PLEASE HELP! Quarterly Fundraiser Day 5 – Still Seeking $3000 (£2250) for My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues. As an independent researcher, commentator and campaigner, without any institutional backing, I cannot do what I do without your support; or, to put it another way, the majority of the 50 or so articles I write every quarter are written for free, and it is only through your donations that I get paid.

The $3500 (£2600) I seek every quarter works out at only about $70 (£50) per article — not a huge amount, I hope you’ll agree, but considerably more than nothing.

So please, if you can help out at all, 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.

In addition, if you’re able to become a monthly sustainer, I will be extremely grateful. After clicking the PayPal “Donate” button, you simply tick the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.

Please also note that, although supporters can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, 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 do also note that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers — but don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account, from the UK, the US or anywhere else in the world.

In return for your support, I promise to keep up the pressure on President Obama to get Guantánamo closed before he leaves office. That may not be possible, but it is reasonable to presume that no more than 40 men will be left in the prison when the next president takes office, and it is to be hoped that, in the not too distant future, those men will be moved to a new facility or facilities on the US mainland so that Guantánamo itself can be closed.

That will not be the end of the story, of course, because there is no excuse for holding anyone indefinitely without charge or trial, whatever the location, and any attempt to do so will need to be challenged. In addition, those who authorized and implemented the disgraceful lawlessness of the “war on terror” — the kidnapping, torture and indefinite detention — need to be held accountable, and those who have been released need to be able to seek compensation for what happened to them. I intend to continue working on these issues when they arise, but for now, of course, the focus must remain on Guantánamo, and the never-ending need for it be closed once and for all.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
September 16, 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, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.