Why I Value Your Support For My Ongoing Work on Guantánamo as a Truly Independent Journalist and Campaigner

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.

 

It’s nearly 18 years since I first began writing about Guantánamo on a full time basis, first via the research and writing I undertook for my book The Guantánamo Files, (which quite literally consumed my life from March 2006 until May 2007), and, ever since, via the more than 2,500 articles I’ve written for this site, many of which have also been posted on the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established with the US lawyer Tom Wilner in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

While I have undertaken paid work with various publications and organizations over the years, including the United Nations, WikiLeaks, the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, most of my writing — as well as my campaigning work to get the prison closed — has been published here, establishing this website not only as the most significant repository of information about Guantánamo, but also as a kind of living diary of my existence since May 2007, when I first began publishing articles here.

I was recently reminded of the durability of my writing by Ed Charles, the editor of the World Can’t Wait’s Spanish website, where, for many years, most of my articles have been translated to reach an audience in the Spanish-speaking world. I was taken aback when, a few months ago, Ed translated dozens of my articles dating back to when I first began writing about Guantánamo, and, when I asked him why, he said that not only was my writing important, but also that many other historical mainstream media reports covering Guantánamo have disappeared from the internet, making the archive here on this site even more significant in terms of providing a rolling history of Guantánamo, as written at the time.

If you appreciate my work, please be aware that the relentlessness of my coverage of Guantánamo, and the ferocity of my criticism of the US government’s actions over these long years has only been possible because of my complete editorial independence, as well as though my refusal to accept the dictates of mainstream journalism, which continues to insist on the importance of objectivity and impartiality. After spending 14 months researching Guantánamo for The Guantánamo Files, it was clear to me that no case could be made to justify Guantánamo’s existence, and that therefore it was necessary to become both a journalist and an activist, however much that offends the sensibilities of the so-called ‘liberal’ media.

In the life journey chronicled though my writing, this is a position that I have also maintained in relation to other topics — the global housing crisis, for example, the climate crisis, which I’ve been writing about regularly for the last five years, and, currently, Israel’s war on Gaza.

To enable me to maintain my independence, however, I have always relied on you, my readers, to support me with donations. Across this site and Close Guantánamo, I’m delighted that two dozen of you support my work with regular monthly donations, but every three months I extend my request for donations to anyone who can help out.

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 join my monthly sustainers by making a recurring payment, 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.

As well as my regular articles, often covering stories not addressed by the mainstream media, my campaigning work is also both time-consuming and unpaid without your support — the monthly coordinated global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure that I set up earlier this year, for example, and the ongoing photo campaign, involving posters showing how long Guantánamo has been open, which I run via Close Guantánamo, as well as my involvements with politicians, including a wonderful event in the European Parliament in September, which I initiated and helped to organize, and, in general, my appearances at speaking events, and in mainstream and independent media programs, which are usually unpaid.

And if you want to support my work in any other way, you can buy my first two books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, which are both still in print, directly from me, and you can also buy downloads of songs by my band The Four Fathers on Bandcamp, or CDs of our first two albums, Love and War and How Much Is A Life Worth? Our third album, Songs of Love and Resistance, is coming out next year, and hopefully, one of these days, I’ll also get to write another book!

In the meantime, however, thanks as always for your interest in my work. It would mean nothing without people who care enough to read it.

Andy Worthington
London
December 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.