Guantánamo vigils expose fake freedom from executive tyranny as the US turns 250

Photos from the monthly global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo on July 1, 2026. Clockwise, from top left: outside the White House in Washington, D.C., outside the US Embassy in London, outside the European Parliament in Brussels, and former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi at an OSCE event in Vienna.

My new article on my website, Photos and Report: Close Guantánamo Vigils Undermine the US’s 250th Anniversary of Independence from Executive Tyranny, features 21 photos from, and my report about the 42nd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and around the world on and around Wednesday July 1, 2026.

In the text accompanying the article, I discuss the proximity of this month’s vigils to July 4, and, this year, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which was meant to bring to an end the 13 colonies’ subjection to the executive tyranny of the British government and King George III.

As I explain, however, 250 years later, the continuing existence of Guantánamo makes a mockery of those claims, as it is, fundamentally, a place where the law has rarely applied, and where the 15 men still held — and all those held previously — owe their detention to the same exercise of executive tyranny that the Founding Fathers sought to overthrow in 1776, but this time around implemented by the US government under four successive presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Mainly, as I describe it, the most glaring injustice of Guantánamo is how — except for a two-year period from 2008 to 2010, when courts were empowered to review prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions — “the only way out of Guantánamo has, in general, been through administrative reviews.”

These are “essentially unreviewable and unaccountable processes, which resemble nothing less than the vile and fundamentally lawless system of ‘administrative detention’ used by the State of Israel to keep Palestinians in a state of permanent legal limbo via cursory security assessments that can be renewed indefinitely every six months. In Guantánamo, these reviews generally take place every two or three years, but the process is essentially the same.”

I add, “Even when approved for release — as is the case with three of the six men specifically held under the US’s ‘administrative detention’ system — no legal mechanism exists to compel the government to actually free them. One of the three has been waiting to be freed for 16 years, while the other two have been waiting since 2021 and 2022.”

Campaigners in London, outside the US Embassy, with my “USA 250” poster exposing US hypocrisy.

Moreover, as I explain, “Even for those who have been charged and are facing trials — in the special military commission trial system that was dredged up from the history books for use at Guantánamo — the stench of executive tyranny hangs over the proceedings.”

As I add, “When prosecutors for three of the five men still held who are accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks realized, in 2022, that successful prosecutions would be impossible, primarily because of their belated recognition that the use of torture on these men, in CIA ‘black site’ torture prisons, was incompatible with justice, their efforts to secure plea deals, on which they worked with the defense teams and with the commissions’ convening authority, the military official who oversees the trial system, were over-ruled by then-defense secretary Lloyd Austin in August 2024, via a clear example of executive overreach.”

As I also explain, “Austin didn’t have right to over-ride the convening authority that he appointed, but he did so anyway, because it was more important for the Biden administration — as with all the administrations who have overseen Guantánamo over the last 24 years — to preserve a fiction of successful vengeful punishment and execution than to accept the reality that torture has made successful prosecutions impossible.”

In conclusion, I state, “There are many reasons for puncturing the myth that, 250 years ago, the 13 US colonies freed themselves from the yoke of executive tyranny and established a new nation on the principle that ‘all men are created equal’, and ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.’

“The horrors of slavery, and the genocidal pursuit of the indigenous population are just two glaring examples that have haunted the Republic throughout its 250-year existence, but for a practical demonstration of executive tyranny in action, right here and right now, it’s important to remember Guantánamo and the 15 men still held there, and to realize that their fate is, essentially, in the hands of one man, Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, who, as president, has such power over Guantánamo that, for the duration of his term in office, no one will be freed from the prison, and no one can do anything about it.”

A great photo from the vigil in Cobleskill, NY on July 4.

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