15 torture victims still languish at Guantánamo, while Cheney, the architect of the “war on terror”, died having evaded all accountability.
My new article on my website, Photos and Report: The 34th Monthly Global Close Guantánamo Vigils on Nov. 5, Also Marking 8,700 Days of the Prison’s Existence, features two dozen photos from, and my report about the 34th consecutive coordinated monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US, in Washington, D.C., New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Portland, and in London and Brussels on November 5, 2025, with San Francisco joining on November 6, and Cobleskill, NY on November 8. Former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi also sent a photo from an exhibition of prisoners’ art in Giessen, Germany.
This month’s “First Wednesday” vigils also coincided with 8,700 days of Guantánamo’s existence, marked with the latest poster in an ongoing photo initiative by the Close Guantánamo campaign (see all the photos here), and they also coincided with the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, although that was wonderfully overshadowed by the Mayoral Election victory, in New York, of Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim socialist immigrant — and, undoubtedly, an opponent of the continued existence of Guantánamo.
The vigils also coincided with the death, at the age of 84, of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the primary architect of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”, including the CIA’s repulsive torture program and the broken military commission trial system at Guantánamo, as well as the main driver, using false information derived from the use of torture, of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As I explained in “Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low”, an article I wrote 16 long years ago, in April 2009, “When Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of the Khalden military training camp in Afghanistan, was captured at the end of 2001 and sent to Egypt to be tortured, he made a false confession that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.” As I added, “Al-Libi later recanted his confession, but not until Secretary of State Colin Powell — to his eternal shame — had used the story in February 2003 in an attempt to persuade the UN to support the invasion of Iraq.”
As I note, “It is thoroughly dispiriting that, while Cheney passed away peacefully surrounded by his family, not only evading all accountability, but also feted by the mainstream media as a ‘giant of Republican politics’ (that quote is, shamefully, from the Guardian), his victims continue to languish in Guantánamo, prematurely aged by the torture they endured, 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.”
Please join is if you can for the next vigils, on Wednesday December 3, the last vigils before the 24th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2026. That’s a Sunday, and, as usual, we’ll be moving the vigils to that date, joining with other groups across the US and around the world, and taking photos with the poster marking 8,767 days of the prison’s existence, before returning to our regular “First Wednesday” vigils on February 4.
Please also feel free to listen to “81 Million Dollars”, the song I wrote and recorded with The Four Fathers about the CIA torture program, calling for accountability for those responsible for it. The title refers to the amount of money paid to James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen, the military contractors who, with no experience of real world interrogations, horribly reverse-engineered a US military training program designed to help US military personnel resist torture for use in the CIA “black sites.”