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Last Wednesday, July 5, coordinated vigils took place around the world calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. My apologies for posting the photos and this report so late, but I took a week’s holiday beginning the day of the vigils, which involved a healthy seven days of digital detox, and I’m only just now back online.

The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and began in February, when I put a call out to friends and colleagues across the US, and in Mexico City, Brussels and Copenhagen, to join the monthly vigils that campaigners in London had been undertaking since September last year, drawing on a long tradition of vigils for the closure of Guantánamo outside the Houses of Parliament.

For the development of the vigils, please see the photos and reports from March, April, May and June.

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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.

As an additional point of interest, this is my 2600th post since I began writing articles about Guantánamo on a full-time basis in May 2007. If you wish to make a donation to support my work, most of which is reader-funded, then please feel free to do so — I am still hoping to raise $1100 of my $3500 target for the next three months. Click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation via PayPal.

Yesterday, March 25, marked 300 days until the end of Barack Obama’s Presidency, and, to mark the occasion, celebrities and concerned citizens across the US and around the world have been taking photos of themselves with posters, as part of the Countdown to Close Guantánamo campaign, reminding President Obama that he has just 300 days left to close the prison, as he promised to do on his second day in office back in January 2009. The poster is here, and you can send it to us here.

The actors David Morrissey and Juliet Stevenson, and the lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, which represents men still held at Guantánamo, are supporting the campaign, along with around 80 other people from the US and elsewhere, who, to date, have sent in photos of themselves with posters reminding the president that he has just 300 days left, to add to the 180 photos sent in when the campaign was launched in January, and marking 350 days last month. All the photos are available on the website here and here, and some are also on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

The Countdown to Close Guantánamo is an initiative of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I founded in January 2012 (as a journalist, activist and Guantánamo expert) with the attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their habeas corpus cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008. I launched the Countdown to Close Guantánamo in January this year with music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd) on Democracy Now! Read the rest of this entry »