In shocking news reported by the New York Times, it has emerged that ten Venezuelan migrants “with suspected gang affiliations” — not confirmed, just “suspected” — who were flown to Guantánamo on Wednesday (February 5) have been moved into one of two prison blocks that, until their arrival, had been used to house prisoners seized in the “war on terror”, as part of the larger Military Detention Center — the notorious Guantánamo prison — that opened in January 2002.
The Pentagon claimed that the ten men, described as “high-threat illegal aliens”, were “too dangerous for the migrant site” at the opposite end of the naval base from the “war on terror” prison, which had previously been described as the destination for the migrants, where an existing 120-bed Migrant Operations Center has existed since the early 1990s.
The Pentagon stated that the ten men “are currently being housed in vacant detention facilities”, and claimed that “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is taking this measure to ensure the safe and secure detention of these individuals until they can be transported to their country of origin or other appropriate destination.”
This article is a much-expanded version of “Monthly Close Guantánamo Vigils Resume Amidst Trump’s Chilling Promise to Expand a Neighboring Facility to Hold 30,000 Migrants“, an article published on February 3 on 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 January 20, as Donald Trump took office for the second time, it seemed that the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which had recently marked the 23rd anniversary of its opening, might become as marginalized and generally forgotten as it was in his first term in office, when he largely sealed it shut for four years.
Last Wednesday, however, and seemingly out of the blue, Trump suddenly announced that he had just issued a new executive order, “Expanding Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to Full Capacity”, to expand an existing migrant detention facility at the naval base, where the “war on terror” prison is located, “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”, as part of his intention to “halt the border invasion, dismantle criminal cartels, and restore national sovereignty.”
Announcing his executive order, Trump claimed that the expanded migrant detention facility was intended to house 30,000 migrants, stating, “We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” It was, however, unclear on what basis these migrants would be held, just as Trump also failed to acknowledge that Congressional approval would be required for its construction.
Check out here my half-hour interview about Trump’s plans, with Chris Cook, for his weekly Gorilla Radio show, which, for 25 years, has been “providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”
On the last day of Joe Biden’s presidency, it seems appropriate to be posting a video and an audio recording marking the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, and appraising the pros and cons of Biden’s tenure in relation to Guantánamo, even though the news today is, understandably, dominated by the extraordinarily welcome news that, after 470 days of the most monstrous and persistent genocidal assault imaginable, a ceasefire has begun today in the Gaza Strip.
This has finally allowed the Palestinians, for the first time since the brief six-day “pause” in hostilities for the exchange of hostages that took place at the end of November 2023, to stop having to live in permanent fear of losing their lives from Israeli bombing, snipers, drones and armed quadcopters.
The sense of relief is, frankly, unimaginable for those of us who have been obliged to watch the atrocities unfold from afar, but many Palestinians, long displaced from their homes, are, for the first time, realizing the unprecedented extent of Israel’s destruction of almost the entire built environment, as they make their way through what appears to be a post-apocalyptic hellscape, in search of the remains of their homes, and of the remains of their lost and murdered loved ones.
Is it really true? After 470 days of the most grotesque, publicly-celebrated, western-backed atrocities that any of us have ever seen, dare we hope that a durable ceasefire has been agreed that will bring to an end the soul-draining horrors of Israel’s relentless efforts to exterminate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip?
On Wednesday (January 15), the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, announced the agreement of a ceasefire deal, agreed to by Israel and Hamas, in negotiations involving Qatar, Egypt and the US. President Biden and the President-Elect, Donald Trump, both claimed responsibility for securing the success of the deal, although it was noticeable that the terms of the deal were almost identical to those agreed to by Hamas over eight months ago, on May 6, 2024, which Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then refused to accept.
This suggests that, despite their protestations, neither Biden nor the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who also rushed to take credit for the deal, had actually done much at all in the intervening eight months, except to be publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, while continuing to send an extraordinary amount of deadly weapons to Israel, indicating that they were prepared to accept humiliation because they continued to unconditionally support Israel’s apparently never-ending hunger for Palestinians’ blood.
If you have the time and the inclination, please check out my latest interview with my colleague Andy Bungay, posted below as a YouTube podcast, and originally broadcast, as the latest in an ongoing series of monthly interviews, during Andy’s shows last Saturday and Sunday on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London, and subsequently made available on his Mixcloud page here and here. I’m pleased to note that Andy also played the latest live recordings by my band The Four Fathers, as well as ‘They Don’t Care’, the latest online single by my son Tyler, the beatboxer and singer known as The Wiz-RD.
In a freewheeling 80-minute discussion, we focused on some of the many profoundly dispiriting events dominating our lives as 2024 draws to a close — the imminent return as the US president of Donald Trump, the ongoing genocidal carnage being inflicted by Israel on the trapped Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and the growing menace of catastrophic climate change.
All are thoroughly depressing topics, of course, but unlike last month, when my discussion with Andy, available here as ‘World on Fire: Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians’, was rather dark (almost certainly because of the intensity of Israel’s “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza), this month’s conversation was threaded through with resistance and hope.
Many thanks to Kevin Gosztola for not forgetting about Guantánamo, and for spending an hour with me online last week to discuss in detail the grave legal and human rights abuses still taking place at the US’s shameful “war on terror” prison, as it nears the 23rd anniversary of its opening.
Kevin and I have known each other for many years, and our paths have crossed on occasion on the annual visits to the US that I undertook every January from 2011 to 2020 to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary its opening, as well as during his long dedication to addressing the persecution of Julian Assange, with whom I worked in 2011 on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo.
In recent years, he’s one of the few journalists to have maintained an interest in Guantánamo, interviewing me for his “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast on a more or less annual basis, in 2020, 2021 and 2023.
For our latest update, available below via YouTube, we began by discussing the half a billion dollars that it costs to keep the 30 men still held at Guantánamo — the 16 men in the “general population” who have all been approved for release, 13 other “high-value detainees”, charged in the military commissions, or, in three cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners”, and one man serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.
We then proceeded to discuss two particularly pressing concerns — the military commissions, and the plight of the men approved for release.
On the military commissions, we followed up on my recent article, Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago, in which I discussed the shameful situation whereby plea deals, carefully negotiated for the last two and a half years by prosecutors and defense attorneys for three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, signed at the end of July, were rescinded two days later by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.
This eminently sensible decision, which finally involved a recognition by prosecutors that the use of torture in CIA “black sites” had fatally contaminated the possibility of successful prosecutions, took the death penalty off the table, in exchange for confessions and life sentences, representing the only practical way for there to be closure — not only for the US establishment, humiliated internationally by its inability to successfully prosecute these men, but also, crucially, for the 9/11 victims’ families.
Now, however, the military judge in the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has thrown a colossal spanner in the works by ruling that Austin had no right to rescind the plea deals, paving the way, hopefully, for the submission of statements in January, before Donald Trump takes office and takes a wrecking ball to the entire operation — if, that is, the Biden administration can be persuaded not to appeal Judge McCall’s forensic humiliation of the Pentagon’s untenable thirst for unachievable vengeance.
Turning to the prisoners long approved for release but still held, we followed up on another recent article of mine, Free the Guantánamo 16: A Message to President Biden as His Time Runs Out, and discussed the horrendous plight of these men, who have been unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held because those decisions were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists that can compel the government to free them if, as has become increasingly apparent since the most recent prisoner release, back in April 2023, the Biden administration has been unwilling to prioritize freeing them.
With time running out before Donald Trump takes over, once more sealing the prison shut, and with third countries having to be found that will offer new homes for these men (because of Republican Congressional bans on repatriating them), I explained how a plan to resettle most of these men in Oman, stopped over a year ago because of the unconnected events of October 7 in Israel, needs to be urgently revived, or a new country needs to be found that will take them in.
At the end of the show, Kevin turned his attention to my band The Four Fathers, who, nine years ago, were featured by Kevin as “Protest Song of the Week”, for our song for the campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, on Shadowproof, the website that he ran at the time. This time around, Kevin promoted our new album, “Songs of Loss and Resistance”, which is available on Bandcamp, to download, or as a limited edition CD, and which features songs recorded over the last six years dealing with Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners”, the persecution of Julian Assange, climate collapse, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much more.
I’m grateful to Kevin for highlighting The Four Fathers’ ongoing protest music, and delighted to note that he has just revived his focus on protest music via The Protest Music Project on Substack — which, with his encouragement, I’ve also joined, and where I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter linking to all my work on an ongoing basis. Please join me!
* * * * *
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” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
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.
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, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
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.
As the dust settles on last week’s Presidential Election, and the US and the rest of the world wait anxiously to see quite what Donald Trump has planned for the future, one policy decision seems unlikely to offer any surprises.
As in his first term in office, Trump — who is very evidently Islamophobic (as we all ought to recall from his Muslim ban in 2017), and is the head of a debased Republican Party that contains numerous screamingly hysterical enthusiasts for the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — will almost certainly seal Guantánamo shut, as he did in his first term, refusing to set any prisoner free unless, by some miracle, they are required to be freed through legal means.
For the 30 men still held at Guantánamo, the situation is remarkably similar to that which faced President Obama eight years ago, as the news sank in that Hillary Clinton would not be taking over from him, and that Donald Trump would soon be inheriting Guantánamo, which he had bullishly promised to “load up with some bad dudes.” In the end, that threat never materialized, as, even in Trump’s inner circle, enough common sense existed to recognize that Guantánamo was an unsalvageable legal mess, and that, for any “bad dudes” that Trump managed to round up, prosecuting them in federal courts would be the only sensible option.
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 the epidemic of disasters afflicting the world, it’s sometimes hard to even remember that, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the US government is still holding 30 men, detained for between 15 and 22 years, who, for the most part, have never been charged with crimes, and are imprisoned, apparently indefinitely, without charge or trial.
With just a fortnight to go until the US Presidential Election, these men’s plight has become politically invisible, even though their treatment — outside of all norms governing the deprivation of liberty of individuals — has, from the beginning, relied on their demonization and dehumanization as Muslims, with a clear line stretching from their fundamentally lawless imprisonment to the way that demonized and dehumanized Muslims are being treated in the Gaza Strip today.
Now suffering under their fourth president, the men at Guantánamo had some hope, when Joe Biden took office, that positive changes were on the horizon. NGOs and lawyers had lobbied his transition team, urging that, at the very least, he address the plight of those specifically imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, as opposed to those charged in the military commissions, a broken system, first introduced after the 9/11 attacks, before Guantánamo even opened, albeit one with some tangential connection to the law.
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.
As the final US troops left Afghanistan two weeks ago, and the Taliban rolled into Kabul, taking the Presidential Palace on August 15 after President Ashraf Ghani fled, the presence of one particular Taliban member — Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir — caught the attention of the western media, when he declared that he had been held at Guantánamo for eight years.
Guantánamo: the mere mention of the word, from the mouth of a conquering Talib, standing in the very place so recently occupied by the US-backed president, reinvigorated the right-wingers in Congress, and in the US media, who had been worried that President Biden might finally close their beloved gulag once and for all.
Once upon a time, the merest mention of Guantánamo had summoned up images of bloodthirsty Al-Qaeda terrorists, hell-bent on the destruction of America, that had helped to keep ordinary Americans docile, and in a state of fear. However, over the years, as the horrors of Guantánamo leaked out to the world, revealing the use of torture and other forms of abuse on prisoners who, for the most part, were not involved in any kind of terrorism at all, defending its existence became more difficult. By his second term, even George W. Bush was aware that it was an embarrassment, and left office having released 532 of the 779 men he had imprisoned there.
The following cross-posted article, with my introduction, was originally published on 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.
Two weeks ago, we marked 7,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence as part of our ongoing photo campaign, with supporters sending in photos of themselves holding up posters marking how long the prison had been open, and urging President Biden to close it.
Since President Biden’s inauguration two months ago, his administration has thrown only a few crumbs of hope to campaigners for the closure of the prison, with which we have had to sustain ourselves — defense secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin telling the Senate that it’s “time for Guantánamo to close its doors,” and press secretary Jen Psaki announcing a “robust” review of the prison, in the 20th year of its operations, and the administration’s “intention” to close it.
As we await further news, we’re delighted that a great friend of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, Jeremy Varon, has written a detailed article for Waging Nonviolence, “an independent, non-profit media platform dedicated to providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements around the world.”
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
Email Andy Worthington
Please support Andy Worthington, independent journalist: