It’s My Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $2500 (£1850) to Support My Guantánamo Work (And, If You Wish, My Housing Activism, Music and Photography)?

4.12.17

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Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantanamo outside the White House on January 11, 2016, the 15th anniversary of the opening of the prison (Photo: Justin Norman).

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2500 (£1850) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!





 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo as an independent journalist and activist trying to get the prison closed down. It’s nearly 16 years since Guantánamo opened, and nearly 12 years since I started researching and writing about Guantánamo on a full-time basis, firstly through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, through my journalism, most of which has been online (here on andyworthington.co.uk, and, since 2012, also on the Close Guantánamo website). I have occasionally worked for the mainstream media, but mostly my independence has allowed me the freedom to focus relentlessly on Guantánamo on my own terms, and I know that, over the long years of my engagement with this topic, many of you have come to appreciate that.

There is a catch, however. As an independent journalist, commentator and activist, no advertisers, editorial board or institution is paying me, and I rely on you to provide me with the financial support to enable me to do what I do. So if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency. The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

I continue to work to get Guantánamo closed, even though, of course, that has become a frustrating uphill struggle since Donald Trump became president in January. His threat to send new prisoners to Guantánamo has, thankfully, not materialized, but he has, effectively, sealed the prison shut, refusing to contemplate releasing anyone, even though five of the 41 men still held were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama. So appalling is his presidency on so many fronts that every worthy cause is left crying out for attention, and so Guantánamo has largely fallen off the radar, and has only briefly flickered back to prominence via outrageous maneuvers — allowing hunger strikers to starve to death, and threatening to destroy artworks made by the prisoners, for example.

In endeavoring to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, I was the first to report the hunger strike story, also covering it for Al-Jazeera, and I also wrote about the threats to destroy prisoners’ art — here and here. I have also kept a photo campaign going all year on the Close Guantánamo website, and have written dozens of other articles there and here, and I’m currently preparing for another US visit in January — my eighth successive January visit — to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and your donations will help to pay for this trip.

Outside of Guantánamo, I have also continued to do other work for which I am not paid — or, if you prefer, that I can only do as a reader-funded creative person. One of these initiatives is my photo project ‘The State of London’, which began in 2012 when, after recovering from contracting a rare blood disease the year before, I started cycling around London on a daily basis, taking photos on my travels, although I didn’t start posting photos — one a day, with accompany text — until may this year, the first anniversary of when I started. I have come to regard the cycling as critical for my mental and physical well-being, and the photos represent my cumulative perceptions of the city that has been my home for over 30 years, in all its joy and misery. If you haven’t yet checked out the photos, please do.

Similarly unfunded is my music, with my band The Four Fathers, whose new album of protest music, ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, was released last week, and a new outlet for my writing and activism — the housing crisis in London, and, specifically, the cynical destruction of council estates, and the social cleansing of those living there, to make way for new private developments and huge profits for the developers. To that end, I’m narrating a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, whose world premiere is in London this Friday, and recently set up a campaign page to resist social cleansing in Lewisham, in south east London, where I live.

All of the above is also unpaid, so if you can help to support all this work, please do. I am now running two websites, seven Facebook pages and five Twitter accounts, and yet, like so many other creative people, our opportunities to make any money whatsoever are being strangled outrageously by a technological climate in which everyone is encouraged to believe that everything they consume ought to be free —  writing, photography and music, for example — when in fact, although the creative people are finding it extremely difficult to make any money whatsoever, the companies driving the tech revolution are making insane profits, and all of us as consumers are also being fleeced, as everything we share for free also feeds into this outrageous profiteering by a handful of tech billionaires.

So, in conclusion, if you can help me at all by donating to support my work, it will be very greatly appreciated. A donation of $25 (£15) is just $2 (£1) a week for the next three months, hopefully not too much for all the work that I do.

With thanks, as ever, for your support. It really isn’t an overstatement to say that I can’t do what I do without you.

Andy Worthington
London
December 4, 2017

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Donald Trump No! Please Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2017), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign.


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2 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    FRIENDS! It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my independent work on Guantanamo as a reader-supported journalist, commentator and activist, and, if you wish, to support my housing activism, and my music and photography, none of which I have any funding for. I’ve been working on Guantanamo for nearly 12 years now, and most of what I do is only possible because of your generosity and support! Thank you!

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    I’ve just had my first donation. Thank you! Can anyone else help? As I say in my article, “A donation of $25 (£15) is just $2 (£1) a week for the next three months, hopefully not too much for all the work that I do.”

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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The Guantánamo Files book cover

The Guantánamo Files

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The Battle of the Beanfield

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion book cover

Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

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Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

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