Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support my Guantánamo Work, Activism and Photo-Journalism for the Next Three Months

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work as a freelance journalist and activist, working primarily to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but also working on social justice issues in the UK, particularly involving housing and the environment, as well as chronicling the changing face of London in my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ 

It’s now 12 years since I began publishing articles about Guantánamo on my website, after I had completed the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007. Since then, I have published nearly 2,300 articles about Guantánamo, telling the stories on the men held, and campaigning to secure the closure of the prison, which remains, as it always has been, a legal, moral and ethical abomination. Since 2012, I have also been augmenting my work here with the  very specific focus of the Close Guantánamo campaign and website.

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, 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 filling in the amount you wish to donate every month, 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 (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), 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.

On Guantánamo, of course, the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House in January 2017 was a disaster, as he has no desire to release anyone or to close the prison, and it remains an uphill struggle to try to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, especially as the many other crimes of Trump and the Republicans are so time-consuming. Nevertheless, it remains imperative that the shame of Guantánamo is not forgotten, and I hope you will be able to support me as I keep making the case for why the prison must be closed once and for all, and providing examples of its long history of lawlessness, brutality and injustice — like the article I posted yesterday on the 13th anniversary of the deaths of three men at the prison in June 2006, who should not be forgotten.

Elsewhere, I appreciate those who support my campaigning against cynical housing development projects in London, a form of social cleansing that should be seen as a war on the poor, if the mainstream media took an interest in it, which they generally don’t. Since 2017, I have been committed to a campaign in Deptford, in south east London, close to where I live, which has involved trying to prevent the destruction of a precious community garden (which was also a vital environmental protection against pollution) and structurally sound council housing, with the campaign attracting wide support, both in and of itself, but also because it is a microcosm of the problems with the housing regeneration industry. I have also been writing regularly about housing issues for the last few years, on the same reader-supported basis as my Guantánamo work.

And on a final front of reader-supported business, I’d also like to thank those of you who follow ‘The State of London’ and to ask for your support. The photo-journalism project, which I started over seven years ago, involves me cycling every day and taking photos, often in my local neighbourhood, but, on average, making journeys across the capital’s 120 postcodes at least a couple of times a week, and posting a photo a day, with detailed supporting text, on social media. Do check it out, if you haven’t seen it already, and feel free to support me if you like what you see.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work, regardless of whether or not you can support me financially. Without you, none of this would mean anything.

Andy Worthington
London
June 10, 2019

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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. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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.