Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Work to Get Guantánamo Shut Down and to Hold Accountable Those Responsible for Its Existence

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 — telling the stories of the men still held, and campaigning to get the prison shut down. 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 media events.

It’s now 16 years — over a quarter of my life — since I began working on Guantánamo on a full-time basis, inspired by three particular events in March 2006: the publication of former prisoner Moazzam Begg’s memoir, Enemy Combatant, the release of the documentary-drama ‘The Road to Guantánamo’ (about the three British prisoners known as ‘The Tipton Three’), and the release — after the Pentagon lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit — of thousands of pages of documents relating to the prisoners.

When the names and nationalities of the prisoners were finally released in the months that followed, I was able to begin analyzing them, to work out who the prisoners were, and to compile a timeline of their capture, for my book The Guantánamo Files, which was published in September 2007.

When I completed the manuscript for the book, in May 2007, I began writing about Guantánamo, on my website, on an almost daily basis, and in 2009 I began asking you, my readers and supporters, to support my work through donations. With your help, I’ve published over 2,450 articles about Guantánamo here on my website, as well as setting up the Close Guantánamo campaign in January 2012.

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.

Since my last fundraiser, in December, a whirlwind of activity attended the 20th anniversary of Guantánamo’s opening (on Jan. 11), and there has also been steady good news as more prisoners have been approved for release via Periodic Review Boards, the parole-type system established by President Obama. 15 of the 39 men still held have now been approved for release under President Biden, to add to the five men approved for release that he inherited when he took office, meaning that the US government has now admitted that it no longer wants to hold over half of the men still held.

Actually releasing them is another matter, of course, and to date President Biden has only released one man — the same tally as his predecessor, Donald Trump — meaning that just two men have been freed from the prison in the last five years. This is unforgivable, but I can only presume that plans are underway for their eventual release. However, the lack of action means that maintaining pressure on the Biden administration is essential, and I will continue to do all that I can to keep shining a spotlight on the prison and its ongoing injustices.

I’m also about to update my definitive six-part Guantánamo prisoner list, for the first time in three years, which links to everything I’ve written about each prisoner over the last 16 years, and I’m also in the early stages of developing a new campaign, the Guantánamo Accountability Project, a long-term project aimed at holding the US responsible for its crimes at Guantánamo, and, in the immediate future, highlighting the cases of men released from Guantánamo, generally to third countries, who are facing all kinds of problems, including a lack of financial support, and arbitrary harassment — all stemming from the fact that, uniquely on the face of the earth, former Guantánamo prisoners are all still designated as “enemy combatants,” and have no fundamental rights.

I hope these projects are of interest, and I thank you, as ever, for your continued interest in my work.

Andy Worthington
London
March 7, 2022

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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.