Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work?

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.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s over 16 years since I first began working full-time as an independent journalist and author writing about Guantánamo, telling the stories of the men (and boys) held there, and campaigning to get the prison closed, and it’s 13 years since I first began asking you, every three months, to enable me to continue this work by making a donation to support me as a reader-funded writer and activist.

Your support has been invaluable in enabling me, via this website, and the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign (which I established ten years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner), to keep shining a light on the injustices of Guantánamo, especially in the face of frequent indifference from the mainstream media, and to present what I continue to hope are powerful perspectives on the prison and the men held that are based on my particular experience of researching and writing about the prisoners and the prison for the last 16 years.

This work began in 2006-07 with the research for my book The Guantánamo Files, and it constitutes a bedrock of knowledge about the prison and the men held there that I have built on ever since, and that I continue to write about as the main focus of my work because of my conviction that detailed knowledge of the truly monstrous lawlessness of Guantánamo requires those who come into close contact with it to remain focused on it, and not to drift with the tide of endlessly breaking news, or, indeed, to become seduced by the false notion that journalistic objectivity — presenting both sides of the story, and letting readers make up their own minds — should apply to somewhere as grotesque as Guantánamo.

No credible case can be made for the existence of a prison where the overwhelming majority of those imprisoned have been held without charge or trial, where torture and abuse have been rife, and where suspicion, hearsay and innuendo have replaced the establishment of facts, and where men continue to he held not because of anything they are alleged to have done prior to their capture, but because of their behavior in Guantánamo, or because of continuing efforts, on the part of the US government, to hide the truth about what was done to them, both in Guantánamo and in CIA “black sites” around the world.

If you can make a donation to support my ongoing efforts to close Guantánamo, and to tell the stories of men held there, 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.

I was recently reminded of how long myself and others have been working on Guantánamo when I wrote my annual article about the three men who died on the night of June 9, 2006, reportedly — and implausibly — by committing suicide. This was the 13th time that I have marked this shameful anniversary, having written about it most years, and it reminded me, as I explained, how the tendency of Guantánamo, as the years grind on with still no end in sight, and no accountability, is to function as a black hole of secrecy that swallows up efforts to expose the truth about it, and that seeks to negate its own long and shameful history.

With your help, I will continue to push for the closure of Guantánamo — especially via calls for the release of the 21 men who have been approved for release (mostly since President Biden took office) out of the 37 men still held — and also to call for accountability, via a new project that I am in the early stages of developing: the Guantánamo Accountability Project. This will serve as a focal point for demands that those released from Guantánamo are freed from the taint of the prison that so frequently haunts them, and that means that, as former “enemy combatants,” they continue to have no unassailable rights as human beings, and also for demands that there must, one day, be accountability for what took place at Guantánamo, and what happened to the men held there, both during their imprisonment, and after their release.

I hope you will stay with me for this journey, and that you will help to support my work if you can (and if you appreciate my activism on other topics, my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London‘, or my music, I’m also happy to receive donations to support those endeavors as well!)

Andy Worthington
London
June 13, 2022

* * * * *

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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.