Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo and the 166 men still held there.

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 (just 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 for support, back in March, when 34 of you donated $1500, I have been relentlessly busy on Guantánamo, as the prisoners, abandoned by all three branches of the US government, finally made the mainstream media wake up to the injustice of their indefinite detention through a desperate, prison-wide hunger strike, which is still ongoing.

After far too long in which Guantánamo had slipped into the shadows, it was reassuring that it was back in the media spotlight, and I have been kept extremely busy over the last three months, writing articles, and making TV and radio appearances to keep people’s attention focused on the hunger strike, and on the reasons for it.

Despite all this activity, I very much need your help to continue working as I do, as an independent researcher, writer and activist, as most of my work has been, and continues to be unpaid. Although I receive some income from the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I founded last year with the attorney Tom Wilner, another income stream has recently dried up, and I am rather urgently in need of your support to keep working. Even if I were to raise the full $2500 I’m asking for, it would be just $200 a week for the next three months.

I’m sad to report, moreover, that the need for persistent reporting and campaigning on Guantánamo has not diminished. President Obama recently promised to appoint a new official to oversee transfers from Guantanamo, and to resume releasing prisoners, and as a result the media’s spotlight has shifted from Guantánamo, even though the President has not yet done anything to fulfil these promises, and the need to maintain pressure on him is clearly as urgent now as it has been since he failed to fulfill his promise to close the prison within a year of taking office in 2009.

As I continue with my work to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, six years after I began writing about it full-time as an independent freelance journalist, and as I approach my 2000th article, I’d like to thank you for your support, as ever. Without it, I literally would not be able to do what I do.

Andy Worthington
London, June 10, 2013

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and 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. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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 four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.