2700 Articles, 2000 on Guantánamo: Please Support My Work at This Milestone in My Nine-Year Career as an Independent Online Journalist and Activist

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2700 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.

Dear friends and supporters,

I hope you’ll forgive me for stepping back for a moment and reflecting on the fact that I’ve just published my 2700th article since I began writing, on an almost daily basis, about Guantánamo at the end of May 2007. This milestone also marked my 2000th article about Guantánamo. An archive of all my articles is here and here.

I’m delighted to have made it this far, as an independent journalist, researcher, commentator and activist, as much of my work over the last nine years has been unpaid, or, more specifically, has only been possible because of your financial support — and this is particularly true now. Every three months I ask you to support my work, as I try and raise $3500 ($2600), but this quarter, perhaps because interest in Guantánamo is waning, I’m still trying to raise $2700 (£2000).

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).

Since I launched my latest fundraiser a month ago, I’ve also been updating some of my specific larger scale Guantánamo projects — specifically, The Full List of Prisoners Charged in the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, which I first published in March 2014, and my six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I first published in 2009 and last updated in 2014. The prisoner list names every prisoner held at Guantánamo and links to everything I have written about them over the last nine years — and, previously, in my book The Guantánamo Files.

The updates are as follows: Part 1 (covering ISN/prisoner numbers 1-133), Part 2 (ISNs 134-268, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, for whose release I campaigned for many years), Part 3 (ISNs 269-496), Part 4 (ISNs 497-661) and Part 5 (ISNs 662-928, including former child prisoner Omar Khadr, my friend Omar Deghayes, the torture victim and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and Abu Wa’el Dhiab, the Syrian who fought in the US courts to have videos of his force-feeding released, and is now on a life-endangering hunger strike in Uruguay, where he was freed in December 2014). I’ll be updating Part 6 (ISNs 929-10029) before the end of the week.

I hope these projects are useful to anyone researching the long and ignoble history of Guantánamo, and thanks for listening. Normal service will resume tomorrow, but in the meantime please feel free to join the Countdown to Close Guantanamo, which I launched in January (with Roger Waters) via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up in January 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Tomorrow, with photos, we’ll be marking the fact that President Obama will have just 100 days left to close Guantánamo, as he promised when he first took office in January 2009, and I hope you can join us. See here for more information, and also check out the Gitmo Clock, which counts down the time remaining until the end of the Obama presidency.

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.