Victory for Mail campaign to end the 14-year scandal
THE Mail took up the cause of Shaker Aamer last year after a damning official report in the US lifted the lid on the brutal torture methods used by the CIA in the so-called ‘war on terror’.
This paper has always stressed that Mr Aamer may be a very bad man but since he was never charged or given a trial, every day of his incarceration in Guantanamo has represented a grotesque affront to justice and a propaganda gift f or terrorism.
The horrifying story of the London father began to emerge after he became the ‘ l ast Briton’ held at the notorious detention camp in 2006.
Human rights campaigners and Mr Aamer’s legal team, led by Clive Stafford Smith, fought doggedly for his release.
In December last year the Mail launched its campaign.
We published a stinging letter demanding action by President Obama from celebrities, civil rights campaigners and politicians. The letter called on David Cameron to ‘pick up the phone’ to the US President and bring Mr Aamer home.
It was signed by actress Juliet Stevenson, actor Mark Rylance, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor and a host of MPs.
The Government has since been embarrassed by a series of failed attempts to get Mr Aamer released. In January, Mr Cameron raised the matter with at the White House, and was told the US would ‘prioritise’ the case. Yet a month later, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel admitted the case had still not crossed his desk.
In March, Amnesty International delivered a 32,000-signature petition to Downing Street, and MPs questioned whether the US was secretly negotiating with Saudi Arabia to transfer Mr Aamer there.
MPs began to believe Mr Aamer would never be released because the US did not want him to expose shocking levels of brutality inside the camp.
In 13 years at Guantanamo, he was regularly tortured both mentally and physically, being beaten at least 315 times.
He has been entombed for 22 hours each day, without even a pen or book and in a cell so small that its concrete walls are barely an arm-span apart.
He has routinely been kept in solitary confinement as a punishment for ‘non- compliant’ behaviour.
While being held at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, he claims he was privy to a dark episode said to have prompted the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – when interrogators tortured a man who ‘confessed’ that Saddam Hussein’s henchmen had trained Al Qaeda to use chemical weapons.
In June, the Mail revealed that the US feared Britain would struggle to stop Mr Aamer ‘returning to the battlefield’ if he was freed. But this week i t emerged a Saudi accused of being Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard had been freed while Mr Aamer had not.
Saudi-born Mr Aamer studied in the US and worked as an interpreter for the US military.
He moved to London and married Zin Siddique, whose father was the imam of Battersea mosque. In 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks, they moved to Afghanistan.
US intelligence claims Mr Aamer was a personal interpreter for Osama Bin Laden and led a band of Al Qaeda fighters. His family denies this – but he was never given his day in court to defend himself.
When he returns to British soil, he will be able to speak.
‘Never given his day in court’