Please Support My Reader-Funded Writing and Campaigning for Guantánamo’s Closure Over the Next Three Months

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 make a donation to support my ongoing work as a genuinely independent journalist and activist, primarily in relation to my work on the US prison at Guantánamo Bay (on which I have written and published 2,600 articles over the last 17 years), but also touching on other topics that seize my attention, including, these days, two topics of colossal importance that are generally either misreported or under-reported by the mainstream media — Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the biggest “war” that any of us have ever experienced; namely, the war waged by humanity on a liveable climate, which is manifesting itself via the unmistakable signs of unprecedented climate collapse.

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.

On Guantánamo, I remain the foremost independent voice writing critically about the shame of the prison’s ongoing existence, and campaigning for its closure. Worldwide, and specifically with regard to the US, only one mainstream media journalist is paid to write regularly about Guantánamo (Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times), even though the basic premise of the prison’s existence — holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, or caught up in a broken simulacrum of a functioning legal system, in relation to a “war on terror” that no longer exists, and was never legally defensible — remains an affront to the legal principles at the heart of any regime that claims to believe in democratic processes and accountability, and should not have been almost entirely forgotten.

While Guantánamo remains open, none of us are truly safe from arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial, or torture without accountability, or, indeed, from discovering that the template of Guantánamo can be replicated if any future leader of the US decides to invent a new category of human beings who, they insist, must be held outside the law without any fundamental rights whatsoever.

However, while my experience of writing about, and campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo has enabled me, at least since the dashed hopes of meaningful change at the time of Barack Obama’s election as president, to recognize that our governments and our mainstream media are thoroughly morally adrift to an alarming degree, my interest in Guantánamo has never solely been about the law and our right to be free of executive tyranny.

Ever since I began researching and writing about the men held, my work has been part of a struggle against the moral rot that enabled atrocities like Guantánamo — and their CIA counterparts, the “black site” torture prisons that existed from 2002 until 2008 — to have existed in the first place: the dehumanization of one group of people by another.

The men who were arbitrarily swept up and sent to Guantánamo — almost all either civilians seized by mistake, or foot soldiers cynically branded as terrorists — were the first major manifestation of a sweeping post-9/11 Islamophobia that sought to dehumanize all Muslims, even though they make up 25% of the world’s population (around two billion people).

More specifically, at Guantánamo, it was only by humanizing the men held — showing them as, fundamentally, people not dissimilar to you or I, with hopes and lives and fears, despite their different customs and cultures — that I could tackle this murderous discrimination head-on.

Tackling dehumanization, as a friend recently remarked to me, is perhaps the central thrust of my work, beginning with my attempts to re-humanize the travellers and other marginalized people violently suppressed for being drawn to the ancient temple of Stonehenge, and to lives led outside of what mainstream society regarded as “normal”, as chronicled in my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, and continuing, via Guantánamo, to the horror of an entire people being dehumanized by Israel, with the west’s consent, as part of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which the Palestinians, collectively, have been dehumanized to at least the same extent as the Jews of Europe, and other ethnic groups and marginalized people, were dehumanized and exterminated by the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s.

Just as I have been involved, for nearly two decades, in working assiduously to establish a narrative regarding Guantánamo that runs counter to the mainstream media’s general indifference, so too, on the genocide in Gaza, I have tried my utmost to add my voice to the many other more prominent voices — especially of the Palestinians themselves, and of Israelis and other Jewish people who have dared to express dissent about what is being done in their name — pointing out that Israel’s dehumanization of the Palestinians, and the west’s approval of it (which revives, in many ways, the western world’s deadly post-9/11 Islamophobia), is, as always with dehumanization, the gateway to unspeakable horror.

I don’t claim that my persistent writing about the genocide for the last eleven months (and also see here, here and here) is any kind of essential reading, but I have felt, from the very beginning of this particularly malignant chapter in modern history, that it was important to be part of an independent counter-narrative to the almost exclusively biased reporting in the west.

In addition, as I also struggle to make sense of the general indifference of politicians and the mainstream media to climate collapse, the greatest threat to us all in our entire history, I hope that my efforts to make sense of the psychic derangement of our leaders and other opinion-formers — as discussed, for example, in my recent article, If We Should Live, Our Scribes Will Record 2024 As The Beginning of the End for Humanity, and via my archive of other recent articles here — provide some thought-provoking perspectives that are largely missing elsewhere.

If the above is of interest — along with my pledge to continue working to get Guantánamo closed for as long as it takes, and also to hold those responsible accountable — then I hope you’re able to make a donation to help me to continue my work.

Thanks, as always, for your interest.

Andy Worthington
London
September 16, 2024

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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.