Quarterly Fundraiser Day 4: Can You Help Me Raise $1600 (£1200) to Support My Guantánamo Work, My Activism and My Creativity?

13.9.18

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Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $1,600 (£1,200) I’m still trying to raise (from my initial $2,500 target) to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration.




 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s twelve and a half years since I began working full-time researching and writing about the prison at Guantánamo Bay that the Bush administration established exactly four months after the 9/11 attacks, and from the beginning, I must confess, I did it — perhaps stupidly — because it seemed like the right thing to do rather than because anyone was paying me to do so.

In the years since, I have sometimes been paid by mainstream or alternative media outlets, but not generally on any basis I could rely on to pay the bills. Instead, with the encouragement of American friends, I began, around nine years ago, asking you, my readers, to support my work, and ever since, every three months, I come to you, cap in hand, to ask you, if you like what I’m doing, to please make a donation to support me if you’re in a position to do so.

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.

In these many years of writing about Guantánamo, I’ve written over 2,200 articles about the prison and the men held there, and have campaigned relentlessly for Guantánamo’s closure, sometimes focusing on specific prisoners — the British residents Binyam Mohamed and Shaker Aamer, in particular — and, since 2012, through the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner.

In much of the mainstream media world, it’s considered unacceptable to be a journalist and an activist, because of a notion that journalism should somehow be objective, and allow both sides of a story to be told, but with Guantánamo I established very clearly through my 14 months of research and writing about the men held there, the circumstances of their capture and the brutal and often grotesque ways which they were treated, that those who established the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror” didn’t deserve to be heard, as they had spent years controlling the narrative and lying endlessly about how Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst” (when only a few percent of the 779 men held there by the military since 2002 can realistically be regarded as having had any connection with terrorism), and about how the US was within its rights to deprive human beings of all rights, to torture them, and to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial, when that, of course, is never acceptable under any circumstances.

I actually think that journalism’s cherished objectivity is dangerously counter-productive, watering down outrage, when so many of the problems we face in the US, in the UK, and around the world need to be exposed and need to have people encouraged to act rather than simply to reflect.

I continue to do what I can to keep Guantánamo in the public eye. I’m currently, for example, in the process of updating my six-part Guantánamo prisoner list, which provides links to everything I’ve ever written about all the prisoners, and I’m about to embark on a series of articles telling the stories of the 40 men still held, largely forgotten in the US, and effectively the personal prisoners of the vile Donald Trump, who, in his ignorance, thinks it is both useful and appropriate to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial, when it is in fact an affront to all the values that the US claims to hold dear.

I also, when time allows, work on other topics, for which I am also grateful for donations — on Britain’s housing crisis, which threatens to become an epidemic of social cleansing without concerted actions now, my London photojournalism project ‘The State of London‘ and my music with my band The Four Fathers.

If you can help out at all, with a donation however small or large, it will be very greatly appreciated. Thanks as ever for your support. Because my work is reader-funded, it’s true to say that I really can’t do what I do without it.

Andy Worthington
London
September 13, 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 2017 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.


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One Response

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    It’s Day 4 of my quarterly fundraiser, to support my ongoing reader-funded work on Guantanamo, now in its 13th year, and after some generous donations, I’ve now reached a third of my target for the next three months. If anyone else can help out at all, I’ll be very grateful. It is only through your support that I’m able to do this work at all, and although Donald Trump is now in the White House, and wants to keep Guantanamo open, I will continue to make the case that the existence of Guantanamo, where men are held indefinitely without charge or trial is a legal, ethical and moral abomination, and that the prison needs to be shut once and for all. Thank you for listening.

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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 Battle of the Beanfield

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