11.6.18
Dear friends and supporters,
It’s that time of the year when I ask you, as I do every three months, to make a donation if you can to support my work as an independent researcher, writer, commentator and activist (and also as a photographer and musician) — primarily on Guantánamo, but also in relation to social justice issues in the UK.
If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.
You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.
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.
For over 12 years now I’ve been working as a very modern writer and activist, working occasionally with the mainstream media, but generally operating via my own websites and social media — in part because of a decline in traditional paid work in the mainstream media, but also because of what I regard as the importance of mixing journalism and activism. In 2008, when I wrote a front-page story for the New York Times, with Carlotta Gall, about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a Guantánamo prisoner who had died of cancer, and who had never managed to persuade the US authorities to make a single phone call to Afghanistan to confirm that he had actually helped a number of significant anti-Taliban figures escape from a Taliban jail, the Bush administration, within hours, called on the Times to apologize for giving me a byline because I had “a point of view.”
Absurdly, while the right-wing lies brazenly in its reporting, and openly pumps out black propaganda, the liberal media is meant to bind itself to a notion of “balance” and “objectivity” that has a tendency to defuse outrage, and to prevent people like me from having a mainstream platform, because of my “point of view.” Shamefully ignored in all of this was the fact that I had a “point of view” on Guantánamo because I had spent 14 months researching it on a full-time basis, for my book The Guantánamo Files, and had concluded, as a result of that research, that there was not a single thing about the existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that was acceptable, a position I still maintain today.
In a world in which the options for making a living out of creative work are becoming more and more endangered — primarily because the masters of the modern world, the tech giants, take almost all the money that is available through creative work for themselves — I rely on you, my readers and supporters, not only to enable me to keep writing about and advocating for the closure of Guantánamo, and calling for those responsible to be held accountable, but also to support all the other work I do.
That includes my work defending social housing (not-for-profit housing) in the UK, trying to prevent the cynical destruction of council estates and efforts to eradicate genuinely affordable rents for ordinary working people, which has recently involved me narrating ‘Concrete Solders UK’, a grass-roots documentary about residents’ resistance to the proposed destruction of their homes, and two other projects — my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which, with a political eye, I have been photographing the whole of London on bike rides over the last six years, and my protest music with my band The Four Fathers, another outlet for my activism, which, again, runs up against a powerful institutional notion, carefully cultivated over the last 30 years, that music and politics don’t mix.
I’m hoping you can help me to keep working on the many fronts of my journalistic and creative work on human rights and social justice. As ever, it’s true to say that I really can’t do what I do with you.
Andy Worthington
London
June 11, 2018
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 see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London.
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, The Complete Guantánamo Files, 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, and marking 6,000 days of Guantánamo this Friday, June 15.
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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One Response
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Dear friends and supporters, It’s that time of year when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantanamo and related issues – and, if you wish, my work defending social housing in the UK, and my photography and music. As an independent journalist, activist and creative person, I rely on your support to enable me to keep writing about and pushing for the closure of #Guantanamo, 12 years since I first started this work, via, for example, the campaign I’m currently running, to publicize the fact that, this Friday, June 15, the prison at Guantanamo Bay will, shamefully, have been open for 6,000 days. I continue to write and publish around 50 articles every quarter, as well as maintaining numerous social media sites, so if you like what I do and are able to help, then please consider making a donation. Thanks, as ever, for your support.
...on June 11th, 2018 at 8:20 pm