Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work Ten Years After I Began

Please support my work! I’m trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of year when I ask you, if you can, to support my work on Guantánamo and related issues. No mainstream media outlet pays me a salary for what I do, and no educational institution or funding organization either, so I am largely dependent on your generosity to enable me to continue my work as a freelance investigative journalist, campaigner and commentator. Please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via 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.

It’s now more than ten years since, on an almost daily basis, I began writing and publishing articles about Guantánamo — and working to try to get the prison closed — and since then I have published over 2,000 articles about Guantánamo. Without your financial support, this would not have been possible. All I’m seeking over the next there months is $200 (£150) a week, not much for the 50 or so articles I will write in this three-month period, as well as maintaining the associated social media, and undertaking personal and media appearances, most of which are also unpaid. I cannot do what I do without your support, so I hope you will be able to help.

So if are able to 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). The Paypal page takes money in dollars (because a majority of my supporters are in the US), but it will convert any currency.

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.

In my ten years of writing about Guantánamo as an independent journalist, empowered to do so by the positive power of the internet (and following 14 months I spent writing a book about the prison and the men held there), I have made a film, set up two organizations, and chronicled the disgrace that is Guantánamo under three presidents. Now, under Donald Trump, interest in Guantánamo has fallen to an all-time low, but there have been troughs of interest in Guantánamo before — under Bush, when people were generally too intimidated to take an interest, and under Obama, when, for over two years, he lost interest in Guantánamo after Congress raised obstacles to his efforts to release prisoners. However, the lesson I have learned is that those of us who care about justice must carry on regardless of how fashionable or unfashionable the cause is.

At its heart, this is a struggle to prevent a country that claims to be the world’s greatest superpower, and that also claims to respect the rule of law, from behaving like a dictatorship, locking people up for life without due process. For 15 years, the US has imprisoned foreign Muslims at Guantánamo without charge or trial; in the future, it could choose some other group to subject to the same lawless policy unless Guantánamo is closed once and for all, and its imprisonment policy thoroughly repudiated.

In addition, I also believe that those who authorized and set up the lawlessness of the “war on terror” — which has, of course, included kidnapping and torture as well as indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial — must be held accountable for their actions, and I pledge, with your support, to continue to advocate for the closure of Guantánamo, and to call for accountability, as well as continuing with my other interests — all of which are also only possible with your support: analyzing and commenting on the political situation in the UK, playing music, photographing protests and photographing London.

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
June 12, 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.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign.