Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Please Help Me Raise $3500 (£2600) to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again when I ask you, if you can, to help support my independent work on Guantánamo and related issues. I’m trying to raise $3500 (£2600) to cover the next three months, which doesn’t work out as a huge amount: £200 a week — or less than $300 a week — for the 50 or so articles I write every quarter, and also for maintaining social media, dealing with admin, and undertaking interviews and personal appearances (mostly unpaid), as well as the cost of running and maintaining this website.

If everyone who reads and appreciates my work was able to donate just $10 (£7.50) for the next three months, I could wrap up this fundraiser immediately, but I know many of you have limited funds and numerous demands for your support. Do bear in mind, though, that I have no institutional backing and that I am, fundamentally, a reader-funded journalist and activist, and as a result reading my work for free means accepting that I have written it for no payment whatsoever.

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).

Any amount will be gratefully received, whether it is $10, $25, $100 or $500 — or any amount in any other currency (£5, £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. I currently have a number of monthly sustainers, and it’s always reassuring to know that some money is guaranteed every month.

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 June, I have continued to cover the main story at Guantánamo this year — the Periodic Review Boards (see here, here and here), which have been helping President Obama work towards the closure of Guantánamo by approving prisoners for release who were previously described as “too dangerous to release.” Since the PRBs began in 2013, 33 men have so far been approved for release. The first round of the PRBs are now complete, but I will continue to monitor the further reviews of the 19 men so far approved for ongoing imprisonment, as well as attempting to keep pressure on President Obama more generally to close the prison before he leaves office.

I doubt the prison will close by January, but I am reassured that only around 40 men will be held at that point, and that, perhaps, we will see the prison’s closure in the not too distant future. Whatever happens, I will continue to write about the prisoners and to call for those who set up the prison to be held accountable for their actions, and, of course, it is as appropriate as ever to say that I cannot do what I do without your help.

Andy Worthington
London
September 12, 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’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). 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.