No Tears for Dick Cheney on Guantánamo’s 8,700th Day of Existence
A composite image of Dick Cheney and the prison at Guantánamo Bay on its first day, January 11, 2002.
By Andy Worthington, November 12, 2025
Last week, campaigners across the U.S. and around the world held the 34th successive monthly vigils calling for the closure of the "war on terror" prison at Guantánamo Bay. That same day — November 5 — marked 8,700 days of the existence of the prison, and campaigners also sent in photos with our 8,700 days poster, an initiative that involves highlighting every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, which we have been running for nearly eight years, via our Gitmo Clock website, which counts in real time how long Guantánamo has been open.
Nearly 24 years since the opening of the "war on terror" prison, I continue to be humbled and impressed by the efforts of the small but dedicated number of individuals who, in defiance of the general amnesia surrounding Guantánamo, continue to insist that its crimes and its victims, both past and present, must not be forgotten.
At the vigils last Wednesday, there were fears that the day would be overshadowed because it was the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s re-election victory, but in the end Trump was overshadowed by the resounding victory, in the New York Mayoral Election, of Zohran Mamdani. The antithesis of Trump — young, articulate, Muslim and socialist — Mamdani has brought hope back to politics, in complete contrast to the relentless darkness and misery of Trump’s far-right administration, and the invisibility of the complacent Democratic center.
However, other unexpected news also percolated through the vigils — the death, the day before, of former Vice President Dick Cheney, at the age of 84.
Campaigners outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on November 5, 2025, as part of the monthly global vigils for Guantánamo's closure, holding our 8,700 days poster.
The death of Dick Cheney
While much of the mainstream media was sanitizing Cheney’s record — the Guardian, for example, eulogized him as a "giant of Republican politics" — those of us who have spent years opposing the existence of the brutal and fundamentally lawless prison at Guantánamo Bay shed no tears at his passing.
After the 9/11 attacks, it was Cheney who largely drove the U.S. response, relegating the president, George W. Bush, to a supporting role, as he wilfully misinterpreted an act of terrorism (a crime) as an act of war, and launched a global "war on terror" in which, appallingly, the whole of the world was perceived as a battlefield. Almost immediately, a plaint CIA was authorized to kidnap, imprison and torture anyone regarded as a threat, and all domestic and international laws and treaties governing the treatment of prisoners were shredded.
Cheney was also the main driver of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and which, most notoriously, involved him using false information derived through the use of torture to claim that Saddam Hussein was working with Al-Qaeda regarding the use of chemical and biological weapons.
From Bagram to Guantánamo, and from Abu Ghraib to the CIA "black sites," Cheney’s fingerprints were all over the atrocities of the "war on terror," including his unprincipled attacks on Muslims in the U.S. through the USA PATRIOT Act, the use of torture, about which he remained unapologetic to the end, his fundamental violations of the Geneva Conventions, his scrambled insistence that terrorist criminals were warriors in a war that they wanted, and which he obligingly endorsed, and his equally scrambled insistence that soldiers were terrorists, and his thwarted efforts to establish trials at Guantánamo using evidence derived from torture that would lead to swift executions.
While no one among us mourned Cheney’s passing, we couldn’t help but reflect on how, although he died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by family members, the last 15 of the 779 men held by the U.S. military at Guantánamo — most previously held and tortured in the CIA "black sites" championed by Cheney — continue to languish at the prison, "prematurely aged by the torture they endured," as I explained last week, "subjected, as they always have been, to chronic and deliberate medical neglect, and with no sign of when, if ever, any of them will either be released, or delivered anything resembling justice."
It was also clear to us that his death has robbed us of any chance of holding him to account for the many crimes for which he was responsible.
Continuing calls for accountability
Following the death of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in 2021, only one of the three most significant figures in the Bush administration — George W. Bush himself — is left alive, although many others who played key roles are also still alive and at large, including Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington, the DoD’s general counsel William J. Haynes, II, and the rather more hapless figure of Alberto Gonzales, the White House Counsel.
Also complicit, as Human Rights Watch noted in 2011, are CIA director George Tenet, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the prison at Guantánamo from 2002 to 2004, who was also sent to "Gitmo-ize" prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and John Yoo and Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), who wrote and approved the memos in 2002 that sought to authorize the use of torture.
While it perhaps seems implausible that anyone will ever be held to account for the crimes of the "war on terror" — especially as no prosecutions followed the publication of the extensive and devastating unclassified summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program in December 2014 — I still believe that it is incumbent on the U.S. to one day accept its responsibilities and to hold itself accountable.
To that end, I will shortly be launching a long-term project that I have envisioned for many years — the Guantánamo Accountability Project, whose main focus will be to get the U.S. to accept its responsibilities towards the men released from Guantánamo, who, in far too many cases, remain as thoroughly deprived of all fundamental rights as they were when they were held as "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo, and to eventually undertake a reckoning with itself regarding the torture, abuse and legal violations that it undertook at the prison and in the wider "war on terror."
Do get in touch if this is of interest to you, and you want to get involved.
