Please Support My Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) For My Guantánamo Work and London Photography

9.3.20

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Andy Worthington on RT in January 2020, and recent images from his ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’

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, and/or for my London photo-journalism project “The State of London”.





 

Dear friends and supporters,

As many of you know, for the last 14 years I have been an independent journalist and activist, writing about Guantánamo and the men held there, and campaigning to get the prison closed. I have no institutional backing, and I’m therefore reliant on your support and generosity to enable me to keep doing this important work.

Guantánamo has been the main focus of my working life for the last 14 years, and it remains as true now, as it has been throughout my long dedication to the cause of getting Guantánamo closed, that I can’t do what I do without your support.

To preserve my health — both physically and mentally — I have also spent the last eight years cycling around London on a daily basis, taking photos of the changing face of the capital, for a project that I call ‘The State of London’, which involves me posting a photo — and an accompanying essay — every day on Facebook.

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.

While I don’t anticipate anything stopping me from continuing to cycle around London taking photos — except for the kerb that threw me off my bike at the end of January, which left me housebound for several weeks — on Guantánamo I feel the need to make explicit what I’m sure many of you will, by now, have realized: that I  won’t stop writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed, until it is shut once and for all.

I can only hope that I live long enough to see the day when Guantánamo is closed for good. I recently turned 57, and was a youthful 43 when I began working on Guantánamo full-time back in 2006, but although there has been progress in that time — the release of over 500 men by the time George W. Bush left office, and nearly 200 under Barack Obama — the worst thing that could possibly have happened, three years and four months ago, was for Donald Trump to have been elected president. Trump has, quite literally, sealed Guantánamo shut since taking office, releasing only one man because he was obliged to do so, and showing no intention of releasing any of the 40 other prisoners under any circumstances, even though only nine of them are facing or have faced trials, and five of them were unanimously approved for release, between 2009 and 2016, by high-level government review processes under Obama. The 26 others, who Trump is happily holding forever without charge or trial, were helpfully described many years ago as the “forever prisoners,” although by now that is a label that can genuinely be regarded as applying to all the men still held.

For the men still held, all hope is draining out of their lives, in a pointless and cruel facility in which they are getting older, and suffering from health problems related to ageing — or, in some cases, related to their torture and abuse —  while the world appears largely to have forgotten them. Via my annual visits in January, marking the anniversary of the prison’s opening, I try to keep the story of the prison alive (as in my interview with RT this January), and I am also committed to doing all I can to get the prisoners’ own stories out to the world — via publicizing an important and ongoing exhibition of prisoners’ artwork at CUNY School of Law (see here and here), and also, most recently, by publishing, with my own introduction, a powerful and moving profile of one of the artists — the “forever prisoner” Khalid Qasim — by his friend, the former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, who was resettled in Serbia in 2016, and has become an accomplished writer.

I hope you can make a donation to support my ongoing work — but even if you can’t, please be assured that taking an interest in it is what truly brings it to life!

And if you’re interested in any other manifestations of my creativity and activism, my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield are still available to order from me, my music with my band The Four Fathers is on Bandcamp, and for my other interest — housing activism — you can watch ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the documentary I narrated about the housing crisis, here. In addition, my book The Guantánamo Files might also still be available, and, for a small fee, you can watch “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary I co-directed, here.

Andy Worthington
London
March 9, 2020

* * * * *

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 the 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.


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One Response

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    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/or my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ Any donation, however large or small, will be very gratefully received!

    For 14 years now, I’ve been writing about Guantanamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed, and, as a reader-supported journalist and activist, with no institutional backing whatsoever, it’s only your support that enables me to continue this important work. Needless to say (I hope), my intention is to keep writing about Guantanamo and campaigning to get it closed until, one day, it is finally shut down for good. This year, I’ve been renewing my efforts to raise the plight of the men still held, entombed without hope by Donald Trump – first via my US visit in January, and more recently via my articles about the current prisoners’ art exhibition at CUNY School of Law in New York, and my publication of a powerful and moving article about “forever prisoner” Khalid Qasim by his friend Mansoor Adayfi, who was released in Serbia in 2016.

    If my London photo-journalism interests you, your support for it will also be greatly appreciated, as I have now spent nearly eight years cycling around London’s 120 postcodes taking photos, and nearly three years posting a photo a day – with an accompanying essay – on Facebook, all of which takes up a considerable amount of time.

    I love it – as I do my Guantanamo work – but the bottom line is that I still live in a capitalist world, and appreciate any support you can give!

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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).
Email Andy Worthington

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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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