8,600 Days of Guantánamo: 15 Forgotten Men and 72 Precarious Migrants
Photos of campaigners, including former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi and our co-founder Andy Worthington, with the poster marking 8,600 days of Guantánamo's existence.
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By Andy Worthington, July 29, 2025
Yesterday, marking 8,600 days of the existence of the reviled "war on terror" prison at Guantánamo Bay, a handful of campaigners in the U.S. and around the world sent in photos of themselves with our poster marking this baleful milestone.
We’ve been making photos available every 100 days for the last seven and a half years, since January 2018, and will continue to do while Guantánamo remains open. You can see all the photos from 2025 here, and we hope that you’ll join us on November 5 to mark 8,700 days, and on January 11, 2026, marking the 24th anniversary of the prison’s opening, when it will have been open for 8,767 days.
Next Wednesday, August 6, campaigners across the U.S. and around the world will also be holding our regular "First Wednesday" monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, which have been taking place for the last two and a half years, since February 2023. You can see all the photos from July’s vigils, including my report, on my website here, and all the previous photos and reports are available here.
Fundamentally, those of us who care about the need for Guantánamo to be closed — and for the men still held there to either be freed, or to be given some modicum of justice after 23 and a half years of exceptional lawlessness — are trying to do nothing more than shining a light to continue illuminating what is otherwise a largely forgotten facility.
Dreamt up in the heat of the U.S.’s post-9/11 paranoia and quest for vengeance, Guantánamo’s continued existence, nevertheless, continues to poison all internationally agreed principles regarding the humane and appropriate treatment of prisoners — either those seized in wartime, or those allegedly involved in acts of terrorism.
The 15 men still held in the "war on terror" prison
Just 15 men are still held in the "war on terror" prison at Guantánamo — out of the 779 in total held by the U.S. military since the prison first opened on January 11, 2002. All of them, however, continue to be deprived of any fundamental rights.
Six have been held, for between 17 and 23 years, without charge or trial — three long approved for release by high-level U.S. government review processes, and three others widely described as "forever prisoners," never charged but not approved for release either.
Of the nine others, six have active cases ongoing in the military commission trial system developed for their prosecution, one other has agreed to a plea deal, another is in legal limbo after a DoD Sanity Board ruled that he was mentally unfit to stand trial in August 2023, and the other is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense in November 2008.
The six active cases are, moreover, mired in controversy. Four of the men, including those accused of masterminding and facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been in pre-trial hearings since 2012, with all attempts at successful prosecutions fundamentally undermined by the fact that they were all held and tortured in CIA "black sites" prior to their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006.
In the cases of three of the 9/11 co-accused, prosecutors finally realized, over three years ago, that, because of the use of torture, successful prosecutions were impossible, but plea deals that were finally arranged after two and a half years of negotiations, and that were agreed in August last year by the Convening Authority for the commissions, were immediately overturned by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.
Austin was subsequently overruled by the military judge in the 9/11 trial, but, as Biden’s presidency came to an end, the government appealed, and on July 11, a three-judge panel in the Appeals Court in Washington, D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) sided with Austin, hurling the defendants back into a seemingly never-ending Groundhog Day of pre-trial hearings.
Guantánamo under Trump, as a venue in his "war on migrants"
Beyond these 15 men, Guantánamo has also been appropriated by Donald Trump for the profoundly racist “war on migrants” that he launched when he took office for the second time in January. After initially ordering the expansion, to hold 30,000 migrants, of an existing Migrant Operations Center, opened in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea, Trump’s ambition has since been scaled back.
Just a fraction of that number — over 600 migrants in total — have been held at Guantánamo since February, with many of them illegally held in Camp 6 of the "war on terror" prison. Most have subsequently been repatriated, or sent back to facilities on the U.S. mainland, but at the last count 72 migrants, from a variety of countries, were held, as I reported here, with 26 of them, including a British national, accused by the Department of Homeland Security of having been convicted of serious crimes.
Locating migrants with criminal records has been a recent maneuver by the Trump administration, after it was repeatedly caught out describing migrants as dangerous gang members and "heinous monsters," despite there being no evidence to justify these hysterical claims.
Since doing so, the administration, as I reported here, has sent eight alleged convicted criminals on a one-way trip to South Sudan, and another five to Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), in a twisted revival of the Bush-era policy of "extraordinary rendition," with, apparently, no regard whatsoever for internationally agreed rules preventing anyone from being sent anywhere where they face the risk of torture, "disappearance," or even death.
There are valid fears that a similar fate may await the 26 alleged convicted criminals held at Guantánamo, but after the story was first reported on July 8, and I followed up on it on July 10, the trail has gone cold.
These migrants — like the men held in the "war on terror" prison — seem to have vanished from view, engulfed in the amnesia that so often plagues Guantánamo, despite its long and ignominious history as the place where successive U.S. governments have chosen to enact dark deeds "beyond the law."
For those if us who care, the light we are still trying to shine on the "war on terror" prison, and the 15 men held there, also needs to shine resolutely on the victims of Donald Trump’s "war on migrants."
