Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work into 2023

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,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work as an independent journalist and activist, primarily as the chronicler of the prison at Guantánamo Bay over the last 16 — now nearly 17 — years, telling the stories of the men held and campaigning to get the prison closed.

I also work on other topics — the extraordinarily urgent climate crisis, and the unjust imprisonment of Julian Assange, to name just two — as well as chronicling London on an ongoing basis via my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and making protest music with my band The Four Fathers.

All of this work is unpaid — or, more specifically, is only viable because of your support, so if you can make a donation to support my work, 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 greatly 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 September, there has been only one piece of unadulterated good news from Guantánamo — the release of Saifullah Paracha, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner — although I have also covered other stories from the prison; most recently, and exclusively, efforts by Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, convicted of terrorism-related charges after a one-sided trial in which he refused mount a defense in 2008, to gain recognition and redress from a court for the fact that he has subsequently been held in solitary confinement for the last 14 years.

As the shamefully 21st anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, on January 11, 2023, I’m particularly focusing on the 20 men in total, out of the 35 men still held at Guantánamo, who have been approved for release but are still held, in large part because the Biden administration won’t prioritize their release, and because no legal mechanism exists to compel them to do so, because the processes that led to their approval for release were purely administrative.

I have been promoting the plight of these 20 men in my writing and campaigning over the last few months, using the hashtag #FreeTheGuantanamo20, and I’ll be increasing my focus on this shameful situation for the anniversary. I hope you’ll be able to get involved, just as I also hope that you’ll be able to get involved in the latest stage of the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo campaign, when supporters from around the world will be sending in photos of themselves with the poster marking 7,671 days of Guantánamo’s existence on January 11, 2023, and urging President Biden to close it.

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

Andy Worthington
London
December 12, 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.