immigrants under Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, in which versions of Guantánamo have proliferated across the US mainland, and which I describe as “a national scandal on an almost unimaginable scale.”

21 photos from, and my report about the 42nd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around Wednesday July 1, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the proximity of this month’s vigils to July 4, and, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was meant to bring to an end the 13 colonies’ subjection to the executive tyranny of the British government and King George III. As I explain, however, 250 years later, the continuing existence of Guantánamo makes a mockery of those claims, as it is, fundamentally, a place where the law has rarely applied, and where the 15 men still held — and all those held previously — owe their detention to the same exercise of executive tyranny that the Founding Fathers sought to overthrow in 1776, but this time around implemented by the US government under four successive presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Photos from, and my report about the 41st monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around June 3, 2026. In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the importance of remembering Guantánamo (which is so largely forgotten) via my interpretation of a well-known quote — “In a time of universal deceit, even the act of remembering is a revolutionary act.” I also discuss how the original quote — “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” — is more significant than at any other time in most of our lifetimes, with a US president who dismisses the truth as “fake news”, and with western governments and mainstream media outlets insisting that a genocide is “self-defense” and that those undertaking it are the “children of light” fighting the “children of darkness.”

Photos from, and my report about the 40th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around May 6. In the article, I also provide a rationale for the vigils’ continued presence, despite the indifference of the Trump administration, and provide a summary of the current circumstances of the 15 men still held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the release, by the Pentagon, on April 20, 2006, of the first ever publicly-released prisoner list revealing the names and nationalities of 558 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo at that point in time, after the prison had been almost entirely shrouded in a deliberate veil of secrecy for the first four years and three months of its existence, enabling torture and other abuse to take place, inflicted on men and boys held as “unlawful enemy combatants” without any fundamental rights whatsoever as human beings. A second list, revealing information about all 759 prisoners, was released in May 2006, and 20 more prisoners — mostly alleged “high-value detainees” — arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and also in 2007 and 2008, when transfers to the prison came to an end. The list was unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation, via a lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press, and it provided the first significant key to enable me, as an independent researcher, to begin to build up a coherent picture of who was held at Guantánamo, by cross-referencing the list with other documentation, and to understand how and why the Bush administration had fundamentally misled the world by claiming that the prisoners were “the worst of the worst.” As I have always maintained, there was never any evidence that any more than a few percent of prisoners held at Guantánamo had any meaningful connection to Al-Qaeda or other groups allegedly involved in terrorism. My work led to the publication, after a year of incessant research and writing, of my book “The Guantánamo Files”, published in September 2007, and my subsequent work as an independent journalist and human rights activist, writing and publishing thousands of articles on my website, telling more of the prisoners’ stories, and campaigning to get the prison closed.

26 photos from, and my report about the 39th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around April 1. In the article, I also provide a detailed analysis of how and why the great crimes of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” — imprisonment without charge or trial, including torture and other forms of abuse, and illegal wars in pursuit of regime change — have, through not being adequately challenged and repudiated, fed directly into the horrific atrocities of the last 30 months. The first of these is Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the torture, rape and murder in Israel’s prisons for Palestinians, while, over the last six weeks, the US, the staunchest supporter of Israel’s genocide, has become directly involved in the Israeli model of devastating, lawless warfare, focused on as much arbitrary civilian death and destruction as possible, via its joint war with Israel on Iran, while Israel also repeats its Gaza playbook in Lebanon.

25 photos from, and my report about the 38th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, in which I also explain why the vigils remain important: firstly, because Guantánamo enshrined indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, the hallmark of dictatorships, as US policy, echoing and drawing inspiration from Israel’s brutal, lawless prisons for Palestinians, and inspiring Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s ever-expanding ICE detention facilities for US immigrants; and secondly, because, as the last bastion of the “war on terror”, it is also a powerful reminder of how that “war” led not only to the establishment of horrific, lawless prisons, but also, via the invasion of Iraq in particular, to the notion that the US could invade a sovereign nation based on lies, and, via Obama’s drone assassination program, to the notion that the US could extrajudicially murder anyone alleged to be a “combatant” without any form of due process, both of which helped Israel to seek to justify its genocide in Gaza, and are now being used by Trump to seek to justify his joint “war” with Israel on Iran.

My analysis of the recent, and almost entirely overlooked announcement by the Pentagon that it was turning down a plea deal negotiated in December 2024 with torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged architect of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The decision prioritizes vengeance, and an unwinnable trial, over the reality that successful prosecutions involving the death penalty at Guantánamo are bound to fail, because of the torture to which the defendants were subjected over many years when they were held in CIA “black sites.” In 2023, this was recognized by prosecutors in the 9/11 trial, who then negotiated plea deals taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for full confessions and life imprisonment. These were agreed in August 2024, but were then immediately challenged by then-defense secretary Lloyd Austin, who succeeded in having them overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court last June, after he had already left office. Al-Nashiri’s plea deal was publicly announced in March 2025, also taking the death penalty off the table in exchange for a full confession and life imprisonment, but it was finally turned down, just two weeks ago, not by Pete Hegseth, but by the billionaire deputy defense secretary, Steve Feinberg, bringing the Biden and Trump administrations into a rare accord, in which both, shamefully, oppose the only viable outcomes for the 9/11 trial and the trial of Al-Nashiri that can bring “closure” and some measure of justice over a quarter of a century after the USS Cole bombing took place.