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In the space of 17 days, US immigration enforcement agents — members of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol — executed two US citizens, in broad daylight, on the streets of Minneapolis, who posed no threat to them.

We know that Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year old mother, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year old ICU nurse with the US Department of Veterans Affairs, were executed, and posed no threat to the agents, because of multiple videos recorded on smartphones at both locations.

Renee Nicole Good, who had just driven her six-year old son to school, was smiling at, and speaking to Jonathan Ross, the agent who executed her, as she began maneuvering her car past him, less than 30 seconds before he shot her, once through her windshield, and twice through the side window, and then called her a “f*cking bitch.”

Alex Pretti, who was monitoring immigration enforcement agents’ actions, as was his right, was filming on his phone, and trying to protect a woman from assault, when he was pepper-sprayed and set upon by officials who, after finding that he was legally carrying a concealed weapon, removed it from him and then, as he was kneeling on the ground, executed him with gunshots to the back of his head. In the space of 30 seconds, he was shot ten times.

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Between Saturday January 10 and Monday January 12, an impressive 18 vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world, marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of the prison, with a 19th taking place on January 15.

Eleven of these vigils were by campaigners who have been taking part in the monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” global vigils that I initiated three years ago, and that have been taking place every month ever since.

Seven of these are at locations in the US — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, and Portland, OR — while the other four are in London, Brussels and Mexico City, with former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi holding a solo vigil in Belgrade.

Eight more groups also joined us. Five of these were in the US — in Augusta, ME, Cleveland, OH, Greenfield, MA and Raleigh, NC, where annual vigils take place on a regular basis, and in Honolulu in Hawaii, while three others, initiated by Mansoor, took place in Rome, Italy, in Warsaw, Poland and at Shannon Airport in Ireland.

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With all the horrors going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and yet, this Sunday, January 11, campaigners around the world — myself included — will be marking the 24th anniversary of the opening of this uniquely lawless facility, which opened on January 11, 2002 when the first flight of 20 prisoners arrived from US prisons in Afghanistan.

We’ll be marking this grim anniversary with vigils across the US and around the world, at which we’ll also be calling for freedom or long-delayed justice for the 15 men still held, and for an end to Donald Trump’s illegal use of the prison to hold migrants seized in the disgraceful, racist “war on migrants” that he declared when he took office for the second time nearly a year ago, promising the largest deportation program in US history, and setting loose armed and unaccountable thugs on the streets of US towns and cities.

Although the existence of the “war on terror” prison has been largely lost in a fog of amnesia for more years than most of us care to remember, it still remains hugely significant that, for 24 years now, and on an ongoing basis, successive US governments have lawlessly claimed that they have the right to hold people at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, or, if they are to be charged and tried, to do so in a broken system, the military commissions, that, after 24 years, must be irrevocably judged to have proven itself incapable of delivering justice.

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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.

The wheels of justice may grind slowly in the US court system, for reasons that involve various forms of inefficiency, but also the requirement to conduct detailed research into legal precedents. Nevertheless, throughout the Republic’s 249-year history, the courts have repeatedly, if, at times, in a glacial manner, performed a key role in ensuring that the checks and balances in the Constitution — the separation of powers between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government — are enforced.

On December 5, ten months after a particularly noxious example of executive overreach began — the detention of migrants with final deportation orders from the US in detention facilities on the grounds of the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay — Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, a judge in the District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled definitively that the Trump administration’s policy of holding migrants at Guantánamo was both “impermissibly punitive”, as a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, and was also completely unauthorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The ruling came in a class action lawsuit, Luna Gutierrez v. Noem, that had first been submitted in June by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (the ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) on behalf of two Nicaraguan nationals who were held at Guantánamo at the time, but also on behalf of every other migrant in “a similarly situated class”; namely, “all immigration detainees originally apprehended and detained in the United States, and who are, or will be held at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

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Last Wednesday, December 3, groups of stalwart campaigners gathered across the US and around the world for the 35th monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The “First Wednesday” vigils took place outside the White House in Washington, D.C., and in London, New York City, Brussels, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, OR, with former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also holding a solo vigil in Belgrade. Further vigils took place in Cobleskill, NY on Saturday December 6, and outside the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday December 7.

As usual, the vigils involved committed campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Veterans for Peace, 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, including NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture), whose banners feature prominently at some of the vigils.

Please see below for the photos, and comments from the participants, and read on for my reflections on the grimness of this particular milestone, as we near what ought to have been unthinkable — the 24th anniversary, on January 11, 2026, of the opening of the Guantánamo prison, where 15 men are still held in various states of fundamental lawlessness.

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It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted)  was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.

Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.

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On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza.

Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror”, but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”, he said, adding, “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7. I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”

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On Wednesday November 5, campaigners calling for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay — and an end to its more recent use to hold migrants seized in Donald Trump’s disturbing “war on migrants” — gathered at significant locations across the US and globally for the 34th successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils.

The “First Wednesday” vigils took place in Washington, D.C., London, New York, Brussels, Portland, Detroit and Los Angeles — with San Francisco following on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8 — and former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sending a photo from an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art in Giessen, in Germany.

As ever, the vigils involved committed campaigners from various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Veterans for Peace, 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, and I’m immensely grateful to our small but dedicated family of global activists for their dedication to shining a light on an enduring injustice that, shamefully, has largely been swallowed up in amnesia and inertia.

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Last Wednesday, October 1, the world’s most dedicated campaigners for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay gathered, at significant locations across the US and globally, for the 33rd successive monthly coordinated Close Guantánamo vigils — in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Brussels, Mexico City, Portland, Detroit, Los Angeles and Belgrade — with campaigners in Irvine, CA holding an indoor vigil, and with the redoubtable progressive outpost of Cobleskill, NY following on Saturday October 4.

The monthly “First Wednesday” vigils involve campaigners from various 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.

As ever, I’m immensely proud of our little global family of activists, all of whom recognize the significance of the enduring injustice of Guantánamo, and its baleful influence on brutal and unjust detention policies from Israel to El Salvador and, more recently, the US mainland, via the expansion of fundamentally lawless detention facilities run by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as part of the malignant “war on migrants” that Donald Trump launched when he took office in January.

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Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.

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.

It’s two weeks since Spencer Ackerman published an article on his Forever Wars website by former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, featuring the first ever interviews with two of his friends, the artists Moath Al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, who were finally freed from Guantánamo in January this year, and resettled in Oman, after being held for nearly 23 years without charge or trial.

I’m cross-posting it below, following my own introduction, in the hope that it will reach some readers who never saw the original posting.

I’ve long followed the story of these two men, including Moath having his habeas corpus petition turned down via some inadequate legal reasoning in 2009, and both men taking part in various hunger strikes, including the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013. This, and the global outrage that greeted it, finally persuaded President Obama to overcome his inertia, prompted by obstacles raised by Republicans to try to prevent him releasing prisoners, which meant that almost no prisoners were freed for two and a half years before the mass hunger strike began in February 2013.

It wasn’t until November 2017, however, that I became aware of the talents of both men as artists, when “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo,” an exhibition of artwork by eight prisoners — some released, and some still held — took place at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which I was fortunate to attend in January 2018, and which I wrote about here.

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