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Huge thanks to everyone who took part in the latest coordinated global monthly vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on September 4, 2024. My apologies for taking so long to collate the photos and to post this report, but on the day of the vigils I flew out to Sicily on a family holiday, where I was offline as part of a ten-day digital detox — a pause in the relentlessness of the bad news that plagues us on so many fronts, which I can heartily recommend to all activists and campaigners at risk of burnout from atrocity overload.

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On Wednesday (August 7) campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay marked 18 months of monthly coordinated global vigils for the prison’s closure at seven locations across the US — Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cobleskill, NY and Los Angeles — and in London and Brussels, with a delayed vigil taking place the day after in Mexico City. The campaigners represent numerous organizations committed to the closure of Guantánamo, including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait, NRCAT (the National Religious Campaign Against Torture) and the UK Guantánamo Network, with numerous other supporting organizations.

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My thanks, as always, to the campaigners in ten different locations across the US and around the world who came together on Wednesday (July 3), to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — in Washington, D.C., London, New York City, Mexico City, Brussels, San Francisco, Detroit, Cobleskill, NY, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, from organizations including Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the World Can’t Wait and the UK Guantánamo Network, and with supporting organizations including the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

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On Wednesday, campaigners in ten locations across the US and around the world held the latest monthly coordinated global vigils calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which, on June 23, will have been open for 8,200 days.

The monthly vigils, which I initiated last February, took place in Washington, D.C., New York, London, Mexico City, Brussels, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Detroit, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, and focused, as usual, not just on calls for the prison’s eventual closure, but also for the immediate release of 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release, but are still held because the decisions to release them — taken unanimously by high-level US government review processes — were, nevertheless, purely administrative. This means that no legal mechanism exists to compel the Biden administration to free them, if, as is increasingly apparent, President Biden and Antony Blinken have no interest in prioritizing their release.

As the poster that I update every month shows, as of June 5, these men had been held for between 621 and 1,315 days since the decisions were taken to release them, and, in three outlying cases, for 5,248 days. Any country that tolerates this cannot be said to have the slightest respect for the law, or, indeed, for any fundamental human notions of decency.

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With Gaza, understandably, dominating the news, as Israel’s genocide continues, and peaceful pro-Palestinian protestors at campuses across the US are being violently assaulted by police on behalf of their universities’ administrators, it’s a tribute to the tenacity of human rights campaigners at five locations across the US — and in London and Brussels — that, on Wednesday, they came out onto the streets to also try to remind people of the ongoing existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, in particular, the plight of the 16 men (out of 30 still held in total), who have long been approved for release but are still held.

Coordinated monthly vigils for the closure of Guantánamo have been taking place across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month since I began organizing them last February, and on Wednesday, May 1, vigils took place in Washington, D.C., New York, London, Brussels, Cobleskill, NY, Detroit and Los Angeles.

San Francisco didn’t hold a vigil this month, but coordinator Gavrilah Wells took photos at two events at the weekend, and campaigners in Mexico City were also unable to take part, although Natalia Rivera Scott arranged instead for two former prisoners to take photos with posters calling for the prison’s closure.

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On Wednesday (April 3), the latest monthly coordinated vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay took place at five locations across the US, in London, in Mexico City, and, as a special one-off event, in the European Parliament in Brussels.

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As the prison at Guantánamo Bay continues its miserable existence, now in its 23rd year of denying justice to the men held, and betraying every legal principle that is supposed to distinguish the US from dictatorships, I’m grateful to the campaigners across the US, and around the world, who, following the annual protests for Guantánamo’s closure on January 11, the 22nd anniversary of its opening, have resumed the monthly vigils that I initiated a year ago to try to keep a light shining on Guantánamo once a month rather than just once a year.

Via organizations including numerous Amnesty International groups, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and The World Can’t Wait, vigils took place on Wednesday (February 7) in Washington, D.C., Cobleskill, NY, Detroit and San Francisco, as well as in Mexico City and London, where I joined fellow campaigners outside the Houses of Parliament, and in Brussels and Copenhagen, where campaigners held their vigils on the preceding days.

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On Saturday (January 20), a colourful and inspiring march and rally for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay took place in central London, organized by the UK Guantánamo Network, which consists of members of a number of local Amnesty International groups from across London and the south east, plus other campaigners, myself included.

The event was organized to mark the recent 22nd anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11, when a handful of campaigners braved bitterly cold weather to stage a vigil outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms, as part of the monthly coordinated global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure that I initiated a year ago. See here for my report about, and photos from the 16 vigils that took place in the US and around the world to mark the anniversary.

Complementing that vigil, the march and rally took place on a Saturday for maximum visibility, and would have taken place on Saturday January 13 had it not been for the fact that a massive March for Palestine was scheduled for that particular date, which I posted photos of — and commentary about — here.

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For those of us who care about quaint notions like the rule of law, due process, habeas corpus, the Geneva Conventions, the prohibition on the use of torture, the right to a fair trial, and the right not to be indefinitely imprisoned without charge or trial, the arrival, every year, of January 11 is always a difficult occasion.

January 11, 2002 was when the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay first opened, when all of the above were jettisoned by the Bush administration in a bonfire of all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the imprisonment of individuals.

This year marked the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the prison, and yet, alarmingly, all of the violations outlined above are still largely in place, and, just as alarmingly, almost no one in the United States — in the government, the media and the population as a whole — even cares, even though, in the last seven years, just eleven men have been freed from the prison.

The violations of all domestic and international norms regarding the imprisonment of individuals at Guantánamo are so severe that last June, after Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, became the first UN Rapporteur to be allowed to visit the prison, she wrote in a devastating report that the systemic legal and medical problems at Guantánamo, as well as the ongoing dehumanization of the men held, and the restrictions on contact with their families, were so severe that they amount to “ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” that “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

30 men are still held at Guantánamo — out of the 779 men and boys held at the prison since it first opened — and yet all are still trapped in circumstances that would be intolerable if they were applied anywhere else in the US justice system, or, indeed, anywhere else in the world.

16 of these men have been unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and yet they have continued to be held for years since the US authorities first decided that they no longer wanted to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial. In the cases of 13 of these men, they had been held for between 475 and 1,169 days since these decisions were taken, as of January 11, and in the other three cases for an unforgivable 5,102 days.

There is is still no sign of when, if ever, they will be freed, because the decisions taken to release them were purely administrative, and therefore have no legal weight, meaning that there is no one they can appeal to if, as is clearly the case, the executive branch has demonstrably failed to regard the restoration of their freedom as any kind of priority.

Three others remain as “forever prisoners” — neither charged nor approved for release — and, although the remaining eleven have been charged with crimes, they are caught up in the broken military commission trial system, which has proven to be incapable of delivering justice — fundamentally because the men in question were brutally and extensively tortured in CIA “black sites,” and the use of torture is incompatible with any practical implementation of justice.

Last year, in other opinions by the UN Special Mandates, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a devastating opinion in the case of one of the “forever prisoners,” Abu Zubaydah, for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was first implemented, in which they condemned his ongoing imprisonment as arbitrary detention, ordered his release and compensation, and also expressed “grave concern” that the very basis of the detention system at Guantánamo “may constitute crimes against humanity.”

The Working Group also issued another devastating opinion in the case of one of the men charged, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, also calling for his release and compensation, and quoting a medical expert, Dr. Sondra Crosby, who, after visiting him several years ago, described him as “one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.” Al-Nashiri’s trial judge later condemned efforts by the government to erase the effects of his torture via testimony obtained “non-coercively” after his arrival at Guantánamo, and yet, although these stories (and Fionnuala’s report) caused brief ripples of interest in the media, the Biden administration’s response has been one of almost total indifference.

Although few people care about Guantánamo, those who do — and who recognize that last year’s reports have quite definitively portrayed the prison as an active crime scene — have persistently taken upon themselves the weight of everyone else’s abdication of responsibility, campaigning, petitioning and contacting their elected representatives, and persistently highlighting both the legal, moral and ethical abominations of Guantánamo, and its impact of the men held, who they have persistently sought to humanize.

Every year, on the anniversary, vigils take place across the US and around the world calling for the closure of Guantánamo. For ten years, from 2011 to 2020, I traveled to the US to take part in the annual vigil outside the White House, organized by numerous groups including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

Covid brought those annual visits to an end, but by the time that crisis had passed the interest in Guantánamo had dwindled to such an extent that it didn’t seem worthwhile any longer for me to contribute to the pollution caused by air travel to visit the country that is responsible for Guantánamo, but where the opportunities to use my vast knowledge of the prison, and those held there, to express my indignation and to try and reach out to people has become almost non-existent.

A year ago, after the typical flurry of activity on and around the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, I decided to try to amplify the voices of activists on a more regular basis, following up on the monthly vigils that a group of activists, myself included, had recently started holding in London (largely involving activists with various local Amnesty International groups, coming together with other campaigners as the UK Guantánamo Network) by reaching out to friends and colleagues in the US and elsewhere around the world to encourage them to join us in holding monthly coordinated global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure.

With the support of Amnesty International USA and other groups (most noticeably Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait), these have become a regular occurrence, typically involving coordinated protests in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cobleskill, NY, Detroit and Minneapolis, as well as London, Mexico City, Copenhagen and Brussels, and on January 11 these protests were augmented by other protests in Raleigh, NC, in Greenfield and Northampton, MA, in Augusta, Maine, in Toledo, Ohio, in Cleveland, Ohio, in Boston and in Berkeley.

Please see below for more photos from these vigils, at which campaigners also took photos with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking 8,036 days of the prison’s existence on January 11, as part of an ongoing campaign that began six years ago, and that involves posters marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, as well as marking the anniversaries of its opening. We received over 100 photos for January 11, and in December, when we marked 8,000 days, we received 170 photos.

I hope that as many people as possible will join us in 2024, as we resume our monthly vigils in February, on Wednesday February 7, continuing on the first Wednesday of every month thereafter, and that you’ll also join us for the ongoing photo campaign, marking 8,100 days of Guantánamo’s existence on March 15, 8,200 days on June 23, 8,300 days on October 1, and, sadly, 8,400 days on January 9, 2025, just two days before the 23rd anniversary of the prison’s opening. Hopefully, by then, the population of Guantánamo will be significantly smaller than it is now.

* * * * *

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 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.