14.9.20
Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my ongoing work as a reader-funded journalist, activist and photo-journalist. It’s now 15 years since I first began researching the prison at Guantánamo Bay, writing about it and campaigning relentlessly to get it closed, and eight years since I began a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, consisting of photos and accompanying essays taken on daily bike rides through London’s 120 postcodes.
On Guantánamo, it was, I recall, September 2005 when I became appalled that the administration of George W. Bush had refused to even let the world know the identities of the men held there, and set about trying to find out who was held there.
That quest, as some of you will know, led to me being the only person to review all the documents released through freedom of information legislation in the spring of 2006, when the Pentagon was finally obliged to release the identities of the prisoners, and 8,000 pages of supporting documents — unclassified summaries of what the US alleged to be evidence against them, and transcripts of the lawless tribunals the US had held to, for the most, perfunctorily assess and confirm that they were correctly held as “enemy combatants” who could be imprisoned without charge or trial forever.
My 14-month analysis of those documents led to the creation of The Guantánamo Files, published by Pluto Press in September 2007, in which I was able to establish where and when most of the men were seized (not on the battlefield, as the US alleged), and to tell as many of their stories as I could reconstruct from the scattered and broken materials provided by the Pentagon.
Since then, I have continued to write incessantly about Guantánamo, sometimes for mainstream media outlets and campaigning organizations, but mainly for this website (where I have now published over 2,300 articles about Guantánamo), and, since 2012, the Close Guantánamo campaign that I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court case in 2004 and 2008.
Along the way, I have been fortunate to have the support of a few benefactors, but I also rely hugely on you, my readers, to support me as a reader-funded journalist and campaigner.
If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, and/or my photo-journalism, 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.
Why I need your support — now and into 2021
This is a crucial time for Guantánamo, as the men still held — 40 in total — are effectively the personal prisoners of Donald Trump and the US Congress, and none of them will be released unless Donald Trump is removed from the White House in November. Trump doesn’t want to release anyone, and no legal mechanism exists to oblige him to. He doesn’t care that five of these 40 men were unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, and nor does he care that only nine of the 40 have been charged, leaving the 26 others in a fundamentally unprincipled legal limbo.
If Trump loses the election in November, myself and other campaigners will at least be able to put pressure on the new administration to release men who will never be changed, and to work towards closing the prison entirely before the 20th anniversary of its opening is reached in January 2022.
I am also involved in other work for which I value your support. On Friday, for example, I spoke about Guantánamo on the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on a show in South Africa, and in a few weeks’ time I’ll be appearing as a witness in the extradition case for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting against his proposed extradition to the US to face unacceptable charges under the US Espionage Act. My appearance as a witness is based on my involvement with WikiLeaks, as a media partner, in the release of classified files from Guantánamo in 2011. For these and other activities I receive no payment, and, as a result, any support you can give is greatly appreciated.
I also hope that, over the coming months, I’ll be able to find the time to start putting together a book bringing together the best of my 13 years of articles about Guantánamo, to be published in the run-up to that dreadful 20th anniversary of Guantánamo’s existence in January 2022.
‘The State of London’
When it comes to ‘The State of London’, I also greatly appreciate any financial support you can give. For over three years, I have been posting a daily photo from my eight years of photographic journeys around London, all accompanied by original essays that shed light on London’s past, present and future. I am currently looking for a publisher for a book of my photos, and I hope to have an exhibition, and also to make some prints and some other merchandise, but in the meantime this entire project remains, largely, a labour of love, one for which I have no institutional backing whatsoever, even though it takes up a large part of my life. As a result, any donations you can make to support it will be very gratefully received.
We live in a time when we are encouraged to take creativity for granted, and, at some level, to believe that it should be free, but this is a massive distortion of the truth, primarily undertaken by the tech companies who profit so massively from it. Creative people live in the same capitalist economies as everyone else, and also need money to survive. If you like my work, please don’t take it for granted that it’s free because I somehow live on air alone.
With thanks, as ever, for your support.
Andy Worthington
London
September 14, 2020
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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 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 eight 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.
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:
Dear friends and supporters: Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work as a reader-funded journalist, campaigner and photo-journalist, working to get Guantanamo closed, and also recording London on a daily basis via photos and accompanying essays in my project ‘The State of London.’
Any donation you can give, however large or small, will be very gratefully received. I also completely understand if you appreciate my work but are unable to help out financially, as it’s abundantly clear that we’re living through extraordinarily difficult times right now.
However, it’s fair to say, I think, that in general we are living in a time when we are encouraged to take creativity for granted, and, at some level, to believe that it should be free, but this is a massive distortion of the truth, primarily undertaken by the tech companies who profit so massively from it. Creative people live in the same capitalist economies as everyone else, and also need money to survive. If you like my work, please don’t take it for granted that it’s free because I somehow live on air alone.
Thanks, as always, for your support!
...on September 14th, 2020 at 8:07 pm
The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse on Guantánamo: “Born in Fear and Sustained Through Political Cynicism and Public Indifference” | The Press 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 September 22nd, 2020 at 1:36 am