Quarterly Fundraising Appeal: Please Support my Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Every three months I appeal for financial support to help me continue my research into Guantánamo and related issues (including secret prisons and the British anti-terror laws), and the articles that I write on a daily basis. 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).

It is just over three years since I began writing articles about Guantánamo, after completing the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, and this is my 882nd post (see here for chronological links to all my articles). As I noted last week, my first article (on May 31, 2007), about the alleged death by suicide of a Saudi prisoner in Guantánamo, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, was viewed by 106 people, but I’m delighted to report that last month I received nearly 250,000 page visits, confirming my belief, which has been unwavering since I began researching Guantánamo on a full-time basis in March 2006, that there is an appetite for the truth about Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” — namely, the cruelty, the incompetence, the crimes of senior government officials and the human cost for the victims — that is not being adequately addressed in the mainstream media.

Three years ago, I received no financial support whatsoever for my work. I’m glad to report that this situation has now changed, and that I am paid regularly for the articles I write for Truthout, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Cageprisoners, but much of the work I do is still unpaid — including many of the 100 or so articles I have written over the last three months, and also the promotion for the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), which I have screened throughout the UK — mostly with former prisoner Omar Deghayes — on 22 occasions since my last fundraising appeal in March. The tour, like so much of my work, has had no financial backing, so any assistance is appreciated.

In the last three months, I have maintained the key elements of my work — reporting on the release of prisoners from Guantánamo (just seven in this period), on the proposed trials for prisoners (consisting of pre-trial hearings for the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just a child when he was first seized by US forces), and, in particular, on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.

In a major series on the habeas cases, I produced a definitive list of the 50 cases to date (of which 36 — 72 percent — have been won by the prisoners), and published six detailed articles analyzing the judges’ unclassified opinions, in which, as I explained, they “revealed the alarming flimsiness of most of the material presented by the government as evidence,” exposing how “the government has been relying, to an extraordinary extent, on confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries.” I also explained how disappointed I was with the mainstream media’s general lack of interest in the prisoners’ court victories, because, as I put it, “the rulings are, to be frank, the single most important collection of documents analyzing the failures of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ detention policies — and Obama’s refusal, or inability to thoroughly repudiate them.”

As part of this project, I also embarked on a campaign to point out how the basis for the ongoing detention of the prisoners whose habeas petitions were denied is, for the most part, grossly unfair, as the men in question are generally low-level Taliban recruits who should have been held as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, rather than being consigned, on an apparently legal basis, to indefinite detention in a prison associated with terrorism. I will keep hammering away at this point, not just because of its significance, but also because it ties in with the inability of lawmakers to recognize the truth about Guantánamo.

Instead of helping President Obama to close Guantánamo, lawmakers have, in recent months, ramped up their vile and unconstitutional rhetoric regarding “terror suspects,” both at Guantánamo and elsewhere, exploiting the fear of terrorism, which has been played almost incessantly since the 9/11 attacks, for political gain. This is lowest common denominator politics of the worst kind, but it has been remarkably successful, as it has cowed President Obama, and has ensured that, nearly eight and a half years after Guantánamo opened, the seemingly unending torment of men who are still held, for the most part, without charge or trial, and with no contact with their families, shows no sign of ending anytime soon, and has almost entirely slipped off the mainstream radar.

For this reason, my work is, sadly, more important than ever, and I pledge to continue to expose the truth, to continue to try to bring to life the stories of the men held in Guantánamo, and to campaign for the remaining 181 prisoners to be tried in federal courts or released. I will also continue to expose stories from the US prisons (including a secret prison) at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and to monitor and put pressure on the new coalition government in the UK to repeal its own draconian anti-terror laws, to fully investigate British complicity in torture, and to secure the return of Shaker Aamer, the remaining British resident in Guantánamo.

I hope that you’ll stay with me as I do so (further articles on the alleged suicides of Guantánamo prisoners, and on the UN’s secret detention report are imminent), and that you’ll continue to spread the word. As ever, I’m more than happy for readers to share links on Facebook, to retweet articles and to Digg them, and to cross-post articles, so long as all internal links are preserved.

My thanks to all of you for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
June 7, 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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list.