Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: $2000 Still Need to Support My Guantánamo Work

12.6.13

Please support my work!

Thanks to the generosity of nine friends and supporters, I have so far received just over $400 in my quarterly fundraising appeal for donations to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo as a freelance investigative journalist and a campaigner for the prison’s closure.

I am still hoping to raise $2500 for the next three months — which works out at just $200 a week — as I rely on your donations to make this work even vaguely feasible.

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, 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!

Six years ago, when I began writing articles on a full-time basis about Guantánamo (following the 14 months I spent researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files), I didn’t set out to be an independent researcher and commentator on the prison, and the men held there, but I realized early on that the internet provided a unique opportunity to reach out to an ever-increasing audience of people dissatisfied with the mainstream media’s inability or refusal to focus relentlessly on issues of enormous significance (like Guantánamo).

I also realized that working independently was the only way that I could work full-time on Guantánamo, creating the biggest online archive about the prison and the men held there, and making sure that it couldn’t be forgotten — another point where I diverged from the mainstream media (and especially the liberal media), which clings to its obsession with “objectivity” as a virtue, when, in fact, all it does it empower the dark forces in positions of power and authority who have no interest in providing both sides of the story.

In addition, as I have maintained from the very beginning, Guantánamo is such a monstrous aberration from the accepted standards regarding the detention of prisoners that it needs to be campaigned against on a full-time basis, especially as those who set it up — with their cynical talk of the prison holding “the worst of the worst” — created a powerful piece of black propaganda that has proven extremely resilient in a world where we are permanently encouraged to live in fear — and, specifically, in fear of terrorists.

Although I have been extremely busy with Guantánamo since my last fundraiser three months ago, as the prison-wide hunger strike awoke the media to what is happening at Guantánamo, and how the 166 men still held — including the 86 cleared for release by President Obama’s inter-agency task force — have been abandoned by all three branches of the US government, the struggle for them to be freed or tried, and for the prison to be shut down, is far from over.

I will continue to work to get the prison shut down, and to make President Obama fulfill his promises, but to do so I continue to need your help.

Any donation you can give, however large or small, will help me to achieve this.

With thanks for your support, as ever,

Andy Worthington
London, June 12, 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).