Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Support the Work of Andy Worthington, Author of "The Guantanamo Files"

It's amazing how much work journalists and bloggers have done to expose the workings of the U.S. torture program, and that of its allies, such as Great Britain. None have done more than U.K.-based journalist Andy Worthington. You can click here to go and support his work, or read on for the rest of this article.

[UPDATE: Andy Worthington has an exclusive story just up at his site -- WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. It "reveals new information, from a source in Libya, about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the former US “ghost prisoner” who died in a Libyan jail last month, focusing, in particular, on the prisons in which he was held, and the ways in which torture was used by his interrogators."]

Andy 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).

Besides over 500 blog pieces on Guantanamo and other torture stories, Andy has done a prodigious amount of original research, publishing last March the definitive list of prisoners held at Guantánamo prison. He also recently posted the results of his study of Guantanamo hunger strikers, Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation. Andy's original reporting on the Binyam Mohamed case in Britain has been almost the sole source for information in the United States. His most recent posting on civil liberties in the UK, Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders, reports on a crucial British ruling against the use of "control orders" -- essentially a kind of preventive detention -- citing the courts finding:
By nine votes to nil, they ruled that imposing control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given “sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.”
In the U.S., or the blogosphere, you'd hardly know such an important decision took place.

That's why we need Andy Worthington, and he deserves your financial support. Andy joins the category of other fine web journalists, like Marcy Wheeler and Jason Leopold, who also have asked for and deserve the support of their web readership.

Donate today!

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