Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Work on Guantánamo

Please support my work and my efforts to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

It’s that time of the year, when I ask you, my friends and supporters, to make a donation to support my work, primarily on Guantánamo, which I have been researching, writing about and campaigning to close for eleven years. This website — and the 50 or so articles I publish here very three months — is entirely reader-supported, so I need your support if I am to continue the work I have been doing since 2006.

My target for this quarter — $2500 (£2000) — works out at just $50 an article, so if you can donate $50 you will know that you have paid for one of my articles. Otherwise, a donation of $25 (£20), for example, is just $2 (£1.50) a week — not too much, I hope, for the work that I do, reminding the world on a non-stop basis about the existence of Guantánamo, telling the stories of the men held there, and pointing out the unrelenting need for the prison to be shut down once and for all. However, 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.

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). 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.

With Donald Trump in the White House, the problem for Guantánamo campaigners — and the 41 men still held in the prison — is that Guantánamo is in danger of slipping off the radar, as it has so often throughout its long and lamentable history — through much of the Bush administration, when the American public were in general too cowed to properly scrutinize what was happening at Guantánamo (torture, kangaroo courts and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, all hallmarks of dictatorships), and between 2010 and 2013, when Barack Obama gave up on Guantánamo after facing opposition in Congress, reviving his interest in the prison (and his promise to close it) only after the prisoners themselves had embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike.

With Trump, there have been murmurings of the unthinkable — a revival of the torture program, new prisoners to be sent to Guantánamo, the official scrapping of President Obama’s intention to close the prison — but nothing has yet materialized. However, as must be obvious to anyone paying attention, on so many other issues Trump is pursuing a bigoted, belligerent trajectory — in his immigration ban, for example — that it is unwise to think that he is anything but bad news for this most wretched of outposts of US violence, racism and overreach, and all decent people must continue to call for the prison’s closure.

With your help, I will continue to call for Guantánamo to be closed, to call for accountability for those who implemented the programs of torture and imprisonment without charge or trial over the last 15 years, as well as photographing protests, keeping an eye on Donald Trump in general, and also keeping an eye on his counterpart in the UK, Theresa May, and her suicidal obsession with removing Britain from the EU, even if, as is certain, it will destroy our economy. I also hope to be focusing more on protest music in the months to come, which I hope will be of interest.

In closing, thanks, as ever, for your support, and if we’re not yet connected via social media, why not follow me on Facebook and Twitter, check out the Close Guantánamo campaign (also on Facebook and Twitter), and check out my band The Four Fathers (also on Facebook and Twitter).

Andy Worthington
London
March 13, 2017

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.