Shocking Reports of the Systemic Brutalization and Dehumanization of Migrants Held at Guantánamo
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.
Huge congratulations to the Washington Post for highlighting the brutality and dehumanization taking place at the migrant detention facility that has been in operation for the last three weeks in the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and, specifically, through the use of one particular cellblock in the existing “war on terror” prison, Camp 6, where the majority of the more than 200 migrants flown to Guantánamo from the US mainland have been held since detention operations began on February 4.
Washington Post reporters spoke to three of the 178 Venezuelan men held there between February 4 and February 20, when, with one exception, they were all repatriated to Venezuela via Honduras — with that one exception, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, flown back to ongoing detention on the US mainland.
Since then, however, 17 more migrants arrived on February 23 — seven from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by the New York Times — with another nine following on February 24, during a visit by defense secretary Pete Hegseth. All are reportedly being held in Camp 6.
Victory for US Law as Trump Abruptly Empties Guantánamo of All the Migrants He Just Sent There
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.
NOTE: Please see the important postscript at the end of this article, about Trump’s revival of flights just after it was published. The struggle continues.
On Thursday (February 20), the Trump administration’s short-lived attempt to turn the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba into a migrant detention facility holding up to 30,000 migrants — a plan announced via an executive order on January 29, and which, as it developed, involved, with astonishing illegality, co-opting a block in the long-established “war on terror” military prison to hold the majority of these men — seemed to stunningly collapse as all but one of the 178 migrants flown there since February 4, all Venuzuelans, were deported back to Venezuela via Honduras. The one man not repatriated was brought back to the US mainland.
It will be difficult for the Trump administration to spin this as anything other than an abject humiliation, and a powerful reminder that a president doesn’t rule by executive order, or with unfettered executive authority; he — or she, if that day ever comes — has to work with Congress, which passes laws and appropriates funding, and has to operate within the constraints of US law, as interpreted through the judiciary.
Trump’s Guantánamo plan openly showed contempt for all of the above. It was never clear that any authority existed to hold migrants seized on the US mainland at the naval base, where a Migrant Operations Center, in operation since the early 1990s, had only ever been used for Haitian and Cuban migrants intercepted at sea, to prevent them from landing on the US mainland and claiming the rights to legal assistance that entailed.
Horror at Trump’s Guantánamo: 53 Migrants Now Held Illegally and Incommunicado in the “War on Terror” Prison
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.
Photos and Report: Global Close Guantánamo Vigils Resume As Trump Begins Illegally Holding Migrants in the Prison
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.
Last Wednesday (February 5), the monthly “First Wednesday” global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay resumed, taking place for the first time under the darkening shadow of Donald Trump’s chaotic but malevolent reach.
While we had all presumed that Guantánamo and its remaining 15 prisoners might be largely ignored by Trump, making our continuing efforts to keep shining a light on the prison all the more important, he surprised us all by doing the exact opposite, dragging Guantánamo into the global spotlight by proposing to send migrants there as part of the cynical and malevolent “war on migrants” that he initiated as soon as he took office.
Trump’s plan initially focused on a massive expansion of an existing facility used since the 1990s to temporarily hold migrants intercepted at sea, and declaring that it would hold 30,000 migrants. This was alarming enough, because he had not sought Congressional approval or funding for this project, which, moreover, clearly had no defensible legal basis.
Trump is Illegally Holding Migrants Seized in the US in the “War on Terror” Prison at Guantánamo Bay
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.
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.”
To Hold 30,000 Migrants in Prison at Guantánamo, How Does Trump Propose to Redefine Them So They’re Beyond the Reach of the Law?
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.
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.”
Gaza Hostage Exchanges: The 90 Freed Palestinian Women and Children Ignored by the Western Media
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. 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.
On Sunday (January 19), as the ceasefire in Gaza began, so too did the first phase of the key peace-making element of the deal — the return, over six weeks, of 33 of the remaining 100 or so Israeli hostages seized by Hamas and other militants after they broke out of the “open-air prison” that the Gaza Strip became in 2007, when Israel, having withdrawn its forces and dismantled its settlements in Gaza itself, essentially sealed it shut, imposing a relentless blockade by land, sea and air, and rationing everything, and everyone permitted to enter or leave.
In exchange, Israel has agreed to release thousands of Palestinians held in its gruesome and ever-expanding network of prisons, solely for Palestinians, that it has established over the last 67 years of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, known, collectively, as the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
251 hostages were seized and taken back to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, a key aspect of the attacks whose purpose was largely obscured as Israel, and its compliant vassal states in the west, focused almost exclusively on the 1,139 people killed (mostly Israelis but also including 71 foreign nationals), and invented atrocities to justify the genocidal frenzy that followed; in particular, the notorious “40 beheaded babies” story that was pure fiction, as only 36 children were killed on October 7, only two of them were babies, and neither of them were beheaded.
Video: “Guantánamo at 23”, My New America Event with Tom Wilner and Karen Greenberg, and My One-Hour Podcast Interview with Margaret Flowers
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.
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.
Photos and Report: Close Guantánamo Vigils Marking the 23rd Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening, January 11, 2025
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.
Saturday January 11 marked another gruesome and unforgivable milestone in the US’s ongoing long war on law and fundamental human decency — the 23rd anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, despite recent positive developments (the release of 15 men), another 15 are still held in varying states of lawlessness.
To mark the occasion, groups across the US and around the world, who have been admirably and diligently taking part in monthly coordinated “First Wednesday” vigils for the last two years calling for the prison’s closure, shifted the dates of their vigils to the anniversary — although normal service will be resumed next month, on Wednesday February 5.
Below are photos of the vigils in Washington, D.C., London, New York, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY and Detroit. A planned vigil in Los Angeles had to be called off because of the wildfires, and other groups held vigils on other days — Portland, OR on January 1, and Mexico City on January 8 — with the vigil outside the European Parliament in Brussels taking place this coming Thursday, January 16. Groups involved include various Amnesty International groups, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, Close Guantánamo, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the UK Guantánamo Network, and many other groups, with other organizations also supporting the vigils on an ongoing basis.
Video: I Discuss Guantánamo Past, Present and Future with David Swanson on Talk World Radio
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.
I’m delighted to be making available below the video of a half-hour interview that I undertook on Sunday with the great peace activist David Swanson, of World BEYOND War, for his Talk World Radio show, which is syndicated by the Pacifica Network throughout the US.
David and I have know each other for a long time, since my earliest visits to the US at the end of the Bush administration, and the start of the Obama presidency, although we haven’t seen each other for many years, and I haven’t before had the pleasure of being interviewed by him for his show, which he helpfully entitled, “Close Guantánamo While Its Victims Are Still Alive.”
Half an hour was a helpful amount of time to discuss a complicated story like Guantánamo with the attention to detail that it deserves, and I was more than happy to discuss the prison from its earliest days, as a facility designed to hold human beings without and rights whatsoever, and to torture them when the largely hapless individuals rounded up or bought in Afghanistan and Pakistan failed to provide the “intelligence” that those in charge of the “war on terror” demanded.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
