Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 For My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to help to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the 166 men still held there, with a donation. Although I do receive some income from the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded last year with the attorney Tom Wilner, and from the Future of Freedom Foundation, for whom I write a regular column, much of the work that I do is unpaid, and I cannot survive as an independent researcher, writer, photographer and activist without your support.

All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world (click on the “Donate” button above), 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), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Since my last appeal, in December, when 17 friends and supporters donated nearly $900 to support my work, I have traveled to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo — in January, to mark the 11th anniversary of the opening of the prison, just before Barack Obama’s second inauguration as President. Although my flights to and from the UK were paid for, I was not paid for the ten days I spent in the US campaigning and having meetings to discuss strategies for President Obama’s second term, so any help you can provide will be very gratefully received.

The struggle to close Guantánamo is more uphill than ever, because of obstacles imposed by Congress, and the President’s own inertia when it comes to making the case that his thwarted plans to close the prison must be fulfilled. I remain in discussions with various parties, formulating plans to publicize the plight of the remaining 166 prisoners — whether they are the 86 men cleared but still held, the 46 designated for indefinite detention who have not had the reviews of their cases that President Obama promised them two years ago, or the others, mostly designated for trials, but largely held in a similar limbo to all the other men, because the military commissions at Guantánamo have been so thoroughly discredited. As we have been hearing lately, and as I discussed in my most recent article, “A Huge Hunger Strike at Guantánamo,” the situation is now so intolerable that a prison-wide hunger strike has broken out, largely unreported in the mainstream media, by men who, understandably, are now convinced that death is the only way to leave Guantánamo.

As well as continuing to be the most significant independent voice calling for the closure of Guantánamo, and continuing to use the wealth of information that I have built up over the last seven years of working on the story of the prison and the men held there, I have also been involved in unpaid work resisting the cynically imposed “age of austerity” implemented in my home country, the UK, by the wretched Tory-led government that has been using the ongoing fallout from the global financial crash of 2008 to try to destroy the British state.

As part of this, I have been involved in the struggle to save the NHS, and, in particular, to save Lewisham Hospital from proposals to fatally downgrade its services to pay for the debts of a neighbouring NHS trust, and to resist severe cuts to services across London. I have been working both as a journalist and a photographer on these issues, and if you like what I’ve been doing, then donations to support this work will also be gratefully received.

Also welcome is any support you can provide for my project to photograph London by bike, to document the city at this difficult time on its history — with the rich still showing off their mostly ill-gotten wealth, while everyone else is squeezed, and the poor and the weak are, in particular, mercilessly assaulted by the malignant millionaires in charge of the Tory-led coalition government. I have already published around 2,000 photos as part of this project, but I have at least 8,000 more   that I am steadily publishing, while continuing to record London’s forgotten places, its brash demonstrations of wealth, and the still-growing gulf between the rich and the poor.

I do hope that you can support me in my quarterly appeal. Rest assured that I am grateful for your interest, whether or not you are able to help me out financially, but I continue to hope that the work I do is a useful example of independent online journalism that is partly funded by those who read it.

Thanks for your support, as ever,
Andy Worthington
London, March 11, 2013

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, Twitter, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,”.