Photos and Report: The 43rd Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo, the Source of So Much of the 21st Century’s Depravity
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In a world of endless, pointless distractions, of 24-hour rolling news that means that people can’t even remember what happened yesterday, of a gloating genocide in Gaza that is tearing our hearts apart, but that no one can stop, and of extreme heat and drought that is telling us, globally, that our days on our unique, miraculous planet are well and truly numbered, because of our inability to stop burning fossil fuels, it’s nothing short of a miracle that, once a month, a handful of diligent activists across the US and around the world get together to hold coordinated vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The vigils — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the Houses of Parliament in London, outside the European Parliament in Brussels, and in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Mexico City and Belgrade — began 43 months ago, in February 2023, as a concerted effort to prevent Guantánamo, routinely engulfed in the collective amnesia of the political and media establishments, from being entirely forgotten.
Please see the photos below, of activists from, amongst other groups and organizations, Amnesty International, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, and read on for my assessment of why remembering Guantánamo and calling for its closure is still so essential, followed by more photos.
An Ever-Expanding Gulag of Concentration Camps for Immigrants: The US Under Stephen Miller
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When Donald Trump promised, on the campaign trail, to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, even the most observant critics would have been hard-pressed to realize quite what that would actually entail.
In the last year, however, we’ve come to see what it is, and the reality is truly horrific, as it involves nothing less than a concerted effort to turn the entire landmass of the United States into a hunting ground for masked and heavily-armed unaccountable thugs to terrorize entire cities, to abduct anyone who isn’t white, on the merest suspicion that they might be undocumented migrants, and to “disappear” them into increasingly overcrowded detention facilities where even the most basic human requirements — decent food and water, and adequate medical treatment — are routinely denied, where strenuous efforts are made to deny them access to lawyers, despite that being their legal right, and where institutionalized cruelty and violence are rampant.
When Trump’s second presidency began, ICE was holding around 40,000 people in 107 facilities. In just twelve months, those figures have both nearly doubled, with over 70,000 people held in 212 facilities. Most pertinently, despite the administration’s claims that it is only seizing and removing “criminal illegal aliens”, three-quarters of those held — 52,504 out of the 70,766 held as of January 25 — have no criminal record whatsoever, while many of those with convictions “committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
