We must shine a light into the legal black hole he’s left behind
AT FIRST it was merely a speck, but when it grew closer, we could see the Gulfstream’s headlights as it descended rapidly towards us. Then Shaker Aamer’s plane was on the ground at Biggin Hill – a key RAF base during the Battle of Britain, but now a hub for the private jets of the rich.
The long ordeal of the last of the 17 British citizens and residents held at Guantanamo Bay was finally over. Almost 14 years after his capture, Aamer’s first sight of England was of the North Downs: of lush chalk escarpments and russet oaks beneath a drizzly sky – an overwhelming contrast to Guantanamo’s heat and bleaching sunlight.
But this was a bittersweet moment. Inside that plane was a man who has never been charged with a crime and who was first cleared for release by a Pentagon tribunal eight years ago. Yet he was facing the trauma of getting to know children grown from toddlers to teenagers in his absence, and of meeting for the very first time the son born the day he arrived at Guantanamo.
Standing beside me at the end of the runway was the leader of Aamer’s legal team, Clive Stafford Smith of the human rights charity Reprieve.
Having spent thousands of hours on Aamer’s case, fighting year after year in British and US courts and battling to maintain his client’s morale in exhausting visits to Guantanamo, he, more than anyone, deserves credit for his release.
He was smiling, but not beaming. ‘The road ahead won’t be easy,’ he said. ‘Shaker’s got an awful lot to deal with.’
I vividly remember the first of our many conversations about Guantanamo, in the spring of 2002 – a few weeks after this newspaper splashed infamous, horrifying images of bound, blindfolded prisoners kneeling in the Guantanamo dust in orange jumpsuits across several pages, under a one-word headline: TORTURED.
‘What’s happening here is extraordinary,’ Stafford Smith told me then. ‘I think it’s going to take up a lot of my time as a lawyer, and yours as a journalist, for several years.’
But nearly 14 of them? That would not have seemed possible: How could the United States, with its ringing Constitution and reverence for due process, keep prisoners in a legal black hole for so long? (The saga is not over: despite President Obama’s vaunted desire to see Guantanamo shut by January 2010, it still holds more than 100 inmates – most of whom, like Shaker, have not been charged with any crimes.)
Then again, back in 2002, although the Guantanamo concept seemed deeply wrong, we had little idea how
bad the reality was. It was not until two years later, when the ‘Tipton Three’ – Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhel Ahmed – were released and told their story to me, that we started to get an inkling.
They described a world of institutionalised violence and abuse: of savage beatings and ‘cell extractions’ by Guantanamo’s armoured goon squad, the Initial Reaction Force; of interrogations ‘enhanced’ by keeping prisoners in extreme heat and extreme cold, by exposure to continuous, deafening music, and being forced to endure agonising hours trussed like turkeys in so-called ‘stress positions’.
The day after The Mail on Sunday published its searing account, the lies and release of disinformation started. None of it was true, US government spokespeople insisted – though each and every allegation the Tipton Three made about Guantanamo prisoners’ treatment has since long been confirmed by the most impeccable of sources – declassified US government documents.
Others tried a more weaselly approach. Anonymous officials whispered that actually, the Tipton men were highly dangerous. One newspaper even claimed that Rasul had fought with the Taliban, illustrating its story with what it claimed was a combat photograph. Having spent many hours with Rasul, I could see immediately that the image was not of him. Moreover, the photo depicted a man with a gaping shoulder wound, which Rasul did not have.
Meanwhile, another pattern was emerging. The Tipton Three and others I interviewed for this newspaper after they were freed revealed that Britain’s intelligence agencies had been deeply enmeshed in Guantanamo’s unlawful process – in deciding who should be ‘rendered’ there; in feeding questions to their interrogators; and in visiting Guantanamo to conduct interrogations of their own.
In the early years, they were there so often they had their own vehicle, which flew the Union flag.
Thanks to British intelligence, two Britons were sent to Guantanamo not from war-torn Afghanistan or Pakistan, but Africa.
One of them, Bisher al-Rawi, was the victim of an astonishing betrayal: He was rounded up on a business trip to Gambia at the UK agencies’ behest – despite the fact, he told me after regaining his freedom five years later, that he had helped MI5 locate the extremist preacher Abu Qatada when he was on the run.
This complicity is why the British Government has already paid some £20 million in damages to former detainees – and will have to pay more to Aamer.
Yet still the lies continued. It took a year-long court case to force the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband to divulge the documents that proved that the appalling story revealed by Guantanamo returnee Binyam Mohamed to this newspaper was true: That before being rendered to Guantanamo, he had spent 18 months being tortured in ‘medieval’ ways at a secret CIA prison in Morocco. Another bittersweet moment: This final disclosure followed years of official denial.
Now the lies are being lined up for Shaker. Over the past three years, this newspaper has published lengthy accounts of his treatment conveyed out of Guantanamo by Stafford Smith, together with excerpts from the 24,000-word statement he gave to Scotland Yard detectives in 2013.
This is the story that matters now Shaker is back: The appalling degree to which Tony Blair’s Government and the services supposed to keep us safe went over to what the former US Vice President Dick Cheney called ‘the dark side’ of the war on terror.
That journey has cost us dear: As a very senior Pentagon official admitted to me in 2004, it is hard to imagine a more potent recruiting sergeant for terrorists than Guantanamo.
It is no coincidence that in its snuff porn-style execution videos, IS dresses its captives in Guantanamo-style orange when beheading them.
Instead, however, old untruths are being dredged up – from longdiscredited bogus ‘confessions’ of other prisoners who were themselves being tortured.
Hence some reports yesterday, suggesting maybe Aamer does pose a security risk, and needs constant surveillance; after all, there is a US document dating from 2007 suggesting he knew Osama bin Laden. In mid-September, just a week before America announced Aamer was about to be released, an individual claiming to have worked for MI5 approached this newspaper with another set of allegations. Half a day’s work conclusively showed that not only were they false, but preposterous.
Given the timing, it is difficult not to believe that someone, somewhere, was trying to ‘neutralise’ the newspaper which, more than any other, has campaigned against Guantanamo for so many years, and for Aamer’s release.
There is only one remedy. In 2010, David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in the ‘dark side’, but in 2013, having produced only a thin, interim report, it was cancelled. The time has come to restore it, with public hearings, and powers to order documents and the attendance of witnesses.
Aamer may be home, but like the rest of the Guantanamo returnees, he deserves the exposure of the truth.
‘A world of violence, beatings and abuse’