Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Writing and Campaigning for the Prison’s Closure, and My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Every three months (at the start of March, June, September and December), I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing reader-funded work on Guantánamo — my frequent writing, my regular campaigning, my public appearances and my media appearances, all of which are generally unpaid.

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.

The start of this particular fundraising week coincides — with a certain synchronicity — with the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, arguably the most significant terrorist attack in history, which led directly to the administration of George W. Bush declaring a global “war on terror,” whose brutal, vengeful, fundamentally lawless and counter-productive outcomes — via the CIA’s global rendition and torture program, and the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where men were (and some still are) held indefinitely without charge or trial — has dominated my life for the last 16 and a half years.

Although I’ve worked, at various times, with the UN, with WikiLeaks, and with a variety of NGOs, and have also written on occasion for the mainstream media, the only way I have been able, for all these years, to guarantee the frequency and intensity of my writing and campaigning has been via my website, where I have published over 2,500 articles about Guantánamo since 2007, via the Close Guantánamo website, which I established in 2012, and via associated social media.

Neither, sadly, have the potential reach of the mainstream media, but, apart from allowing the odd critical media piece, the mainstream media has been, and remains implacably opposed to recognizing that their obsession with “objectivity” and “impartiality” is woefully inadequate when it comes to covering profoundly damaging once-in-a-generation injustices like the crimes of the “war on terror.”

In the face of this fundamental indifference — and the related, but not entirely consequential indifference of the majority of the American people to the crimes committed in their name since the 9/11 attacks — I’m profoundly grateful to those of you who take an interest in my work, and have enabled me to create a space in the cluttered online world where I have been able, for all these years, to shine the light of truth on Guantánamo, without any kind of editorial interference, and with the forensic and hard-hitting journalism that the ongoing crime scene of Guantánamo deserves.

Since my last fundraiser, in June, I have covered a number of high-profile condemnations of Guantánamo in more depth than most, if not all of the mainstream media — a damning opinion by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention about the treatment of torture victim of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a sweeping condemnation of the prison’s continuing operations by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, and an astonishing ruling by a military judge, also in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which ruled out prosecutors’ long-standing pretence that self-incriminating confessions obtained from al-Nashiri by a so-called “clean team” of interrogators were free from the effects of torture. I also covered the case of a “forever prisoner,” Muhammed Rahim, following his latest administrative review, which was completely ignored by the mainstream media.

I have also undertaken a number of media appearances, with The New Arab, with Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek on their “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, and on the Scott Horton Show, and on the campaigning front I have also been busy, via the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility, which met most recently in June, and via a follow-up meeting at Amnesty International’s London headquarters with former prisoners Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi. I have also taken part in, reported on and compiled photos from the monthly coordinated global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that I established in February (see here, here and here), and have also publicized and compiled photos from an ongoing Close Guantánamo photo campaign, which involves supporters from across the US and around the world taking photos with posters marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence— most recently, 7,900 days on August 28.

I have also been working with MEPs in the European Parliament to set up what is being described as “the most significant gathering ever assembled on Guantánamo in the European Parliament,” taking place on September 28, at which I will be speaking, along with former prisoners, lawyers, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and others connected to Guantánamo’s history, and over the next three months, with your help and support, I will continue to write about and campaign for the closure of Guantánamo with the same intensity that I have brought to his perennially under-reported story since I started working on it in 2006.

Supporting my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’

If you’re interested in my other work, I continue, on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, to post, every two days, photos of London, and essays about the capital’s history, and, in particular, the ways in which its fabric, and the quality of life of its citizens, continue to be undermined by the forces of predatory transnational capital, aided and abetted by inadequate and/or corrupt politicians. Donations for ‘The State of London’ will also be gratefully received, because for this project, like the rest of my work, I have no institutional backing, and am entirely dependant on your generosity to enable me to continue.

You can also, if you’d like, check out my writing about the climate crisis, my music with The Four Fathers, and my books, including The Battle of the Beanfield, first published in 2005, for which I recently undertook a third printing.

Whether you can help out with this fundraiser or not, I’d like to thank you, as always, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington
London
September 11, 2023

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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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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.