Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Seeking $2600 (£1800) to Support My Guantánamo Work

9.3.16

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Andy Worthington calls for the closure of Guantanamo outside the entrance to US Southern Command in Florida on January 9, 2016.Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

This week is my latest quarterly fundraiser, in which I’m hoping to raise $3500 (£2400) to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues for the next three months. That’s just $270 (£180) a week for my full-time, independent work on Guantánamo, writing 50-60 articles every quarter, and campaigning to get the prison closed. Thanks to the generosity of ten supporters, I’ve raised $900 (£600) since launching the fundraiser on Monday, but I’m still hoping to raise $2600 (£1800) to reach my target.

In case you don’t know, most of my work is reader-funded. I receive no institutional funding for this website, and I really can’t continue to do the work I do without your support. Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£15, £50 or £250, for example). PayPal will convert any currency you pay into dollars, which I chose as my main currency because the majority of my supporters are in the US.

So 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). 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.

As I seek your support for the next 13 weeks, this is a reflective time for me, because it’s exactly ten years since I began working full-time on Guantánamo. Tonight, exactly ten years ago, I watched “The Road to Guantánamo,” about the Tipton Three, on Channel 4, one of three events at this time that turned my part-time interest in Guantánamo — and research I had been undertaking since September 2005 — into an all-consuming, full-time affair that has largely dominated my life ever since.

The second event ten years ago was my purchase of — and avid reading of — Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant, which also came out in March 2006, and the third was the Pentagon being forced to release over 5,000 pages of documents relating to the prisoners, after losing a FOIA lawsuit submitted by the Associated Press, which happened on March 3, 2006 — although it was not until April 19, 2006, when a list of 558 prisoners was released, and May 15, 2006, when a full list of the 759 men who had held at that time was released, that it became possible to ascertain who the 5,000 pages of documents referred to, and for me to begin the research that led to the publication of my book The Guantánamo Files in  2007, and my full-time journalism about Guantánamo, which I began at the end of May 2007.

Ten years on, that research continues to inform my knowledge of the prisoners, and to help me to continue to write about them, and I expect that, at some time this year, my tally of articles about Guantánamo will reach the 2,000 mark (it’s currently 1,920). Anyone interested in following my ten years of writing about Guantánamo will find all the articles listed chronologically here and here.

Since I started my work, it would be fair to say that many more journalists have become involved in the story of Guantánamo and its prisoners, but I believe that I still have an important role to play, and I hope you agree, and will support my work if you are able to do so. As ever, I must conclude by pointing out that I really can’t do what I do without your support.

Andy Worthington
London
March 9, 2016

Note: As a ten-year anniversary bonus, “The Road to Guantánamo” is posted below:

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, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), 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.


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3 Responses

  1. Andy Worthington says...

    When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:

    It’s Day 3 of my quarterly fundraiser, in which I’m still hoping to raise $2600 (£1800) to support my ongoing work on ‪Guantanamo‬ and related issues for the next three months. So far ten supporters have donated $900 (£600), for which I’m very grateful, so if you can help me to get any nearer my target, any donation, however large or small, will be most welcome. As someone whose work is largely reader-supported, it’s important to note that I really can’t do what I do without your help.

  2. Andy Worthington says...

    Thanks to the supporter who has just made a donation. Just $75 (£50) needed now to get to $1000 (£700). Can you help?

  3. Andy Worthington says...

    I’ve had another donation taking me to over $1000 raised, but I’m still hoping to raise another $2500. Can you help with a donation of $50 (£30)? That’s just $3 (£2) a week if you appreciate what I do, the cost of a newspaper or two. If 50 of you could do that, I could end the fundraiser and get back to work (not that I haven’t been working my socks off – articles coming soon on the Tories’ Housing Bill and on the latest news from Guantanamo’s Periodic Review Boards).

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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The Battle of the Beanfield

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Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion

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Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo

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