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Last Wednesday, September 3, the 32nd consecutive monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place at five locations across the US — in Washington, D.C., New York, Portland, OR, Los Angeles and Detroit — and in London and Brussels.

In Kansas, Amnesty International USA death penalty abolition campaigners also joined in, as did former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade, and two dedicated Close Guantánamo supporters in Irvine, CA, and, on Saturday September 6, campaigners in Cobleskill, NY also took part. Mexico City had to cancel this month, but will be back on October 1.

My thanks as always to the dedication of everyone involved, from organizations including numerous Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, the Peacemakers of Schoharie County, and various activist groups in New York City, with support from numerous other organizations.

Please see below for photos from the vigils, and read on for my report, which this month focuses on the 24th anniversary, today, of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which not only led to the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and a network of CIA “black site” torture prisons around the world, but also led to a fatal erosion of the rules governing warfare and the treatment of individuals deprived of their liberty that haunt us to this day.

I was away for the “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure last week, on a much-needed trip to Italy with my family, where I undertook a thorough digital detox, switching off from all news of the outside world for eleven days, which I recommend to anyone who struggles not to be overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the 24/7 live-streamed horrors of the world in 2025.

My return, and my belated publication of these photos from the day, coincides, fortuitously, with the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001, which continues to cast a baleful shadow on all of the supposed protections established after the Second World War governing the parameters of warfare and the acceptable treatment of prisoners, even if the relentless focus on it that was repeated every year has now faded away, as almost no one under the age of 30 in the US has any memory of it whatsoever.

The prison at Guantánamo Bay is the last corrosive bastion of the discredited flight from international and domestic laws and treaties that George W. Bush initiated when he launched a global “war on terror” in the wake of the attacks.

Just 15 men are still held — out of the 779 in total held by the US military since the prison was established four months after the 9/11 attacks, on January 11, 2002 — but all are still victims of the chaos that ensues when internationally agreed rules and laws are jettisoned in pursuit of vengeance; in the “war on terror”, via the claim that the severity of the the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 people were killed, was such that it represented a “new paradigm” for the conduct of warfare, in which “quaint” notions like the Geneva Conventions became irrelevant, torture was permissible, the entire world was regarded as a battlefield, and, as then-Vice President Dick Cheney memorably and chillingly declared shortly after the attacks, the US would cross over to “the dark side” to seek revenge and to ensure its future security.

The “black sites” may be long gone, but the damage caused by the recklessness, lawlessness and cruelty of the “war on terror” lives on, both at Guantánamo itself, where six of the 15 men still held — some previously tortured in the “black sites” — have, monstrously, been imprisoned for over two decades without charge or trial, and where the other men — most also previously tortured in the “black sites” — continue to be denied any fundamental justice. Although they have been charged with crimes, the method chosen for their prosecution, the military commissions, unwisely dredged up from the history books by the Bush administration, is so flawed that most of the cases remain deadlocked in a Groundhog Day of endless pre-trial hearings, in which the defense teams seek to expose the full details of the torture to which the men were subjected, while prosecutors do their utmost to prevent it.

Even for those freed — almost all as a result of administrative review processes, rather than any recognized legal basis — many, if not most, remain dogged to some extent by the taint of Guantánamo, with limited rights and limited freedom of movement, despite never having been charged with any crimes.

In numerous cases, men resettled in third countries, because successive US governments have regarded it as unsafe to repatriate them, have found that the elusive freedom they were promised has never materialized, and some have found post-Guantánamo life to be even more arduous and unjust than their experiences at Guantánamo itself, as their host countries have reneged on whatever promises were made in their secret resettlement agreements with the US, while the US itself has largely shown little or no interest in their fate, despite their continuing obligations under international humanitarian law.

Beyond the specific victims of the “war on terror”, the US’s flight from reason, law and decency post-9/11 has also made the world a much darker place, normalizing torture, normalizing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, and normalizing a perilous notion of global warfare in which borders — and notions that any kind of military aggression can only be conducted between two parties that are officially at war — have become irrelevant.

Notoriously, the US itself not only launched two wars of aggression and occupation in response to the 9/11 attacks — in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also behaved as though it was also perfectly acceptable to kidnap people anywhere on earth, to establish torture prisons in other countries, and also to undertake air strikes and drone attacks on countries with which it was not at war.

On this particular anniversary, it’s appropriate, I think, to reflect on how much of the poisonous legacy of the US’s “war on terror” continues to reverberate in particular in the State of Israel, whose long and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people provided a template for the US’s post-9/11 policies of indefinite, extrajudicial imprisonment without charge or trial via the “administrative detention” policies that it has long used to hold Palestinians without charge and without rights in its vast network of abhorrent prisons in which the use of torture is also rife.

In Gaza, where, unthinkably, Israel is nearing the second anniversary of its relentless genocide of the Palestinian people in response to the attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — and which President Biden, to his shame, explicitly compared to the 9/11 attacks — it’s worth reflecting that, although not explicitly described as such, Israel’s entire justification for its grotesque slaughter of civilians and its almost entire erasure of Gaza’s built environment is that it is engaged in its own “war on terror”, a war on Hamas in which it has deliberately blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, and frames its grotesque genocidal actions as a legitimate assault on “terrorists.”

In addition, while Israel has never shied away from extrajudicially pursuing and executing individuals abroad who it regarded as enemies — which it was engaged in long before 9/11 — it’s also difficult not to see its actions over the last 23 months — not only in Gaza and the West Bank, but also via its targeted assassinations of individuals in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, and, most recently, in Qatar and Yemen — as being explicitly perceived within Israel (and in large parts of the US political establishment) as justified by the US’s post-9/11 assertion that, in pursuit of “terrorists”, the entire world is a legitimate battlefield.

If the US’s response to the 9/11 attacks was a disturbing assault on the post-WWII “rules-based order”, Israel’s actions over the last 23 months would seem to amount to the final nail in its coffin. The human cost has also been immense. By even the most conservative estimates, the US-led post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq killed 200 times as many people as were killed on 9/11. Officially, Israel has, to date, killed 60 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed on October 7, but, as experts have definitively established, that is a serious undercount, and Israel may already have passed that unforgivable ratio, confirming that, in the new world disorder that began the day after September 11, 2001, the relentless brandishing of the word “terrorist” is apparently sufficient to justify mass slaughter as revenge on a truly heartbreaking and unforgivable scale.

Hopefully, by next year, when we mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the genocide in Gaza will somehow have been brought to an end, but, even if it is, the monstrous crimes of both the US in its “war on terror” and Israel in its opportunistic reimagining of it (fully backed, of course, by the US and other western countries) need to be so robustly condemned that the blood-stained tide of 21st century history — in which powerful but fundamentally deranged nations have conceived of mass genocidal slaughter as “counter-terrorism” — are fundamentally held accountable so that “never again” might mean what it was meant to mean in the wake of the Nazis’ atrocities in the Second World War.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

 

Since Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 29, to expand an existing migrant detention facility on the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — the Migrant Operations Center — to hold 30,000 migrants, as part of the “war on migrants” that he cynically and malevolently embarked upon as soon as he took office, eight flights of migrants from immigrant detention facilities in the US — all, apparently, carrying Venezuelans — arrived at Guantánamo between February 5 and 12, containing 98 men in total.

This is alarming enough, because no information has been provided about the legality of these flights, to a naval base that has only previously been used for prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, in what is known as the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility, which opened in 2002, and, via its Migrant Operations Center, first used in the 1990s, for migrants intercepted at sea. The base has never before been used to hold foreign nationals brought from the US mainland, who should have the same rights of access to lawyers and contact with families that they would have had on the US mainland. There is no indication, however, that this is the case.

The administration has also provided no information about who these people are, beyond unverifiable claims about them being gang members, and why it is regarded as so important for them to be sent to Guantánamo when, it would seem, they could just as easily be returned to their home countries. Just as importantly, no information has been provided about why this operation has begun without Congressional approval, or Congressional funding.

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If your son or daughter was murdered, and you responded, in your grief, by suggesting that 2.3 million people should be murdered in retaliation, and if, moreover, you had the means to fulfil your vengeful fantasies, mental health experts would be alarmed, and would seek an urgent intervention.

This, however, is what happened not just to individuals, but, collectively, to almost the whole of Israeli society after the deadly attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, in which, according to official Israeli figures, 1,068 Israeli citizens and 71 foreign citizens were killed, and 251 others were taken back to the Gaza Strip as hostages.

That is a significant number of people, and no excuse can be made for it — although strenuous efforts to claim that it occurred in a vacuum, as if through the exercise of pure evil for its own sake, fail, crucially, to recognize that it happened as the result of a multi-generational conflict between a colonial oppressor (the State of Israel) and an oppressed and occupied people (the Palestinians) that has been ongoing for 76 years, and that has involved, over the years, and before the latest horrors, the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, in numbers that dwarf the number of Israelis killed over that same period.

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On July 31 this year, a truly historic event took place at Guantánamo — in the military commissions, the trial system established to prosecute prisoners charged with acts of terrorism.

After two and a half years of negotiations between three of the men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their prosecutors and their defense teams, the Convening Authority for the Commissions, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier (who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), entered into three separate pretrial agreements (PTAs) with Khalid Shaykh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. Of the five men originally charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, one other man, Ammar al-Baluchi, is still involved in negotiations regarding his case, while the fifth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was ruled “unfit to stand trial” by a DoD Sanity Board last year.

Two days after the plea deals were announced, however, they were rescinded by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in a decision that, shamefully, demonstrated a commitment to undying vengeance in defiance of reality on the government’s part, coupled with fear of even greater reality-defying vengefulness from Republicans.

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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In depressing but sadly predictable news regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay and its fundamentally broken military commission trial system, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has stepped in to torpedo plea deal agreements with three of the men allegedly involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which were announced just 48 hours before in a press release by his own department, the Department of Defense.

The three men in question are Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and, although the full details of the plea deals were not made publicly available, prosecutors who spoke about them after the DoD’s press release was issued confirmed that the three men had “agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial.”

The plea deals, approved by the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals, would finally have brought to an end the embarrassing and seemingly interminable efforts to prosecute the three men, which began sixteen and a half years ago, and have provided nothing but humiliation for four successive US administrations — those led by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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You might be thinking that’s an outrageous analogy. Apart from the visual similarities between burning towers, how can I compare an attack by a foreign entity on the tallest buildings in New York’s banking centre with an unfortunate accident that befell the inhabitants of a tower block of social housing in a historically deprived area of west London?

The reason I make the analogy is because the Grenfell Tower fire, on June 14, 2017, wasn’t an accident, as such; it was the inevitable result of a system of deliberate neglect, and the deliberate erosion of safety standards, for those living in high-rise housing, which came about because of the deliberate creation of what I believe we’re entitled to call cannibalistic capitalism; or, if you prefer, economic terrorism, knowingly inflicted on civilians by politicians and almost the entire building industry.

Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians for political or ideological aims, and at Grenfell, seven years ago, 72 people died because, over the previous four decades, a system of providing safe and secure rented housing was eroded and largely erased, replaced with a new ideology that, under Margaret Thatcher, sought to eliminate the state provision of housing, selling it off via the notorious ‘Right to Buy’ policy, demonising those who still lived in social housing, portraying them as shirkers and scroungers and reclassifying them as inferior, or second-class citizens, cutting funding for maintenance and repairs, and transferring as much of the remaining social housing as possible to less accountable, or, seemingly, completely unaccountable public-private entities.

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And so the evil — there is no other word for it — continues, as, after two weeks of unprecedented airstrikes on the trapped civilians of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military continues to increase its attacks, with 704 people, including 305 children and 173 women killed in the last 24 hours.

Last week, when I last wrote about the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip as a result of Israel’s merciless and relentless bombing campaign, over a thousand children had been killed in Israeli bombing raids, out of a total death toll of over 3,000.

In just a week, that number has more than doubled.

As the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported today, 2,450 children have now been killed by Israel bombing raids, as well as 1,323 women, out of a total of 5,926 people killed overall. In addition, 16,124 people have been wounded, and around 1,500 people are reported missing and buried under rubble, including 830 children.

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I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In startling news from Guantánamo four days ago, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, the judge in the military commission case against the five men accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ruled that one of the men, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, is, as the Associated Press described it, “unfit for trial” after a medical panel found that “torture left him psychotic” — or “lastingly psychotic,” as the article’s opening line stated.

Bin al-Shibh, 51, a Yemeni, was 30 years old when he was seized in a house raid in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. He was subsequently held for four years in CIA “black sites” around the world — including Morocco, Poland, Romania and a “black site” that existed in Guantánamo in 2003-04 — before his final transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, with 13 other “high-value detainees,” including the other four men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

After an abortive attempt, in 2008, to prosecute the five men in the military commissions under President Bush, and a subsequent commitment, in November 2009, to prosecute them in a federal court in New York, which was abandoned after a Republican backlash, the five were charged in a revived military commission system in May 2011.

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Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

On Monday June 26, 7,837 days since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, and on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (“independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective”) issued a devastatingly critical report about systemic, historic and ongoing human rights abuses at the prison, based on the first ever visit by a Special Rapporteur — Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who visited the prison in February.

At the time of her visit, just 34 men were held at the prison (a number now reduced to 30), out of the 779 men and boys who have been held by the US military throughout the prison’s long history, and, as the Special Rapporteur admitted, she agreed with every “detainee or former detainee,” who, “[i]n every meeting she held” with them, told her, “with great regret,” that she had arrived “too late.”

However, it is crucial to understand that the lateness of the visit was not through a lack of effort on the part of the UN; rather, it was a result of a persistent lack of cooperation by the US authorities — part of a pattern of obstruction, secrecy and surveillance that prevented any UN visit because the authorities failed to comply with the Terms of Reference for Country Visits by Special Procedure Mandate Holders, which require “[c]onfidential and unsupervised contact with witnesses and other private persons, including persons deprived of their liberty.”

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Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

In recent months, an often-submerged story at Guantánamo — of aging torture victims with increasingly complex medical requirements, trapped in a broken justice system, and of the US government’s inability to care for them adequately — has surfaced though a number of reports that are finally shining a light on the darkest aspects of a malignant 21-year experiment that, throughout this whole time, has regularly trawled the darkest recesses of American depravity.

Over the years, those of us who have devoted our energies to getting the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed have tended to focus on getting prisoners never charged with a crime released, because, since the Bush years, when, largely without meeting much resistance, George W. Bush released two-thirds of the 779 men and boys rounded up so haphazardly in the years following the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, getting prisoners out of Guantánamo has increasingly resembled getting blood out of a stone.

Apart from a brief period from 2008 to 2010, when the law finally reached Guantánamo through habeas corpus (before cynical appeals court judges took it away again), getting out of Guantánamo has involved overcoming government inertia (for several years under Obama) or open hostility (under Trump), repeated administrative review processes characterized by extreme caution regarding prisoners never charged with a crime, and against whom the supposed evidence is, to say the least, flimsy (which led to over 60 men being accurately described by the media as “forever prisoners”), and many dozens of cases in which, when finally approved for release because of this fundamental lack of evidence, the men in question have had to wait (often for years) for new homes to be found for them in third countries.

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