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

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work on Guantánamo and the “war on terror” by making a donation. Most of the work I do to educate people about Guantánamo, and to campaign to get the prison closed, is unpaid — or, rather, it is unpaid unless it is funded by you, my readers — and this quarter is no exception.

I recently launched a campaign called We Stand With Shaker, specifically to try and secure the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. With a colleague, Joanne MacInnes, we launched it two weeks ago, and we seem to be getting noticed, in particular through our photos of celebrities — including actors, comedians, politicians, journalists and musicians — standing with a giant inflatable figure of Shaker. Some of you may also be surprised to discover that I also wrote and sang the campaign song, featured in the official video for the campaign.

This project has been taking up a huge amount of time, although, like so much of my work, it is completely unfunded, so any assistance you can provide will be very gratefully received, as the campaign continues, with new initiatives planned for the next few months, as well as the daily updates of celebrities standing with Shaker.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal).

All contributions to support my work are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

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!

I realize that there are probably many causes calling out for your support at this time of year, and if you can’t help out, I completely understand, but now is a particularly good time to maintain pressure on the Obama administration — and on David Cameron in Shaker Aamer’s case — as President Obama has been showing a willingness to release prisoners recently, and I am hopeful that my annual visit to the US — to coincide with the anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, on January 11 — will be an opportunity to attract more attention that usual. I will be in the US for around two weeks, and although my flights will be paid for, no one will be paying for my time — unless you can help out by donating to support me.

In closing, thank you for your interest in my work. As ever, it is true to say that I genuinely can’t do what I do without your help.

Andy Worthington
London
December 8, 2014

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, 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 six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and “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, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign.