Seeking Your Support in My 20th Year as an Independent Truth-Telling Human Rights Journalist

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo and on other related topics over the next three months.

 

2025 marks the 20th year of my full-time work as a tenacious independent journalist and activist focused on issues of dehumanization, militarism, prisons, social justice and the many overlapping evils of 21st century capitalism.

Relentlessly focused on endless war and the ever-increasing extraction and use of fossil fuels, 21st century capitalism threatens our very existence on this miraculous planet, and yet its supporters, in governments, in business and in the mainstream media have conspired to hide, minimize or discredit the truth through distractions, distortions and, increasingly, direct suppression.

The main focus of my work since 2006 has been the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, for over 23 years, the US has, outrageously, been holding men either indefinitely without charge or trial, or, in a handful of cases, facing charges in a broken trial system, the military commissions. My focus on Guantánamo began with 14 months of relentless research and writing, for my book The Guantánamo Files, and has continued ever since with over 2,600 articles about Guantánamo that I have written and published here on my website. Since 2012, I’ve also been running the Close Guantánamo website, and I continue to spearhead monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, and a photo campaign every 100 days.

At times, the situation regarding Guantánamo has been so stymied by political inaction that I’ve turned my attention to other topics. Between 2011 and 2013, when President Obama capitulated to Republican obstruction by largely ignoring Guantánamo, I began cycling across the whole of London taking photos for a photo-journalism project, The State of London, in which I published photos on a daily basis, with accompanying essays, between 2017 and 2023 on Facebook.

Donald Trump’s first term, when he sealed the prison shut, coincided with my involvement in housing activism in London, precipitated by the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, and including my participation in the two-month occupation of a community garden in Deptford, in south London, to try to prevent its inappropriate redevelopment as a housing project. In 2018 and 2019, I also became involved in chronicling and seeking to amplify the growing environmental movement, in which Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion managed to bring man-made climate collapse into widespread focus.

Sometimes, too, other events have consumed me to such an extent that I have been obliged to devote my attention to them, as has been the case over the last 20 months, since October 2023, in response to the State of Israel’s unceasing genocidal assault on the trapped civilian population of the Gaza Strip, the most soul-shredding atrocity of my entire 62 years on this earth.

Challenging the failures of the mainstream media

A key aspect of my work has been to challenge the so-called “objectivity” and “impartiality” of the mainstream media, who either suppress what should be undiluted outrage by both-siding every topic under discussion, or who serve an even deeper and darker purpose, fundamentally protecting the “status quo” of the entire economic and political system that is responsible for the many grotesque crimes that I cover in my work.

I’ve often stressed that much of my work — beyond the unparalleled in-depth research I undertook to become an independent expert on Guantánamo — involves nothing more than responding to mainstream media reports by rewriting them using adjectives that inspire outrage.

It’s a lesson that those on the political right have long been using to their advantage, and which they have capitalized on as they have moved further to the right — to the far-right, in fact. This has manifested itself on numerous fronts — via Brexit in the UK, and the rise of Donald Trump in the US —  with its most antagonistic manifestation involving the demonization and dehumanization of immigrants, a particularly acute problem in the US right now.

The so-called “liberal” media, however, has continued to fail to learn any lessons from this, or is determined to stay in its establishment bunker. This makes the role of independent media all the more significant — when, that is, we can overcome the obstacles raised by corporate search engines and the social media giants.

Funding – and how you can help

As a truly independent journalist, I’m reliant on the support of my readers, and have spent most of the last 19 years posting and promoting a quarterly fundraiser on my website asking for donations via PayPal — either as one-off donations, or, for those who are willing and able, via regular “sustainer” donations every month. I also encourage supporters of the Close Guantánamo campaign to support my work via one-off donations or “sustainer” donations, and I’m enormously grateful to those who support my work in this manner.

Through my own failings, however, I never established a mailing list for this website, and, as social media (Facebook and Twitter) have become more repressive, restricting my reach via persistent algorithmic suppression (in common with many other independent journalists), and even, on Facebook, via direct censorship on the spurious grounds of cybersecurity and spamming, it has become progressively harder for me to reach out to potential supporters.

Last October, I finally addressed this shortcoming by establishing a Substack account to promote my work, as a more interactive alternative to a mailing list, and encouraging those who can to take out paid subscriptions (although free subscriptions are always available).

This has been a positive development, but across all my various platforms it remains difficult to secure donations to support my work. I hope this isn’t because of any particular inadequacy in my reporting, which still largely consists of in-depth articles that provide more detailed coverage and context than most of the mainstream media, and in which I continue to charge my writing with necessary outrage, although I do recognize, of course, that many of my readers are suffering from the endlessly increasing cost of living that has become endemic, and that many too are diverting whatever they can spare to the worthiest of causes — the Palestinians trapped in Gaza, and the organizations working to support them.

Nevertheless, if you are able to support me, I will be enormously grateful. You can support me directly via PayPal here or via Stripe here, where I’ve just established a brand-new donation page.

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
June 16, 2025

NOTE: You can also support my work by buying my books, The Battle of the Beanfield, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Guantánamo Files, or you can buy downloads of my music with The Four Fathers on Bandcamp, including our three albums, Songs of Loss and Resistance, How Much Is A Life Worth? and Love and War, which are also available as limited edition CDs.

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage 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 and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign.