9.12.24
Dear friends, fans, followers and supporters,
For nearly two decades, I’ve devoted most of my working life — and much of my waking, non-working life — to the largely thankless task of exposing the truth about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the men and boys held there, revealing how most of them were not “the worst of the worst”, and had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or terrorism, railing against the abhorrent lawlessness and brutality of the prison, and campaigning assiduously to try and get it closed.
Throughout this time, I have been reliant on you, my readers, to support me in my work as the prison’s foremost independent opponent, a reader-funded independent journalist and activist, free of the lamentable indifference or amnesia of most of the mainstream media, and able to articulate freely and persistently why it is so important not to allow the victims of Guantánamo to be dehumanized, and why the prison is, and has been consistently, a legal, moral and ethical abomination.
As a result of my regular quarterly appeals for support, many of you have, over the years, made one-off donations, or, in some cases, have becoming subscribers, donating a regular amount every month — all of which is essential to allow me to continue to work towards Guantánamo’s eventual closure.
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 $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.
Over the years, as the media landscape has changed, I tried to adapt by establishing a presence on Facebook and Twitter (now X), although for some time now both of these platforms — and other social media platforms — have been plagued by algorithmic suppression (or shadow-banning), whereby accounts are deliberately sidelined, as is the case with my accounts, or through outright censorship, as posts are arbitrarily removed by police bots enforcing ill-conceived, mismanaged or openly biased security protocols.
While algorithmic suppression applies to both Facebook and X, it is on Facebook that censorship has recently begun to encroach noticeably on my freedom of expression, with posts removed in July and September, mostly for breaching spurious rules on cybersecurity, which, in turn, seemed to be nothing more than a cloak for suppressing criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Just ten days ago, the censorship returned with a vengeance, when a post of mine — about Israel, the ceasefire in Lebanon and the ongoing genocide in Gaza — was removed for breaching Community Standards on “hate speech.”
This latest episode, in particular, prompted me to assess how viable it was to try to reach an audience through the medium of what is, essentially, an arbitrary police state, and to recognize that a major omission on my part, for many years, has been my failure to establish a mailing list for my website, not only to bypass censorship and suppression, but also to alert people, via email, to my various endeavors, without relying on them remembering to visit.
I’ve now addressed this omission by setting up a Substack account, and, if you’re interested in my work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Free subscriptions are available, but if you want to support my work, and are able to do so, paid subscriptions are also available — and if you do take that option, I’ll soon start making some material available exclusively to paid subscribers.
Substack allows me to have the equivalent of a mailing list, sending you a weekly newsletter by email, linking to all my work, but it also allows me to be part of a larger community of creative people and political commentators, free from censorship and algorithmic suppression.
I do hope you’ll join me on Substack, and I look forward to continuing my creative and political journey with you.
Right now, much of my attention remains focused on Guantánamo, as President Biden runs out of time to free 16 men (out of the 30 still held) who have long been approved for release by high-level government review processes, but who he hasn’t already released because he couldn’t be bothered.
This, in part, has happened because he isn’t legally obliged to free them, and this is because the review processes that approved these men for release are purely administrative. However, what this also means is that these men are, to all intents and purposes, his own private prisoners, but sadly no one who should care about executive overreach — in the mainstream media, for example — seems to care, and most of those who do care have been tiptoeing around gingerly for the last few years, unwilling to upset the administration in any way, precisely because the president wields such unacceptable and intolerable power over the fate of these men.
Meanwhile, of course, the ongoing genocide in Gaza — and increasing unrest in the Middle East, all of which seems designed to facilitate Israel’s deranged plans for endless expansion — will also be a focus of my work, as will, all too imminently, be the return to the White House of the unhinged gangster Donald Trump.
Do stay with me as I navigate what is looking increasingly like the start of the end times, and thanks, as always, for your interest.
Andy Worthington
London
December 9, 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 new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his 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.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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One Response
Andy Worthington says...
I posted this on Facebook, and then it was immediately removed – as “spam.”
When I posted a screenshot of the notification, I said:
“Facebook’s outrageous censorship continues.
“My new post, seeking support for my ongoing reader-f*nded Guantanamo work, and, recommending my new S*bst*ck account as a way of avoiding censorship (and also, if you like, to support my work as a paid subscriber), has just been removed, on the spurious basis that it was spam.
“Is it viable to use this platform anymore, do you think? Please join me on S*bst*ck where I can freely tell you what I’m doing by email rather than having to endure this arbitrary police state.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10162890944563804&set=a.10150687732288804
...on December 9th, 2024 at 7:55 pm