It’s My Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Please Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work for Three Months?

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation, via Paypal, towards the $2500 (£2000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

Dear friends and supporters,

Today is the 16th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which nearly 3,000 people died. As we take time to remember the victims of this terrible crime, I hope we can also remember that it is exactly 15 years and eight months since, in response, the Bush administration set up a cruel and lawless prison for Muslims at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, an unacceptable response that, for the last eleven and a half years, I have been writing about, exposing the lies and distortions used in a cynical effort to justify the imprisonment of the men (and boys) held there, and campaigning to get the prison shut down once and for all.

To help me to continue to work towards this aim, I need your help. Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work on Guantánamo and on related issues — holding accountable those who authorized and set up Guantánamo, for example, and those who authorized and set up the torture program whose story is woven so closely into its fabric.

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 would be profoundly reassuring to me if a hundred of you were able to donate $25 (£20) to support my work over the next three months, but I understand that this may be asking rather too much, as, for some time now, I’ve only generally succeeded in raising around $1000 per quarter rather than the $2500 I seek.

I understand that this is, in part, because Guantánamo has rather spectacularly dropped off the radar since Donald Trump became president, and I also understand that Trump’s arrogance and stupidity has meant that there are many, many other worthy causes calling out for people’s attention. However, an injustice ignored doesn’t go away, and although President Obama reduced Guantánamo’s population to just 41 men before he left office, those men continue to be held without the rights that prisoners should be able to take for granted — that they will face prompt trials if accused of a crime, and, if seized in wartime, will be held unmolested until an agreed end of hostilities under the Geneva Conventions.

The men at Guantánamo, shockingly, are still essentially political prisoners who can only be freed at the whim of the president — and with Donald Trump in the White House, it ought to be particularly unacceptable that their fate is completely dependent on someone so particularly unsuited to the demands of high office.

With your help, I will continue to work towards getting Guantánamo closed. Those of you with long memories will recall that there have been times before when the prison slipped off the radar — in 2011 and 2012, in particular, when Republican lawmakers raised obstacles to the release of prisoners, and President Obama responded not by challenging Congress, but by doing nothing, as he did until the prisoners themselves obliged him to act, embarking on a prison-wide hunger strike in 2013 that shone an uncomfortable spotlight on him, and led to unprecedented domestic and international criticism regarding his inaction.

With Donald Trump as president, it is, once more, an uphill struggle to remind people of the existence of Guantánamo, and to highlight the need for its closure, but as long as those of us who care — however small our numbers — refuse to be silenced, the dark forces who want to keep Guantánamo open forever will be thwarted in their efforts to do so without opposition. And, like others opposed to the existence of Guantánamo — primarily, these days, Witness Against Torture, Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights — I will, through this website, through my related work with the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded in 2012 with the attorney Tom Wilner, and through my music and photography, continue to call for the prison’s closure, and to point out that every day it remains open is an affront to the values that the United States claims to hold dear.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
September 11, 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 music is available 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.