Funding my Guantánamo work: a supporter will match all donations in the next 48 hours

Please support my work!

Please forgive this interruption to my normal flow of articles about Guantánamo and the “War on Terror,” but a supporter on Facebook has just pledged to match all donations to support my work over the next 48 hours, which is a wonderful offer, and one that I thought would be appropriate to extend to my readers as a whole. Please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal.

I’m sure that many of you know that I survive as a freelance journalist primarily through the support of a number of organizations who pay me to write articles for them — the Future of Freedom Foundation, Cageprisoners and Truthout — but much of the work I do is unpaid, and any donations will be gratefully received, especially as I have just been hit with a bill for some unexpected technical support issues.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working harder than ever to expose the truth about Guantánamo — that it was nothing more than a brutal and misguided experiment, fuelled by incompetence and a violent disregard for the law, even though it was dressed up as a robust and appropriate response to terrorism.

To this end, I have been particularly busy recently, putting together a series of articles under the heading, “Guantánamo Habeas Week,” (even though, in the end, the project spilled over into a three week period), which provided a sustained analysis of the results of the prisoners’ habeas rulings over the last year and a half.

The introduction is here, a comprehensive list of 47 rulings is here (34 of which were won by the prisoners), and detailed articles analyzing the judges’ unclassified opinions are as follows: “With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic,” “Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims,” “Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture,” “Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo” and “How Binyam Mohammed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court.” A final article, “Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion,” will be published soon.

As with all my work, some of this was funded, but much of it was not, so any donations will help to support this project, and others to come — including my ongoing analysis of the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr, a report on the Palestinian recently released from Guantánamo in Spain, reports on the two prisoners released from Guantánamo this week, and further analysis of the ongoing habeas rulings.

Thanks for your time — and if you’re in the UK, don’t forget to vote wisely, and feel free to check out this list of 149 MPs who, in the last 12 months, have supported human rights in relation to terrorism.

Andy Worthington
London, May 6, 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, and details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK.