Fundraising Week: Please Support My Guantánamo Work!

Please support my work!

Every three months I appeal for financial support to help me to continue the full-time work I began exactly four years ago, when I started researching and writing about the stories of the prisoners held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and first realized the scale of the injustice and brutality of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. All contributions are welcome. Readers can pay 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 (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page).

My life as a full-time chronicler and analyst of Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” began with the 14 months I spent researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, which (with additional chapters published online) tells the stories of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo throughout its eight-year history. I then began writing articles following developments at Guantánamo, helping to spread the word through various websites, and am delighted to report that my website now receives an average of 150,000 page views a month.

My thanks to all who have discovered my work, and especially to those who follow it on a regular basis. Three months ago, despite stalling and compromises on the part of the Obama administration, I thought that we were at least still proceeding in the right direction, but the last few months have proved me wrong, and have demonstrated that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. This is where your help — reading my work, helping to get it out to other people and providing financial support to enable me to keep spreading the word — is so important.

The one-year deadline that President Obama set for the closure of Guantánamo has passed, those who oppose the prison’s closure appear to have gained the upper hand in an ongoing propaganda war, and the administration has made numerous fundamental mistakes: failing to provide new homes on the US mainland for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture, reviving the Bush administration’s reviled Military Commission trial system, and insisting that it has the right to hold some prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.

With widespread indifference in the mainstream media, my mission — to educate people about the terrible mistakes that have been made, and the human cost of those mistakes — continues, not just with regard to Guantánamo, but also in researching the “ghost prisoners” of the CIA’s secret detention program (whose whereabouts are largely unaccounted for), exposing the baleful history of the prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, calling for accountability for those who made America a “Torture Nation,” and exposing British complicity in torture and the injustice of my home country’s own anti-terror laws.

In the last three months, I have updated my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, produced an annotated version of the first ever Bagram prisoner list, and published five articles listing all my work in chronological order, as well as reporting the stories of the prisoners released from Guantánamo, reporting on their habeas corpus petitions in the US courts, exposing right-wing lies and misinformation, and the spinelessness of many Democrats, and criticizing the administration for its inability to place principles above pragmatism.

As this story moves forward, I am grateful to the various organizations who support my work financially (primarily, Truthout and the Future of Freedom Foundation, but also the Guardian, Cageprisoners and the Daily Star, Lebanon). However, most of the work I do is still unpaid — not only the majority of the 90 or so articles I have written over the last three months, but also the promotion I am undertaking for my documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), which I am taking on a UK tour with former prisoner Omar Deghayes. The tour, like so much of my work, has no financial backing, so any assistance will be appreciated.

In conclusion, if you can’t help out with a donation, please be aware that my book The Guantánamo Files (and my two previous books, The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion) are all available to buy from me if you’re in the UK (and are available elsewhere through Amazon and other retailers), and that copies of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” are available on DVD, and can be dispatched anywhere in the world.

Thank you for being here, and for your continued support of my work.

Andy Worthington
London
March 1, 2010

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.