My Quarterly Fundraising Campaign: Seeking $3500 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 by making a donation to support my work. I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo for over nine years, and I have been writing articles on an almost daily basis, and campaigning to get the prison closed, for just over eight years, beginning with a blog post I wrote on May 31, 2007, after a Saudi prisoner died, reportedly by committing suicide. In all this time, most of my work has been unpaid — and is only possible because of the support I receive from you.

If you support my work as a genuinely independent voice, unafraid to combine hard-hitting journalism with activism, and 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 cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

Since my last fundraiser, in March, when over 30 of you helped me to reach my quarterly target, I have, of course, continued to work towards the closure of Guantánamo, drafting an open letter to President Obama and defense secretary Ashton Carter, on behalf of 13 rights groups, and publishing around 50 articles, in which I have tried to keep readers up to date on Guantánamo in general, as well as focusing in particular on the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, though the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, in November.

Our campaigning — for which we have no funding — helped to secure a Parliamentary debate on Shaker in March, in which the British government endorsed a motion calling for his release from Guantánamo and his return to the UK, and also contributed to the success of a fundraising appeal to pay for a delegation of four MPs to visit the US last month to meet with Senators and Obama administration officials to discuss Shaker’s release. We also recently published the 70th photo of celebrities and MPs standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that is at the heart of the campaign, and that has done so much to raise awareness of Shaker’s plight.

I probably don’t need to remind you that my work also involves radio interviews, occasional TV appearances, and a variety of other personal appearances, as well as all the emails and admin that take place behind the scenes, and that almost all of this is not paid for, and is only possible because of your support.

For the first time since I began fundraising six years ago, I have raised the amount I am hoping to receive to $3500 a quarter from $2500. That’s still less than $270 (£170) a week for my constant advocacy on behalf of the men still held, and my unfailing support for the closure of Guantánamo once and for all, and I hope you recognize it as good value for money.

As ever, it’s true to say that I couldn’t do what I do without your support.

Andy Worthington
London
June 8, 2015

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers). He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-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 the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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.