Torture and the man who could expose Britain’s dirtiest secrets

LAST FRIDAY, the Daily Mail campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident in Guantanamo Bay, finally bore fruit. For Mr Aamer’s wife Zin Siddique and their four children, the news can only bring indescribable joy. It is thought he will be released in the next month.

They have not seen him for 14 years, ever since he was handed over by bounty hunters for an estimated $5,000 into the hands of American forces shortly after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

During that time he has almost certainly been tortured and beaten, and undoubtedly been held in solitary confinement for years.

He has been the subject of countless humiliations. Yet he has never been charged with a crime.

By any standards he is the victim of a grotesque perversion of justice at the hands of America, with the shameful complicity of British intelligence agencies and politicians.

Terrified

His youngest son, Faris, who is 13 years old and lives with his mother and three siblings in South London, has grown up without ever meeting his father.

So it would be more than understandable if Mr Aamer retreats for good into the bosom of his family on his return to Britain. He has endured, in all truth, more than any human being should be asked to endure.

It seems fairly certain that he will be offered a huge sum of money by the British State in compensation for the wretched injustice he has suffered.

In return for the money he may well be required — like many other ‘terror suspects’ who have suffered comparable torture and degradation — to keep his mouth shut.

Nobody would blame him for taking the cash. For the rest of us, however, the Shaker Aamer scandal is not quite as simple as that.

His impending return to Britain raises profound questions about the conduct of British intelligence agencies in the aftermath of 9/11.

The questions do not stop with MI5 and MI6. Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, and ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair must be held to account for their wider role in the Shaker Aamer affair.

Bear in mind this utterly scandalous fact: Shaker Aamer was reportedly first cleared for release as long ago as 2007, then again formally in 2010.

So, if the reports were true, he was forced to endure eight unnecessary years in the living hell of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Why? There were no security reasons for keeping him in jail, and certainly not the slightest legal justification, because Shaker Aamer has never been charged with any crime.

As this paper has said many times, we may never know for certain whether he is entirely innocent of consorting with Al Qaeda terrorists. Indeed, he may be guilty of bad things. But there is no doubt that keeping a man locked up for so long without a fair trial is an appalling abuse of justice.

My view is that Mr Aamer may have paid the price for knowing too much. The CIA had very good reason to be terrified of what he might reveal when he emerged from jail.

Shaker Aamer may well be one of the very few people capable of shedding light on the darkest and most cynical of all the lies used to justify the Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq.

I am talking about the completely false claim, repeatedly made by the United States in order to justify the planned invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein provided Al Qaeda with training in chemical and biological weapons.

This fabricated, completely implausible assertion was based on information seemingly extracted under torture from a Libyan citizen called Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who, like Aamer, was captured in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

Very conveniently for all concerned, al- Libi is dead, having been secretly flown by the U.S. to Egypt and then Libya, where the Gaddafi government later reported that he committed suicide.

Unluckily for him, Shaker Aamer was a witness to al-Libi’s treatment at the hands of the Americans.

Like Mr Aamer, al-Libi was held at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. According to the respected lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who has frequently visited Mr Aamer in Guantanamo Bay: ‘Shaker was prisoner 005 in Bagram, and he witnessed Ibn al- Sheikh al-Libi being taken out [of the prison, alive] in a coffin.’

Stafford Smith says the CIA then ‘ flew al- Libi to Egypt, where he was subjected to torture by electric cattle prod. Once there he “confessed” that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league’. This turned out to be a palpable falsehood.

We now come to the second reason why the authorities may have been only too happy to let Mr Aamer rot in Guantanamo. This concerns British Intelligence rather than the CIA.

Beaten

According to his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, Mr Aamer ‘described a UK intelligence agent being present while he [Aamer] was being beaten’.

This claim from Gareth Peirce is of huge importance.

While there is overwhelming evidence of British complicity in torture, the case of Shaker Aamer is the only one where there is a suggestion that a British intelligence officer was present in the room while it was going on.

The third reason why Mr Aamer may have been kept in Guantanamo for so long concerns a tragic episode at the jail in 2006. On June 9 of that year, three detainees apparently committed suicide.

But confusion surrounds these deaths, and Mr Aamer is on record as stating that he was very badly beaten up on that day. Was there a connection between his beating and the deaths of the others?

It is important to be fair to the U. S. authorities. In the wake of 9/11 they had a very serious job making certain that such an atrocity was not repeated, and that the guilty were brought to justice.

There were, furthermore, entirely legitimate questions to be asked about what exactly Shaker Aamer was doing in Afghanistan shortly before the attack on the Twin Towers. He says he had journeyed from Britain to work there for a charity. But questions abound.

However, it is a vital principle of British justice that everyone, even those suspected of the most terrible depravity, should face trial.

Shaker Aamer has never been charged with anything, while apparently suffering dreadful abuse and torture. This is why it is essential that we learn the full truth about his story.

Betrayed

Right from the start there was a horrible paradox about the way that George W. Bush and Tony Blair fought their so-called ‘war on terror’.

Both leaders said they were fighting for Western values of decency, tolerance and the rule of law.

Yet Britain and America repeatedly betrayed those values by employing detention without trial, extra- judicial killing and torture.

To its everlasting credit, the U.S. last year came to terms with its grotesque conduct when California senator Dianne Feinstein produced a no-holdsbarred report into the horrifying conduct of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In Britain we have had no such investigation into the role played by our own intelligence agencies — even though David Cameron promised such an investigation in the run-up to the 2010 General Election.

With the belated return of Shaker Aamer to his family in London now a matter of weeks away, there can surely be no excuse for waiting any longer.

We owe him a full investigation into his terrible claims. More important still, we owe it to ourselves. Otherwise, Britain will no longer be able to regard herself as a lawabiding country with values that shine like a beacon of decency around the globe.