Guantanamo

Over 50 photos from the 19 global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that took place across the US and around the world marking the shameful and unforgivable 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11. The article also includes my report about the significance of the vigils, because of the fundamental and unending lawlessness of the prison, and also because of Donald Trump’s cynical co-opting of it over the last year as a venue for performative cruelty in his vile, racist “war on migrants.” 15 men are still held at Guantánamo, although none under circumstances that are acceptable in a country that claims to respect the law. Six are held indefinitely without charge or trial, while the nine others are caught up, in various ways, in a trial system, the military commissions, that is haunted by the US’s use of torture and is fundamentally incapable of delivering justice. I’m grateful to everyone who took part in the vigils, both for cutting through the fog of lamentable amnesia that engulfs Guantánamo, and for remembering that it’s a monstrous place where, after 9/11, the law was sent to die, and also for their dedication when so many other horrors are vying for campaigners’ attention; most noticeably, in the US, Trump’s aggression towards Venezuela and the monstrous abuses being committed in Minneapolis by ICE agents.

My report about the important news that the British government has reached a “substantial” out-of court financial settlement with Guantánamo prisoner and CIA torture victim Abu Zubaydah, to prevent further public disclosure of their complicity in his torture in CIA “black sites” from 2002 to 2006, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial. The settlement relates to information first disclosed in a rare and frank Parliamentary investigation into British complicity in 2018, when it was revealed that the UK intelligence services had fed questions for Abu Zubaydah to US interrogators, even though they knew that he was being tortured. The payout was made to prevent full disclosure of the details after the Supreme Court ruled in Abu Zubaydah’s favor in a case decided in December 2023. Unfortunately, the settlement will do nothing to secure Abu Zubaydah’s release from Guantánamo. Although the US authorities long ago walked back from claims that he was a significant member of Al-Qaeda, which they made after his capture, and has never charged him with a crime, he continues to be held at Guantánamo, one of three “forever prisoners” detained indefinitely. This is in spite of two European Court of Human Rights rulings, in 2014 and 2018, condemning his torture in “black sites” in Poland and Romania, which also led to significant financial settlements, and a devastating opinion issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, which called for his release and reparations for his suffering during his long and arbitrary imprisonment. Under Donald Trump, however, when an unarmed 37-year old mother and US citizen murdered by an ICE agent is described as a “domestic terrorist” by senior administration officials, there can be no real likelihood that a torture victim slandered as a terrorist for years, and still routinely referred to as a “terror suspect”, will be freed. As his ordeal continues, we must all reflect on how, while three governments have paid him significant amounts of money for their complicity in his torture, no mechanism exists that can compel his actual torturers to free him.

Promoting the global vigils this weekend, on Saturday January 10 and Sunday January 11, marking the unforgivable 24th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay on January 11, where 15 men are still held, although none are detained on anything resembling a legally sound basis. Six are held without charge or trial, six face charges in a broken trial system, the military commissions, that are incapable of delivering justice, one is in legal limbo after being judged mentally unfit to stand trial, another, severely disabled, agreed to a plea deal, and another is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement after a one-sided trial 17 years ago in which he refused to mount a defense. Please join us if you find this ongoing but largely forgotten injustice intolerable, and if you can’t be present in person, feel free to join us by sending in a photo with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking how long Guantánamo will have been open on January 11 — 8,767 days — as part of an ongoing photo campaign we’ve been running every 100 days, and on the anniversaries of the prison’s opening, since 2018.

Celebrating a significant court ruling last week, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Biden appointee, ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s use of Guantánamo to hold migrants with final deportation orders flown from ICE detention facilities on the US mainland was and is completely illegal under immigration law (the Immigration and Nationality Act), and is also “impermissibly punitive” as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. It’s been ten months since Trump began using Guantánamo to hold migrants, and five months since lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) submitted a lawsuit on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals held at Guantánamo at the time, and also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class.” It’s unknown as yet if the Trump administration will appeal, but it’s abundantly clear from Judge Sooknanan’s ruling that there are absolutely no grounds for doing so. The use of Guantánamo to hold migrants was a vile example of performative cruelty, meant to terrify all migrants in the US, and would-be migrants elsewhere, and its demise is long overdue.

Photos from, and my report about the 35th consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, OR, and in London and Brussels on December 3, 2025, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also holding a solo vigil in Belgrade, and with Cobleskill, NY joining on December 6, and San Francisco on December 7. These were the last vigils of 2025, and the last before next month’s vigils marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2026.

My thoughts on the funeral of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, including my 20-minute interview with Rebecca Myles for WBAI Pacifica in New York, about Cheney’s legacy, and why he must never be forgiven, as the primary architect of the “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program, and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. As I also note, despite Cheney’s opposition to Donald Trump, it was his enthusiasm for unfettered executive power throughout his career, but especially under George W. Bush, that fed directly into Trump’s notion of himself as a would-be emperor who refuses to acknowledge that there ought to be any constraints on his power. In my discussion about Cheney’s funeral, listing the high-profile attendees — and absences — I also focus in particular on the presence of Joe Biden, who so unforgivably replicated the US’s violent and lawless response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in his response to the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, which he shamefully described as “Israel’s 9/11”, as he offered Israel unprecedented and uncritical support for its own violent and lawless “war on terror.”

In a detailed analysis, I compare Israel’s prisons for Palestinians with US prisons in the “war on terror”, following comparisons that have been made between Sde Teiman, the notorious Israeli facility where a mass rape scandal took place, and Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, noting that the most appropriate comparison is with the CIA’s “black site” torture prisons, as they were the only prisons in the “war on terror” from which the ICRC were excluded, as has happened, under Israel’s far-right National Security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, throughout its entire prison system for Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Along with amendments to the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, first introduced in 2002, allowing prisoners to be held without any charge or access to lawyers for several months, this has meant that Israel has been engaged in a “black site”-style policy of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention throughout a network holding thousands of people, dwarfing the numbers held by the US at the height of its “war on terror.” Both the US and Israel were, as I describe it, “driven by a terrifying all-consuming vengeance, by a determination that everyone they seized was a ‘terrorist’, and by claims that they were seeking ‘actionable intelligence’ to target everyone responsible”, and that, as result, they “shredded all protections for prisoners, with complete contempt for all international and domestic laws and treaties that were supposed to guarantee fundamental baseline protections from torture, abuse and murder.” I also bring the story up to date via more recent developments, including the horrific celebrations, within Israel, of the soldiers in the rape scandal as heroes, and a new bill in the Knesset, introduced by Ben-Gvir, which proposes the execution of Palestinian prisoners, and I end with condemnation of the western media, and western leaders, for having bought into discredited lies about atrocities on October 7, while largely failing to recognize or show sympathy for the Palestinians, subjected to genuine atrocities on a colossal scale ever since.

Photos from, and my report about the 34th consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, and in London and Brussels on November 5, 2025, with San Francisco joining on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8. Former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sent a photo from an exhibition of prisoners’ art in Giessen, Germany. This month’s “First Wednesday” vigils also coincided with 8,700 days of Guantánamo’s existence, marked with the latest poster in an ongoing photo initiative by the Close Guantánamo campaign, and they also coincided with the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, although that was wonderfully overshadowed by the Mayoral Election victory, in New York, of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim socialist immigrant — and, undoubtedly, an opponent of the continued existence of Guantánamo. The vigils also coincided with the death, at the age of 84, of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the primary architect of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, including the CIA’s repulsive torture program, as well as the main driver, using false information derived from the use of torture, of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Shamefully, as I note, “while Cheney passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, his victims continue to languish in Guantánamo, with no sign of when, if ever, any of them will either be released, or delivered anything resembling justice.”

Photos from, and my report about the 33rd consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Portland, Detroit and Los Angeles, and in London, Brussels, Mexico City and Belgrade on October 1, 2025, with Cobleskill, NY joining on October 4. I also provide commentary and analysis regarding Donald Trump’s use of Guantánamo in the “war on migrants” that he initiated when he took office in January, which, after an initial flurry of media interest, has largely fallen off the radar as much as the “war on terror” prison in recent months. This is in spite of the fact that, as was reported in July, Trump was using Guantánamo to hold 26 migrants (out of 72 held at the time) from a variety of countries, including the UK, who allegedly had criminal records, raising fears that they might be deported to third countries, as has been happening sporadically but alarmingly over the last eight months. That doesn’t seem to have happened, although reports last week indicated that there are currently no migrants left at Guantánamo at all. However, as observers struggle to keep up with Trump’s manifold crimes, it is unclear exactly what happened to these men, and to dozens of others held over the summer, which is clearly a collective abdication of media responsibility.

Photos from, and my report about the 32nd consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, and in London, Brussels and Belgrade on September 3, 2025. In my report, I also discuss the significance of today being the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which not only led to the extraordinarily ill-advised establishment of the prison at Guantánamo, but also perilously sought to redefine the rules regarding warfare and detention, with baleful and far-reaching effects that, 24 years on, seem particularly to have provided inspiration for Israel’s behaviour over the last 23 months of its genocide in Gaza, and its unjustifiable attacks on numerous neighbouring countries.