Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£1800) to Support My Guantánamo Work Over the Next Three Months

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£1,800) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months, and/or for my London photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my reader-funded work on Guantánamo — telling the stories of the men still held, working to get the prison closed, and remembering key events in its long and shameful history.

I began working full-time on Guantánamo over 15 years ago, initially by spending 14 months researching and writing about the prison’s history, and the men held there, for my book The Guantánamo Files, and, ever since, as a freelance journalist and activist. Since May 2007, I’ve written and published nearly 2,400 articles about Guantánamo, and after initially getting into debt writing the book, and then spending some time chasing around for freelance work, I began asking you, my readers, to support my endeavors on a quarterly basis 12 years ago, in June 2009. As I have no institutional backing, I’m dependant on your generosity to enable me to keep writing about Guantánamo, and to call for the prison’s closure, until it is finally consigned to the history books, where it belongs.

Throughout this period, the prison’s newsworthiness has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes I have received only a fraction of the $2,500 I ask for every three months, while at other times your kindness has exceeded my expectations. All along, however, there have been many dozens of people who have regularly donated to fund my work, and I am immensely grateful to all of you, as well as to the many others who have made one-off donations, however large or small.

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo (or my other major ongoing project, ‘The State of London,’ a photo-journalistic record of the changing face of the UK’s capital), 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. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation 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 or cash (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.

With Joe Biden in the White House, and with the 20th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaching (in January 2022), the need to keep Guantánamo in the public eye — and to keep pushing for its closure — is more pressing than it has been since the last year of the Obama presidency, and in recent weeks I’ve spent some time covering the ongoing efforts by lawyers to seek justice for the Guantánamo prisoners in the US courts, as well as noting with relief that three men have recently been approved for release by Periodic Review Boards, a review process set up by President Obama.

That said, the decisions to approve the three men for release only highlight the fact that, to date, President Biden has not yet appointed a senior official to deal with Guantánamo, even though that appointment is necessary before these three men — and the six others still held who were already approved for release before Biden took office — can be freed to resume their lives, as they should be able to after their long imprisonment without charge or trial.

As well as the nine men approved for release, 19 of the 40 men still held continue to languish as “forever prisoners,” and those of us concerned with the need to close Guantánamo must also use every opportunity we have to demand the release of everyone still held who has not been charged with a crime, as, I’m glad to note, 24 Senators urged the president to do back in April, finally breaking the long and complacent endorsement of endless imprisonment without charge or trial that has, shamefully, been the US establishment’s default position regarding Guantánamo since it first opened back in January 2002.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
June 7, 2021

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), 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).

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.