Quarterly Appeal: Please Support My Ongoing 18 Years of Campaigning to Close Guantánamo and My Work on Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

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 over 18 years since I gave my life over to telling the true story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and the men and boys held there, and to the seemingly endless task of trying to get the prison closed.

I began with a book, The Guantánamo Files, which absolutely consumed 14 months of my life, and since then I’ve written over 2,000 articles, about every aspect of Guantánamo’s story, mostly here, but also, at various times, for the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, as well as on the Close Guantánamo website, which I established with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012.

I also co-directed a film, ’Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo’, released in 2009, and have worked with the United Nations, WikiLeaks, Reprieve and Cagepisoners (now CAGE International). I’ve also spoken publicly about Guantánamo at every opportunity, have undertaken numerous TV and radio appearances, and, more recently, via podcasts and other online media outlets, have written and recorded songs about Guantánamo (and the CIA’s “black site” torture program), and have launched numerous campaigns.

These include, most recently, an ongoing photo campaign involving posters marking every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence, and ongoing monthly coordinated vigils for the prison’s closure, which take place across the US and around the world on the first Wednesday of every month, and which have specifically focused on the 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release, but who are still held because the decisions taken to release them were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism whatsoever exists to compel the government to free them if, as is abundantly apparent, the Biden administration has no interest in prioritizing their release. In fact, as recently became clear, in the cases of eleven of these men, the Biden administration specifically prevented their resettlement after the events of October 7, fearing the “political optics” of doing so.

Throughout all this time, I’ve been largely reliant on you, my readers and supporters, to enable me to continue my work as a genuinely independent journalist and activist, negotiating an ever-changing media landscape in which independent voices are persistently silenced or sidelined, while striving to still get my message out to as many people as possible.

If you can help me to continue this work, please click on the “Donate” button above, or here, to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $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.

Throughout my long years of working on Guantánamo, I’ve regularly highlighted key events in the prison’s sordid history, and today, coincidentally, is one of those occasions, the 18th anniversary of the death of three men at Guantánamo — Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami — who, according to the US authorities, killed themselves through a suicide pact, even though that was implausible for a number of compelling reasons. Over the years, I’ve remembered these men, and two others who died around the same time in 2007 and 2009 — Abdul Rahman al-Amri and Muhammad Salih — in what I’ve described as the “season of death” at Guantánamo. For further information please see my article from this day two years ago, The 16th Anniversary of the Implausible “Triple Suicide” at Guantánamo.

In addition to my Guantánamo work, I’ve also, over the years, been enabled by your support to cover other stories in what I hope is my own distinctive and coherent manner, including the housing crisis (a crisis of affordability deliberately engineered throughout the west over the last 20 years) and, most alarmingly, the unprecedented perils of climate collapse, although, since October 7 last year, my attention has been focused, to the exclusion of almost everything else, on the grotesque, bragging, live-streamed genocide being inflicted by Israel on the trapped and defenseless civilians of the Gaza Strip, who, even after eight months, and the murder of over 40,000 civilians, are still unconditionally supported by the majority of the countries of the west, led by the doddering, sclerotic and inexplicably hate-filled figure of Joe Biden.

I realize that, if you care about either Guantánamo, or the genocide in Gaza, there are numerous other worthy demands on your generosity — and particularly, of course, with Gaza, where outside support is essential. However, if you can help out at all it will be greatly appreciated, because the horrors of the world need to be addressed in a manner that the mainstream media has proven itself to be almost entirely uninterested in doing, and, although my contribution is small, it is, I hope, still worthy of support as truth-telling that is only viable with the support of those who read and share it.

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

Andy Worthington
London
June 10, 2024

* * * * *

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.