17 Years Since I Began Working on Guantánamo, Can You Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) to Carry On? | Andy Worthington (original) (raw)

Andy Worthington campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House, singing about Guantánamo, and campaigning against housing injustice 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 entirely reader-supported work as an independent journalist, focusing on the prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the men held and campaigning to get the prison closed.

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 500,500, 500,100, 25oreven25 or even 25oreven10 — 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.

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.

The timing of this particular fundraiser coincides with the 17th anniversary of when I began working on Guantánamo on a full-time — and entirely unpaid — basis.

This full-time work began after the Pentagon was obliged to release, for the first time, the names and nationalities of the men and boys it was holding at Guantánamo, as well as thousands of pages of supporting documentation. These were unclassified summaries of the supposed evidence used to justify their imprisonment, and transcripts of the cursory tribunals — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — that were held in 2004-05 to, primarily, rubber-stamp the outrageous decision to designate them, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Over the next 14 months, I analyzed and brought together this information to tell the story of the prison, and over half of the men held, in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in September 2007, and since completing the manuscript I have written over 2,500 articles about Guantánamo, including, in 2011, after working with WikiLeaks on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo, telling the stories of the first 200 prisoners to be freed, whose stories were previously unknown.

17 years on, the situation regarding Guantánamo looks more positive than it has for some time, with the majority of the 31 men still held at the prison now approved for release, and with four men freed over the last five weeks by the Biden administration, the most significant release of prisoners since President Obama’s last few weeks in office over six years ago.

Despite this progress, I believe that an uphill struggle still lies ahead, as almost all of the 17 men still held who have been approved for release need third countries to be found that will offer them new homes, which is, of course, a significant demand from a government whose Republican lawmakers have prohibited it from resettling any Guantánamo prisoner on the US mainland.

As a result, in recent months, I have been increasing my efforts to put pressure on the Biden administration, and to help with its efforts to maintain its positive movement towards the closure of Guantánamo, via the Close Guantánamo campaign’s ongoing photo campaign (which secured more support than ever before on Jan. 11, the 21st anniversary of the opening the prison), via new posters I have made showing the men still held, and an infographic showing how long they have been held since being approved for release, and via establishing coordinated global vigils for the prison’s closure on the first Wednesday of every month.

I’ve also, as always, continued writing articles, as well as working with other campaigners to establish an All-Party Parliamentary Group in the UK for the closure of Guantánamo, and starting to work with MEPs to support the prison’s closure, and with your help I’ll be able to continue my work in this busy and, hopefully, fruitful period.

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

Andy Worthington
London
March 13, 2023

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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 (and see the latest 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 he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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.