Guantanamo

Two of the most talented artists in Guantánamo, Moath Al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, resettled in Oman in January after being held for nearly 23 years without charge or trial, discuss their artwork and their memories of Guantánamo with their friend, the former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi. Both men’s work has featured in various art exhibitions of prisoners’ art over the last eight years, in the US and in Europe, and Moath’s vast sailing ships, made from recycled and scavenged materials, attracted significant attention — so much so that, for five years after the first exhibition in New York in 2017, the Pentagon petulantly imposed a ban on prisoners leaving with their artwork, and even threatened to destroy it, until the Biden administration capitulated to demands made by two UN Special Rapporteurs. Less well-known, but no less striking, are Khalid’s sculptures and symbolic paintings, some painted on gravel from the prison’s recreation yards, mixed with glue, which, as I describe them, “reveal a tantalizing conceptual fascination with using the elements of Guantánamo itself to tell a story.” The article was published two weeks ago on Spencer Ackerman’s Forever Wars website, and this cross-post features my own detailed introduction. Also included are photos of artwork by both men which hadn’t been seen until the Forever Wars article was published.

Photos from, and my report about the 31st 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, Mexico City and Belgrade on August 6, 2025. I describe Guantánamo as doubly forgotten because, as we continue to campaign for justice for the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison, who now seem largely to have receded from memory, Trump’s recent reanimation of Guantánamo as a venue for his “war on migrants” seems also to have drifted from view, after a flurry of media activity in the first few months of his baleful second presidency. This is in spite of the fact that, six weeks ago, it was reported that 72 migrants were being held at Guantánamo, and that 26 of them, including a British national, had been identified as having criminal records for serious crimes. Since then, however, the trail has gone cold, even though it is reasonable to fear that the administration is planning a one-way trip for these men to obliging third countries. This recently happened with South Sudan and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), where the men disposed of by the administration were given no safeguards that they would not be subjected to torture, “disappearance” or even death, as required under the Torture Convention, to which the US is a signatory.

My definitive overview of the first six months of Trump’s “war on migrants”, with a particular focus on the administration’s recent and truly alarming drive to deport, to third countries, migrants with criminal records, who have served prison sentences, often for serious crimes. The administration claims that it is being forced to act because these ex-prisoners’ home countries won’t take them back. However, even if this is sometimes true, it is essentially an intractable political problem, to which the answer cannot, and must not be to eviscerate the post-WWII consensus — involving the Refugee Convention and the Torture Convention — that there must be robust mechanisms preventing foreign nationals from being deported, either to their home countries, or to third countries, where they face the risk of torture or death. I also examine how Trump’s declared pursuit of migrants with criminal records (roughly 4% of the 11 million undocumented migrants in the US) is a smokescreen seeking to disguise a blunter and much more violent truth — that all eleven million are a target, because entering the US illegally is being regarded as a crime worthy of deportation. I also examine how there must always be a balance between a desire to stem uncontrolled immigration and the need for a significant number of immigrants to do numerous essential jobs, and run through the sordid back story of the administration holding Venezuelan migrants at Guantánamo, and then sending others on a one-way trip to a mega-Guantánamo in El Salvador, on the basis of allegations about their criminality that were largely exposed as lies. I proceed to explain how this new focus on finding migrants with criminal records and sending them on a one-way trip to third countries (South Sudan and Eswatini in the last week) has been cynically implemented to forestall any sympathy for these men, to enable a program that can be effected without attracting the outrage it deserves, with its horrific echoes of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” policies in the “war on terror”, which may well also constitute the reviled international crime of enforced disappearance. I end with some good news, with polls showing that Americans are increasingly turning against Trumps’s excesses, although that alone is not sufficient to prevent an ever-increasing humanitarian and moral disaster without serious resistance.

My report about the disturbing news that, in recent weeks, around 60 migrants, from 26 countries including the UK, have been flown to Guantánamo, apparently reviving the use of detention facilities on the naval base, which began with the arrival of 178 Venezuelans in February, but then tailed off after legal challenges, and after the administration was embarrassed by research establishing that, although they were all described as dangerous gang members, this was demonstrably untrue. In a new twist, seeking to overcome these earlier embarrassments, the Department of Homeland Security has published a list naming 26 of these men, and alleging that all of them, including the British national, have been convicted of serious crimes, although, via an internet search, I was unable to verify any of these claims. What the administration’s intention is remains unclear, but two options seem probable. Sending men with criminal convictions to Guantánamo (if these claims are true) may enable the administration to claim that it can hold them without charge or trial, replicating the model used in the existing “war on terror” prison, or it may be a prominent way to deport them to third countries, as recently happened when eight men from a variety of countries, all allegedly with criminal convictions, were sent to an unknown fate in war-torn South Sudan. Drawing analogies with the “extraordinary rendition” program of the Bush administration, and the often flawed resettlements of Guantánamo prisoners in third countries under Obama and Biden, I examine a recent and commendable New York Times investigation into the 58 countries that administration officials have approached, or want to approach, regarding taking in migrants who are not their own nationals. I also discuss the seven countries who have already agreed, and raise the alarm about the threat of the worst abuses of the “war on terror” being revived under Trump and his senior officials, who seem particularly motivated not to safely repatriate migrants, but to defy protections against torture or even death by sending them to unsafe destinations where any rights they should have will be unenforceable. I also sound a similar alarm about the increasing expansion of unaccountable hit squads “disappearing” people on the US mainland, and the creation of new detention facilities, reminiscent of Guantánamo, with “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida as the first example, and highlight the very real prospect that, without ferocious resistance, the $175 billion allocated to ICE in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will lead to a horrendous police state expansion of “disappearances” and gulags across the entire country. As I state in my conclusion, “Resistance is necessary, by all means available.”

Photos from, and my report about the 30th 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, Mexico City and Belgrade on July 2, 2025. As we continue to call for justice for the 15 remaining prisoners in the “war on terror” prison, I point out how our vigils are assuming increasing importance because of the “Gitmoization” of Donald Trump’s vile, racist “war on migrants”, in which new detention facilities are being established on the US mainland that look suspiciously like Guantánamo, or even like concentration camps, with the first notable example having just opened in the Florida Everglades, gleefully dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” I also point out how the horrors of the “war on terror” that are being replicated in Trump’s USA extend to the “extraordinary rendition” program that is being revived through the deportation of migrants to uncertain fates in third countries, with the most recent alarming example being the deportation of eight migrants from various nationalities to the war-wracked country of South Sudan.

The remaining 15 “war on terror” prisoners at Guantánamo have largely been forgotten, although detention facilities at the naval base have been cynically used by Donald Trump in the “war on migrants” he declared when he took office five months ago. While Trump’s interest in Guantánamo has largely waned, migrants are still being sent there, with the latest including a group of Haitians who were subsequently deported back to Haiti, on the same day that it was reported that the Trump administration was planning to send 9,000 new migrants to Guantánamo, including 800 Europeans. The claim was dismissed as “fake news” by the White House, but it seems to me that the officials who leaked the documents did so in an effort to derail the proposals by enraging European allies, which seems to have been successful. I also report on a letter to Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth by 15 lawmakers, led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, calling for the prison’s closure, and I also reflect on Guantánamo’s sordid history, and its still tainted present, to mark the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which was yesterday.

An appraisal of my work as an independent journalist and human rights activist in the 20th year since I first began, on a full-time basis, researching and writing about Guantánamo and the men held there, and exposing the truth about the Bush administration’s lies and distortions regarding their alleged status as “enemy combatants”, who, they claimed, in defiance of all international and domestic laws and treaties, could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. I also reflect on my other writing over the years, most recently about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and I invite your support, if possible, for what is an ongoing truth-telling endeavour, involving in-depth articles that provide more detail than is usually available through the mainstream media, and with a moral compass that also generally eludes the “liberal” media gatekeepers, with their alleged “objectivity” and “impartiality”, which either discourages entirely valid outrage, or props up the establishment “status quo.”

In an update on the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s decision, three months ago, to invoke the little-used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send 238 Venezuelans on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s CECOT prison for alleged terrorists, I look at a recent ruling by Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which, after comparing the treatment of these men to the lawless ordeal endured by K., the lead character in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial”, he ordered the administration to arrange for the men to have habeas corpus hearings. Judge Boasberg did so because of the failure of the administration to demonstrate that they had made any efforts to establish whether, as they alleged, these men were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, noting that “significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations.” The administration, predictably, has appealed Judge Boasberg’s ruling, which will now make its way to the D.C. Circuit Court, where, back in April, one appellate judge memorably declared that, the last time the Alien Enemies Act was used (in the Second World War), “Nazis got better treatment than has happened here.” I also look at how Trump’s “war on migrants” — and his use of the CECOT prison — has been influenced by the “war on terror”, the prison established at Guantánamo by George W. Bush, and the CIA’s “black site” torture program, and I also examine the well-chronicled lack of evidence against these Venezuelan men, the troubling manner in which many of them were sent to El Salvador even though they had ongoing immigration appeals, and the recent revelation that some of them also had Temporary Protected Status. Introduced under Joe Biden, TPS applied to hundreds of thousands of migrants, but it has also been under fire from Trump, and in two recent cases the Supreme Court, alarmingly, complied with his requests to strip these and other protections from nearly 900,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, which could lead to another tsunami of detentions and deportations.

Photos from, and my report about the coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay that took place across the US and in London, Brussels and Mexico City on June 4, 2025. The “First Wednesday” vigils have been taking place on the first Wednesday of every month for the last 29 months, and will continue while the prison is still open. I also run through the horrors of Guantánamo under Donald Trump, usurped as a theater of performative cruelty in the “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office, until he took more interest in sending migrants on a one-way trip to the CECOT prison, a mega-Guantánamo for alleged terrorists in El Salvador. I also point out that Trump’s indifference towards the 15 men still held in the “war on terror” prison — who include the men allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks and previously regarded as the most significant terrorists in US history — ironically reveals how Guantánamo is no longer of any relevance, although that won’t, sadly, help any of the men still held either secure their freedom or anything resembling justice.

YouTube clips from my recent interview with Misty Winston on Due Dissidence, plus links to the whole 90-minute interview on Rumble, X and Substack, in which we discussed the forgotten “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, where 15 men are still held, Donald Trump’s grotesque “war on migrants”, in which he has used Guantánamo as a location for performative cruelty, and the even more alarming deal he reached with El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, to send migrants on a one-way trip to Bukele’s mega-Guantánamo, the CECOT prison that wouldn’t exist without the template for indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that was provided by the Bush administration at Guantánamo. I was particularly concerned to highlight the similarities between “the war on terror” and the “war on migrants,” both of which explicitly involve, or involved imprisoning people without any form of due process, claiming a national emergency as justification, and to stress quite how alarming it is that this template has been extended to potentially encompass millions of hapless migrants in the US. As I said to Misty, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, in Donald Trump’s white supremacist America, no one of color is safe anywhere.