Quarterly Fundraiser: $2500 (£2000) Needed to Support My Work to Close Guantánamo As We Approach the 20th Anniversary of Its Opening

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 into 2021, 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 ongoing work on Guantánamo — researching and writing about the shameful lawlessness of the prison and the plight of the men still held, and campaigning to get it closed down. I’ve been doing this work for nearly 16 years now, and, as a reader-funded journalist and activist, I rely on your support to enable me to keep running three websites (Andy Worthington, Close Guantánamo and the Gitmo Clock), maintaining the associated social media, and engaging in public speaking and events.

Shamefully, we’re just a month away from an anniversary that all of us opposed to Guantánamo’s existence hoped would never arrive — the 20th anniversary of the prison’s opening, on January 11, 2022. And sadly, despite huge efforts this year to push Joe Biden to take decisive action (including by Senators and Representatives in his own party), very little has actually happened. Just one man has been freed, and while eight of the 39 men still held have been approved for release by Periodic Review Boards (a high-level US government review process) since he took office, none of them have been freed, and five others approved for release before he took office are also still held.

As the anniversary approaches, I’m working on a number of online events to highlight the need for Guantánamo to be closed (and I’d also like to ask you to take photos with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s posters marking 7,300 days of the prison’s existence on Jan. 5, and 7,306 days on Jan. 11, and to send them to us), and I’ll let you know more about these plans as they develop.

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. 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 (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.

And, finally, if you like my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London,’ in which, every day, I post a photo from nearly ten years of bike rides throughout the capital, along with an accompanying essay, I’m also delighted to receive donations to support it, because, as with my Guantánamo work, I have no institutional backing for it, and I’m reliant on your support to keep it going.

With thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington
London
December 13, 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

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 struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — 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.