9.12.19
Dear friends and supporters,
It’s that time of year again when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the US torture program, and/or, if you wish, to support my ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’
As a completely independent journalist, activist and commentator, I have no institutional backing whatsoever, so I’m reliant on your support to help me to keep writing and campaigning about Guantánamo, and chronicling the ever-changing face of London.
If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, and/or ‘The State of London’, 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 those interested in my Guantánamo work 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.
14 years of researching and writing about Guantánamo – and torture
I’m finding it hard to comprehend right now, but 14 years ago I was poring over speculative lists of prisoners held at Guantánamo, created by the Washington Post and the British NGO Cageprisoners, trying to work out who was held in the prison, because the Bush administration was still maintaining, nearly four years after Guantánamo opened, that the world had no right to know who was held there. Just three months later, the Pentagon lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit, and was obliged to release the names of those held, along with thousands of pages of supporting documentation, which was where my work began in earnest.
Analyzing this and other documentation over more than a year, I was able to work out and tell the stories of the majority of the prisoners, published as The Guantánamo Files in 2007. When I finished the manuscript, I began writing about Guantánamo on an almost daily basis here on this website, and have, to date, published 2,300 articles in total about Guantánamo.
Today is also another anniversary — of the publication, five years ago, of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, a five-year project that revealed, in shocking detail, the brutality and pointlessness of the program, and which confirmed what myself and other researchers had been piecing together via other means during this whole period — in 2009, for example, I was the lead author of a UN report into secret detention worldwide, in which, in an extensive section on US policy after 9/11, I profiled 94 “black site” prisoners.
Five years on, I’ve been promoting “The Report,” the compelling new docudrama about the Senate staffers, led by Daniel Jones, who compiled the torture report, and I’ll be writing more about it very soon, having watched it online last night. I recommend it wholeheartedly, and, as with my ongoing Guantánamo work, it beggars belief, nearly 18 years since Guantánamo opened — and since the torture program began — that no one has been held accountable for the torture and abuse at Guantánamo, in the “black sites” and elsewhere, while Guantánamo, of course, is still open and still holding 40 men, many of whom were victims of the torture program.
With your help, I will continue to write about Guantánamo and the torture program, and to call for Guantánamo to be closed and for those responsible for all the crimes committed by the US since 9/11 to be held accountable for their actions.
‘The State of London’
Another pursuit of mine for which I also have no institutional backing — and invite your support — is my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London,’ in which, every day, I post a photo and essay from seven years of cycling around London’s 120 postcodes, which I still do on a daily basis, taking photos of the changing face of the extraordinary city that has been my home for the last 34 years.
‘The State of London’ is a long-standing labour of love, which I’m hoping to take into new territory in 2020, setting up a website, expanding into print and organising some exhibitions. I’m hugely grateful to the thousands of people who follow ‘The State of London’ on Facebook and Twitter, and appreciate any financial support you can give to help to keep this project going.
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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, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven 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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
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. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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2 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
It’s that time of the year when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantanamo and torture, as I continue to call for the prison’s closure, and for those responsible for the many crimes committed since 9/11 to be held accountable for their actions. Not coincidentally, today is the fifth anniversary of the release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, which I have also spent time researching over the last 14 years.
I’m also asking for donations to support my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which, for over seven years, I’ve been cycling around all of London’s 120 postcodes showing the changing face of the extraordinary city that has been my home for the last 34 years.
Any donation you can make – however large or small – will be very gratefully received. I have no institutional backing whatsoever, and so rely on your support to enable me to continue my work.
...on December 9th, 2019 at 10:09 pm
Video: Calling For The Closure Of Guantánamo Outside The White House On The 18th Anniversary Of The Opening Of The Prison | PopularResistance.Org says...
[…] support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months […]
...on January 14th, 2020 at 9:11 pm