Guantánamo Vigils Continue to Mark the Prison As the Source of Much of the 21st Century’s Depravity
Photos from the monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo in August 2026. Clockwise, from top left: Cobleskill, NY, Washington, D.C., London and New York.
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By Andy Worthington, August 12, 2026
Last Wednesday, August 5, the 43rd consecutive monthly global vigils for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay took place at key locations across the U.S. and around the world — outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the Houses of Parliament in London, and outside the European Parliament in Brussels, as well as in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Cobleskill, NY, Mexico City and Belgrade.
The photo above shows four of these vigils, and others are featured in this article, but you can see 23 photos in total by visiting my website, where I published them in my recent article, Photos and Report: The 43rd Monthly Global Vigils for the Closure of Guantánamo, the Source of So Much of the 21st Century’s Depravity.
In Belgrade, former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi joined the vigils with a one-man protest in his inimitable style.
Posted below is the main text from my article, but please do visit my site to see all the photos (and you can find all the photos from and reports about the vigils here):
At the time our vigils began, in February 2023, Joe Biden was the president, the genocide in Gaza had not yet begun, and 34 men were still held at Guantánamo, mostly without charge or trial, and all in varying states of fundamental lawlessness.
Our efforts throughout 2023 and 2024 helped to keep a flicker of interest in Guantánamo alive, and to secure the release of 19 of these men before Biden left office, even though those successes were completely overshadowed by the "ironclad" support for Israel that he clung to as his ailing mind collapsed.
Since last January, when Donald Trump returned to the White House, the 15 men still held at Guantánamo have almost entirely fallen off the radar. Trump, as in his first term, has no interest in releasing any of them, even though six of them are still held without charge or trial.
Instead, he briefly used Guantánamo as a grotesque prop in the "war on immigrants" that he declared when he took office, holding hundreds of hapless migrants there until he was challenged in court, and lawmakers began noticing how absurdly expensive it was to use Guantánamo as a largely symbolic theater of cruelty.
Campaigners outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on August 5, 2026.
In January, the prison at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 25 years — a quarter of a century — and, despite Trump’s lack of interest in it, it continues to cast a shadow over the whole of the 21st century.
It is the last bastion of the global "war on terror" that the Bush administration declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (whose 25th anniversary is just a month away), when the entire world was declared to be a battlefield, and when transnational kidnapping, the use of torture, and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial became normalized.
All of the above has had disturbing ramifications that can be seen most clearly in the actions of the State of Israel, whose torture prisons for Palestinians — held in vast numbers without charge or trial under "administrative detention" or as "unlawful combatants" — echo Guantánamo, with its own forms of "administrative detention" and its insistence that those held were "unlawful enemy combatants," as well as the CIA’s "black site" torture prisons, and whose contempt for borders, and for any kind of limits on military action, is as marked as that of the U.S.
Guantánamo has also provided a baleful template for Trump’s "war on immigrants," extending far beyond its temporary use for migrants last year. The entire model of the mass abductions of immigrants on U.S. soil, by unaccountable ICE agents, and their imprisonment in facilities from which they may, or may not ever be released, designed and driven by the horrific Nazi-like Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, is turning the whole of the U.S. mainland into a venue for proliferating Guantánamos.
This is a national scandal on an almost unimaginable scale, as 400,000 people have been detained and "disappeared" since Trump took office, 500 times as many people as have been held at Guantánamo throughout its history. The majority of these people have been deported, but 68,000 are currently held, and a problem that no one in the administration wants highlighted is what will happen if their home countries refuse to cooperate in taking them back, or if lawyers and the courts manage, against the odds, to establish in some cases that it is unsafe for them to be repatriated.
The administration has, in some cases, as happened with Guantánamo prisoners, sought to send some of these immigrants to third countries, but that is absurdly expensive, and also runs the risk of failing foul of the U.S.’s obligations, under torture legislation, not to send anyone anywhere where they face the risk of torture, disappearance or even death.
Campaigners with the Peacemakers of Schoharie County in Cobleskill, NY on Saturday August 8, 2026, as part of the weekly vigils they’ve been holding since the Iraq War to campaign against the U.S.’s multitude of injustices.
As we continue to raise our voices not only for those held at Guantánamo, but also for the Palestinians, and for the victims of ICE, we’ll be marking 9,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence on September 1, via the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo project. Do join us if you can, by taking a photo with the 9,000 days poster, via our Gitmo Clock website, which shows in real time how long Guantánamo has been open), and sending it to us. All this year’s photos to date can be seen here.
The day after, Wednesday September 2, will mark the 44th global monthly vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, and we’re also beginning to prepare for the 25th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, when I hope to finally launch a long-planned project, the Guantánamo Accountability Project, to serve as a focal point for efforts to eventually hold the U.S. government to account for its quarter-century of crimes at its shameful offshore gulag.
