Quarterly Fundraiser: With Trump Presidency Looming, Please Support My Work on Guantánamo – $3500 (£2750) Needed

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $3500 (£2750) for the next three months!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to support my independent research, writing and commentary on Guantánamo and related issues. This is work I’ve been doing, largely as a reader-supported independent writer, for over ten years, but whilst it was reasonable to suppose, until recently, that Guantánamo might close, if not under President Obama, then under Hillary Clinton as his successor, the election of Donald Trump indicates, alarmingly, that the prison may gain a new lease of life from January onwards. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to keep Guantánamo open, to bring back torture, and even to send US citizens to Guantánamo to face military commission trials — all developments that are completely unacceptable.

I need your support to be able to continue the struggle to get Guantánamo closed (to bring to an end indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial), to make sure that no efforts to revive torture will be successful, and to continue to call for those who authorized and implemented the post-9/11 programs of extraordinary rendition, torture and arbitrary detention to be held accountable for their actions. It is hugely important that Donald Trump — and those he is appointing to key positions — are resisted every step of the way if they attempt to revive Guantánamo in any way, or to revisit any of the other lawless excesses of the Bush years.

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). I’m hoping to raise $3,500 (£2,700) for the next three months, which is just $270 (£200) a week for my constant work campaigning on behalf of the Guantánamo prisoners.

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 September, through which I raised around $1500 of the $3500 I hoped to raise, I have continued to try to educate people about Guantanamo and the men held there, and to campaign for the closure of the prison, through the 60 or so articles I have written over the last 90 days, in which I have also written about issues relating to politics in the UK, and have also undertaken media appearance and personal appearances, all of which, like most of my writing, is unpaid and only possible through your support.

I hope that you can help support my work at this particularly dangerous time for liberty and the rule of law, and I thank you, as always, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington
London
December 5, 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.