Quarterly Fundraiser: Please Help Me Raise $2500 to Support My Work on Guantánamo, Injustice and Austerity

Please support my work!

It’s that time of the year again. Every three months, I ask you, my friends, readers and supporters, to help to support my independent, freelance investigative journalism — as the foremost journalist on Guantánamo, the 169 men still held there, and the lies and distortions that are still used to hold them, and as a commentator diversifying into other topics, especially economic issues, and particularly with regard to the savage austerity being implemented in the UK and in other countries in Europe.

All contributions are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other 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 a check from the US (or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter), please feel free to do so, but bear in mind that I have to pay a $10/£6.50 processing fee on every transaction. Securely packaged cash is also an option!

Since my last fundraiser, in March, when 32 of you donated nearly $2000, I have written a hundred articles, in which I have, of course, continued to focus on Guantánamo, as it is the core of my work, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This is because the promised closure of Guantánamo has shamefully slipped off the Obama administration’s agenda, and neither the media nor the American people care sufficiently that the prison’s continued existence is both a disgrace and a rallying point for those — including members of Congress — who are entranced by the notion of indefinite arbitrary detention. Some US citizens have campaigned against the dreadful provisions inserted into last year’s reviled National Defense Authorization Act, demanding the indefinite arbitrary detention of those regarded as terrorists — including US citizens — but far too few have realized that these provisions would have been unfeasible if a precedent had not been established at Guantánamo, where foreigners have been subjected to indefinite arbitrary detention for the last ten and a half years.

In the last three months, only around two dozen of my articles have been commissioned — as part of my regular work for Close Guantánamo, the campaigning website I established in January with my colleague Tom Wilner, and also for the Future of Freedom Foundation, for whom I have been writing a weekly column since October 2008. In other words, around 75 of the articles I have written in this period were supported only through your donations, as I do not receive any financial support from any other source.

So if you would like to see more of “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” my million-word series telling all the Guantánamo prisoners’ stories in unprecedented detail, which I began last year after working with WikiLeaks on the release of previously classified US military documents relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, and if you want to help support exclusive articles like my report last week, EXCLUSIVE: Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago, then please support my work.

Your donations will also help me to keep exposing the harsh austerity measures that are being used in the UK, in Greece and elsewhere for ideological reasons, to destroy the state provision and ownership of services as part of an ongoing obsession with privatization, cynically using the financial crisis caused by the banks in 2008 as an excuse for unprecedented austerity measures, which, as well as wreaking social havoc, are also economically disastrous. In the UK, this involves the NHS, whose planned privatization I campaigned against extensively, the withdrawal of the provision of financial support for the disabled, and the exploitation of the unemployed in workfare schemes, and in Greece, of course, it appears to involve nothing less than the annihilation of the entire state.

Andy Worthington

London

June 11, 2012

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign.”