It’s My Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $3500 (£2400) to Support My Guantánamo Work?

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of the year again when I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo, and related issues. Any amount, however large or small, will be gratefully received, as most of my work is only possible through your donations. I don’t have the backing of a mainstream media outlet, and I don’t have the backing of an institution; I am, instead, very much a creation of the modern online world — a reader-funded investigative journalist and commentator — and almost everything I do is only possible because of your support.

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).

$3500 (£2400) is just $270 (£185) a week for the next three months — not a huge amount for the 50 or so articles I write every quarter, plus all the social media work, and the personal appearances and media appearances I also undertake, most of which are also unpaid.

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.

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.

It’s now over ten years since I began working on Guantánamo — first of all via my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, via this website. I recently missed the 9th anniversary of the start of my online journalism (on May 31, 2007, after a Saudi prisoner had died at Guantánamo), but you can find that first post here, and my Guantánamo archive now contains nearly 2,000 articles. In recent months, I have been assiduously covering the latest stage in Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history — the Periodic Review Boards, which function like parole boards, and have been reviewing the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release or facing trials. These are proving successful for the prisoners — with a 73% success rate so far — and they are crucial in moving towards the closure of the prison.

Despite this, the coverage of the Periodic Review Boards in the mainstream media has generally been poor, and, ten years after I began this work, it seems that my knowledge and my voice is still necessary to shine a light on what is happening at Guantánamo, to explain what it means, and to tell the prisoners’ stories.

With your help, I will keep pushing to get Guantánamo closed throughout the next three months, focusing in particular on the PRBs, which are currently taking place twice a week, whilst also making sure that I keep an eye on any other developments, and also continuing to promote the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that I’m running through the Close Guantánamo campaign that I also run — which, incidentally, has some financial backing this year, but will be without funding next year, even though, I suspect, its presence will still be needed, as it looks unlikely that President Obama will succeed in closing the prison before he leaves office.

My thanks, as ever, for your interest in my work. As I noted above, I genuinely can’t do what I do without your help, and I will be very grateful if you can make any kind of donation to support me.

Andy Worthington
London
June 6, 2016

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.