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Last week, the 45th “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay took place across the US and around the world — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the Houses of Parliament in London, in Brussels, the home of the European Parliament, and in New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. Campaigners in Cobleskill, NY joined us on Saturday October 10, and, on the weekend of October 3-4, attendees at the AIUSA Los Angeles Western Regional Activism Conference also took part.

I remain, as always, immensely grateful to our small but dedicated global family of campaigners who come together once a month to metaphorically hold up candles around the world to show that not everyone has been engulfed in the general amnesia and indifference regarding the continuing existence of Guantánamo, and, just as importantly, to send a message to the 15 men still held that they haven’t been forgotten.

Please check out the photos below, and read on for my thoughts on this particular occasion, a month after the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that led to the establishment of Guantánamo, and with just three months to go until we mark the 25th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, 2027. Next month, the vigils take place on November 4, the day after the US midterm elections, when, we hope, the malignant Trump administration will lose control of Congress, so that those of us who care about Guantánamo will be able to once more work with the handful of sympathetic Democrats who are capable of putting the unresolved scandal of Guantánamo back on the agenda. Do join us if you can!

I first established the monthly vigils back in February 2023, when Joe Biden was in the White House, and it seemed to me that our annual vigils, held on January 11 every year to mark the anniversary of the prison’s opening, weren’t enough to maintain pressure on the administration to address the fact that 20 of the 34 men still held at that time had been approved for release, but were still imprisoned. Over the last two years of the Biden administration, our efforts maintaining visibility for Guantánamo and the men still held helped to secure the release of 19 of the 34 men still held, including most, but sadly not all of those approved for release.

As I noted when I posted the flier for this month’s vigils, although only 15 men are still held at Guantánamo, out of the 779 men and boys held at the prison since it first opened, they are all still held in “states of such fundamental lawlessness that if any other country — with one exception, as discussed below — was holding people in similar conditions they would be subjected to international condemnation.”

As I explained, “Six are held without charge or trial (like the overwhelming majority of the 779 individuals held throughout Guantánamo’s unforgivably long history), six have been charged with terrorism-related crimes but are caught up in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings because of the taint of the torture to which they were subjected in CIA ‘black sites’, two have been convicted (with one serving a life sentence in solitary confinement), and one is in legal limbo after being ruled unfit to stand trial because of psychosis brought on by his torture in the CIA ‘black sites.’”

The exception I mentioned in my post is, of course, the State of Israel, which is currently holding 9,265 Palestinian “security prisoners” in its gulag of torture prisons for Palestinians. 4,520 of these prisoners — nearly six times as many prisoners as have been held at Guantánamo throughout its nearly 25-year history — are held without charge or trial, under “administrative detention”, inherited from the British, or as “unlawful combatants”, under a law passed in 2002, around the same time that George W. Bush stripped the men and boys held at Guantánamo of all their rights as human beings by defining them as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

In addition, since October 7, Israel has also refused to allow the ICRC (the International Committee of the Red Cross), the only international and objective monitor of prison conditions, to visit any of the Palestinian “security prisoners.” This is an almost totally ignored scandal whose significance can readily be appreciated through a recognition that, even at the height of its global “war on terror”, the Bush administration allowed ICRC visits to almost every prisoner at Guantánamo, and only excluded the ICRC from its CIA “black site” torture prisons, where 119 prisoners were held.

For further information, see my recent post about Israel’s ongoing ban on ICRC visits, in defiance of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, and please see below additional photos from last week’s vigils, including some specifically noting the similarities between Guantánamo and Israel’s prisons for Palestinians. These comparisons were made all the more pointed and powerful because last week’s vigils took place on October 7, marking the third anniversary of the attacks on southern Israel by militants who broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, but also, more horrifically, marking the start of Israel’s response, the almost unimaginably depraved ongoing genocide, which I marked in an article entitled, Three Years of Gaza as a Ghetto of Genocidal Extermination.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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.