The Guantánamo Document That Changed My Life 20 Years Ago Today

A photo taken at Guantánamo on January 11, 2002, the day the prison opened, and an excerpt from the first ever prisoner list released by the Pentagon, on April 20, 2006, featuring the names and nationalities of 558 prisoners, out of the 759 prisoners who had been held in the first four years and three months of the prison’s existence.

Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ 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. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.





 

20 years ago today, on April 20, 2006, a document was released by the Pentagon that changed my life, launching me on what has become the defining struggle (or jihad, in Arabic) of my time here on earth as an independent journalist and human rights activist: exposing the horrific injustice of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the 779 menand boys — held there by the US military, and calling for the prison’s closure.

The document in question was a list of 558 prisoners held at Guantánamo at the time (see here or here), unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation.

It was the first ever list of prisoners released by the US government, which, for four years and three months, since Guantánamo first opened on January 11, 2002 — to hold prisoners seized in connection with the global “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — had sought to shroud the prison and those held there in a veil of the utmost secrecy, behind which it could completely disregard all international and domestic laws and treaties concerning the treatment of those deprived of their liberty.

With the release of this document, it was suddenly possible, by cross-referencing with other documents unwillingly released by the Pentagon, and other available reports, to tell the stories of those held at Guantánamo, and to fatally puncture the Bush administration’s lies that those held were “the worst of the worst”, “terrorists” who were “seized on the battlefield”, and who were all hell-bent on inflicting the maximum amount of damage imaginable on the so-called “Land of the Free.”

Inventing a category of prisoner without any rights whatsoever

For those regarded as having committed crimes or for those detained in wartime, only two courses of action are legally applicable for depriving people of their liberty in countries that, like the US, claim to respect the rule of law. Those detained are either charged with a crime, and swiftly put on trial, or are held as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Under George W. Bush, however, the US government decided that those held at Guantánamo were “unlawful enemy combatants”, who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and who, fundamentally, had no rights whatsoever.

For the very small number of men who were to be charged with crimes relating to terrorism, the venue chosen for their intended prosecution was not the federal courts on the US mainland, but at Guantánamo itself, in military commission trials that had been unwisely dredged up from past military conflicts, and which, shockingly, were conceived, initially, as a method for swiftly executing alleged “terrorists” after brief capital trials in which information derived through the use of torture would be allowed.

For the first two and half years of their imprisonment, the anonymous victims of the “war on terror” were so thoroughly cut off from the world that, when it came to Guantánamo, the only valid comparison for the US under George W. Bush was with a full-blown dictatorship.

However, most of the US, from its politicians to its mainstream media and far too many of its citizens, didn’t care, as a permanent state of grief, fear and vengeance was cultivated and maintained by the government, by Congress and by the mainstream media.

Although brave lawyers began challenging Bush’s dictatorial regime almost immediately, it wasn’t until June 2004 that the Supreme Court ruled on a case, Rasul v. Bush, named after a British prisoner, Shafiq Rasul, that had been making its way through the courts for the previous two years.

The prisoners briefly secure habeas corpus rights

In Rasul, the Supreme Court ruled that, because the prisoners had no way of challenging the basis of their imprisonment, even if they declared that they were completely innocent and had been seized by mistake, they had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to challenge the government’s supposed evidence against them before an impartial judge.

It was a sign of how grotesquely the Bush administration had deliberately blurred the distinctions between alleged criminal behavior and the actions of foot soldiers in wartime that this ruling was required. Normally, there was no need to grant habeas corpus rights to people seized in wartime, because the Geneva Conventions applied, allowing them to be held unmolested until the end of hostilities. In the “war on terror”, however, the government had compelled the Court to act by failing to review the prisoners’ cases close to the time of place and capture, to ascertain whether or not they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake.

Historically, this was achieved by convening “competent tribunals” under the Geneva Conventions, at which those who claimed to be civilians caught by mistake could call witnesses to verify their claims. In the first Gulf War, around 1,200 “competent tribunals” were held, and, in around three-quarters of the cases, the US military recognized that they had made mistakes, and the wrongly-detained civilians were released. At Guantánamo, in contrast, the position taken by the Bush administration, primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington, was that no mistakes were made, and that everyone detained was an “unlawful enemy combatant”, without any right to have those evidence-free assertions reviewed.

Crucially, the ruling in Rasul v. Bush allowed attorneys into Guantánamo to begin representing the men held on a pro bono basis, but while the arrival of lawyers brought the most blatant torture and abuse at the prison to an end, which had relied on the veil of total secrecy to keep it hidden, most of the prisoners who accepted representation by US attorneys, having overcome their initial concerns that they were secretly working for the government, didn’t have their cases publicized, to prevent any contamination of their planned hearings, and also to prevent what might otherwise have been a torrent of black propaganda emanating from the Bush administration and lapped up by compliant media.

In those early years, the only reports that emerged from Guantánamo were via the accounts of released prisoners, initially in brief comments made largely by released Afghan and Pakistani prisoners, who made up the bulk of the 200 or so prisoners released from 2002 to 2004, and particularly, from 2004 onwards, when European citizens were freed after belated pressure was exerted by their home governments, and when they began relating their accounts to generally sympathetic mainstream media outlets with a wide reach.

Convening unfair tribunals at Guantánamo

However, despite the importance of Rasul, Congress was subsequently prevailed upon by the Bush administration to pass laws aimed at stripping the prisoners of their newly-granted habeas rights, and the Bush administration, in a further snub to the Supreme Court, convened administrative military tribunals at Guantánamo — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) and, later, the Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) — which were designed not to provide justice, but, shamefully, to rubber-stamp their designation, on capture, as “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without rights, continuing the prison’s fundamental lawlessness.

Fundamentally, the CSRTs and ARBs echoed the “competent tribunals” that should have taken place when the prisoners were first seized, but they were deliberately worthless in the context of Guantánamo, far from the time and place of capture, when witnesses were unobtainable.

Although I had been aware of the disturbing lawlessness of Guantánamo from the day it opened, I spent the first four years of its existence working in another field entirely: writing two books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield (both still in print) about the contested landscape of Stonehenge, the great sun temple in southern England, the anarchic pagan free festivals that flourished there every summer from 1974 to 1984, and the vile police assault on those seeking to make their way to Stonehenge in 1985, at what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

Because this research exposed me to profound questions about the nature and extent of civil liberties and human rights, and, eventually, the rule of law, as the UK’s highest court ruled that a military-style exclusion zone imposed at Stonehenge every summer for 15 years was illegal, paving the way for public access on the summer solstice to be restored, everything was in place for me to end the summer of 2005, which I had spent in idyllic circumstances, traveling with my family from festival to festival in the English countryside to promote my Beanfield book, by becoming ensnared in the far graver story of Guantánamo.

After attending a law event discussing the British prisoners still held in September 2005, I became appalled by the Bush administration’s continuing secrecy about who it was holding at the prison, and began conducting detailed research on the internet, also drawing on two speculative lists of the prisoners held, compiled by the British NGO Cageprisoners (now CAGE International) and the Washington Post.

The significance of the release of the prisoner list

It was not until March 2006, however, that the US’s obsessive secrecy first began to be decisively prised open publicly. In response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, the Pentagon was obliged to release, on March 3, 2006, over 5,000 pages of documents from Guantánamo; primarily, unclassified allegations against the prisoners, and transcripts from their CSRTs, with the names of a number of the prisoners included. An earlier lawsuit has led to the release of 2,000 pages of documents, in May 2005, although all identifying information had been redacted.

Although some of those in the files released in March 2006 were identified by their names, rather than just their prison numbers (their ISNs, or Internment Serial Numbers), it was not until the list of 558 prisoners was released on April 20, 2006, providing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had gone through the CSRT process, and the first round of the subsequent ARB process, that it was possible for investigative journalists and researchers to finally establish who the prisoners dismissed by Donald Rumsfeld as “the worst of the worst” really were, through cross-referencing the CSRT documents and unclassified allegations with the names on the prisoner list.

I immediately began working around the clock to create plausible biographies of the prisoners, based on whatever glimpses emerged of them through the transcripts of the tribunals, and to establish the important context of where and when they were seized, which was essential in ascertaining whether or not they had been foot soldiers with the Taliban, for example, or civilians seized by mistake. At no point, crucially, was it apparent that any more than a handful of these individuals had any meaningful association with Al-Qaeda or any other group connected to any kind of terrorism.

A second list, released on May 15, 2006 (see here and here), provided even more context — the names, nationalities and dates of birth of all 759 prisoners held from the date the prison opened. As I continued my research, I kept expecting to hear of similar efforts undertaken by mainstream media outlets or NGOs, but it turned out that I was alone, and became the sole independent custodian of the prisoners’ stories.

The first page of the list of all 759 prisoners held at Guantánamo as of May 15, 2006, as released by the Pentagon under Freedom of Information legislation.

Writing The Guantánamo Files

I pitched a proposal for a book to the tenacious left-wing publisher Pluto Press, which was accepted, and then spent over a year engaged in an obsessive quest for the truth, which resulted in my book The Guantánamo Files, accurately described as “the first book to tell the story of every man trapped in Guantánamo”, which I submitted in May 2007, and which was published four months later.

Crucially, what my research revealed was that the majority of the prisoners were not “seized on the battlefield”, as the US alleged, but had been seized elsewhere, confirming reports that most had been handed over by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and that substantial bounty payments were involved.

I was able to establish that a number of men had been seized in Afghanistan in the early months of the US-led invasion, and that most of these men had either survived a massacre in a prison, or massacres in containers as they were transported from one location to another. I was also able to establish that the largest group of prisoners — hundreds in total — had not been seized in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001.

These men were all portrayed as Al-Qaeda fighters who had been involved in the Battle of Tora Bora, but in all likelihood they consisted of a mix of foot soldiers, missionaries, aid workers and economic migrants, mainly from Europe and the Middle East, who had been attracted by the notion that the Taliban had created a “pure Islamic state” in Afghanistan, or who had simply been drawn by its affordability, compared to their home countries or their experiences as marginalized migrants in Europe.

I also established that numerous prisoners, who had not even set foot in Afghanistan, had been seized in house raids in Pakistan, largely between January and July 2002, which were noteworthy for the general incompetence of the military intelligence involved, and that around 40 men had been transferred to Guantánamo after spending time in the CIA’s network of “black site” torture prisons, or in proxy prisons operated by US allies in the Middle East.

The largest group of prisoners sent to Guantánamo were Afghans — many reluctant Taliban conscripts, or men betrayed by their rivals in Afghanistan itself — who continued to be sent to Guantánamo in significant numbers until November 2003, when their transfers ceased, and Bagram prison in Afghanistan took over as the primary prison for Afghans and others seized during the US’s ongoing occupation.

A group of ten or so “medium-value detainees” arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2004, while 14 more men, the so-called “high-value detainees”, arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and six more in 2007 and 2008.

The transfer in September 2006 marked the first time that it was feasible to suggest that at least some of these men fitted the almost non-existent description of those held at Guantánamo being anyone at all who could meaningfully be described as having been involved in Al-Qaeda and acts of international terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks.

Locating the time and location of the prisoners’ capture helped me to interpret which of the competing narratives exposed in the US government’s files — the US’s own accounts, and those of the prisoners themselves — was the most credible, and I believe that the passage of time has confirmed most of my assessments that, to put it bluntly, almost no one held at Guantánamo had any significant involvement with terrorism, and that they were, instead, overwhelmingly either insignificant foot soldiers, or civilians seized by mistake.

After I submitted the manuscript of The Guantánamo Files to Pluto Press, I almost immediately began writing regularly about Guantánamo on my website, telling stories untold in the mainstream media, or following up on mainstream media reporting that provided information, but lacked the crucial context of always pointing out that the very basis of Guantánamo, and everything to do with it, represented the most colossal failure imaginable of international law and of basic human standards of decency.

Please support my work if you can

I’ll post another article soon telling the story of my relentless independent journalism and activism over the last 19 years, but for now, if you’ve enjoyed the account above, please do consider, if you can, making a donation to support my work.

Although I have worked, at various times, with the UN, WikiLeaks, Cageprisoners (now CAGE International), Reprieve, the Center for Constitutional Rights and members of the European Parliament, and have written articles for the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, I have undertaken most of my work over these two defining decades of my life — over 2,600 articles about Guantánamo, numerous personal appearances and media appearances, as well as specific campaigns and activism — on the basis that it needed doing, and that, as a truly independent writer, largely excluded from the mainstream media, with its inbuilt biases, or its often paralyzing obsession with “objectivity”, I would need to be reliant on the financial support of my readers to enable me to continue this work.

If you can help out at all, you can take out a paid subscription to my Substack, which I established 18 months ago, and which also means that you’ll be notified about all my work in your inbox, for $80 a year, or $8 a month, or you can donate any amount you wish to make via PayPal, with an option of making regular monthly payments, or via Stripe, where I recently set up an account.

Any financial support you can provide will be very greatly appreciated.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation via PayPal or via Stripe.

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

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House, singing in Washington, D.C., and campaigning against the destruction of a community garden in Deptford, south London.

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.

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Please Support My Guantánamo Work With a Donation, or Subscribe to My New Substack Newsletter

My new Substack account, where I welcome supporters who want to be informed about my work by subscribing to my weekly newsletter.

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, 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.

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

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo at an event in the European Parliament on September 28, 2023, and at a rally in Trafalgar Square on January 20, 2024, marking the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11.

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.

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

Andy Worthington calls for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the White House on January 11, 2020.

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.

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Please Support My Truly Independent Reader-Funded Work on Guantánamo as a Journalist and Activist

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo in the European Parliament on September 28, 2023, and at a rally in Trafalgar Square on January 20, 2024, marking the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the prison on January 11.

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.





 

I never meant to become a world authority on Guantánamo, or the most persistent independent journalist and activist campaigning for the prison’s closure, but over the last 18 years, as my youth has given way to middle age, that is, apparently, what I’ve become.

I’ve done this through a combination of personal tenacity, through persistent efforts to navigate and not drown in the ever-changing media landscape of the 21st century, through a refusal to accept the false distinction between journalism and activism that makes far too much “liberal” journalism self-defeating, and through a belief that, in the face of almost complete indifference from politicians, the mainstream media and the American people, those of us who recognize that the prison at Guantánamo Bay is a uniquely lawless affront to all notions of decency need to do all that we can to persistently raise our voices and to be heard.

When I began this work on a full-time basis, in March 2006, social media and smartphones barely existed, and the internet was much more of a level playing field than it is now. Drawing on publicly available documents — largely extracted from the US government through Freedom of Information legislation — I spent 14 months researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, and then began writing and publishing articles here on my website, which has subsequently become the largest repository of publicly available information about Guantánamo, with none of it hidden behind a paywall, and none of it having been erased, as is sadly the case with the archives of so much of the mainstream media.

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

Andy Worthington with the poster marking 8,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence on December 6, 2023, and at “Close Guantánamo!”, an inspiring event at the European Parliament in September.

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.

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Celebrating 2,400 Days of ‘The State of London’: Please Donate to Support This Unique Photo-Journalism Project

The most recent photos posted in Andy Worthington’s ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.





 

Dear friends and supporters,

Today marks 2,400 days — or a little over six and a half years — since I first set up ‘The State of London’ Facebook page, and began posting a photo a day, with an accompanying essay, drawn from the photos I had been taking since I first began cycling around London and taking photos throughout the capital’s 120 geographic postcodes five years before — on May 11, 2012, to be precise. I also post the photos on X (formerly Twitter).

From the beginning, this has been something of a deranged hobby. I have no financial backing for the project and, as a result, am reliant on you, my readers and followers, to provide me with any kind of monetary recompense for the ridiculous amount of time that I’ve spent cycling around London with a camera over the last eleven and a half years — and, in particular, the many hours I spend researching and writing about the photos that I post to entertain and inform you about London’s history, its social housing, its takeover, in recent decades, by predatory capitalism, the changing seasons, forgotten corners, rivers, hills and canals, parks and graveyards, seats of power, poverty and protests.

In the last six months, for example, I’ve celebrated pubs and cafes, inter-war council estates, Art Deco and Brutalist triumphs, delved through the archive for coverage of lost or soon to be lost reminders of London’s history — Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, prior to redevelopment, slipper baths in South Bermondsey, council flats in Homerton, a lodge in Archway and a prefab in Stepney Green, and have also posted about horrible new developments in Pimlico, Canary Wharf, the City, Vauxhall and Lewisham, as well as covering the massive and frequent protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

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Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Writing and Campaigning for the Prison’s Closure, and My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Andy Worthington speaking at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London in June 2023, and at a vigil for the closure of Guantánamo outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms in May.

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.





 

Every three months (at the start of March, June, September and December), I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing reader-funded work on Guantánamo — my frequent writing, my regular campaigning, my public appearances and my media appearances, all of which are generally unpaid.

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 make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by 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.

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Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Ongoing Work to Close Guantánamo Over the Next Three Months

Andy Worthington campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House, singing in Washington, D.C., and campaigning against the destruction of a community garden in London.

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 work as an independent journalist and activist, working to get the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed, and telling the stories of the men held there, as I have been doing for the last 17 years. I have no institutional backing for any of this work, so I really am dependent on your financial support.

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 make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Andy Worthington

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).
Email Andy Worthington

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