Photos and Report: 9,000 Days of Guantánamo, and the 44th Monthly Global Vigils for the Prison’s Closure
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Last Wednesday, the 44th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world — in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, outside the Houses of Parliament in London, and outside the European Parliament in Brussels. Friends in San Francisco joined us, as did two former Guantánamo prisoners, Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi in the Netherlands.
Campaigners in Washington, D.C., outside the heart of the beast, the White House, were unable to make the “First Wednesday” date, and will, instead, be holding a vigil on Friday September 11, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to the Bush administration’s sickening, brutal and counter-productive global “war on terror”, and the establishment of Guantánamo, the last physical manifestation of that failed war, whose polluting influence has contaminated US law to this day.
Last Wednesday’s vigils coincided with a grim milestone in Guantánamo’s history — 9,000 days of the prison’s existence, and at all the vigils supporters held up the Close Guantánamo campaign’s 9,000 days poster, the latest in an initiative that has been running since January 2018, marking every 100 days of the prison’s existence with photos of supporters standing with the posters to show support for our unsilenceable demand for the hellhole of Guantánamo to finally be closed.
We received over 50 photos in total, all of which can be found here on the Close Guantánamo website. Some of these photos are also posted below, along with photos from the vigils, and I hope you’ll also read on for my reflections on how and why Guantánamo has always been, and always will be a grotesque and irredeemable legal, moral and ethnical abomination that pollutes the soul of the US every day that it is open, and for profiles of the 15 men still held in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
