BETRAYAL OF PRISONER 239
THE curtains are almost permanently drawn now, so her nights and days seem to merge. She sleeps fitfully and at odd hours, then wakes to pace the gloomy little council flat, her thoughts racing. Outside, on the f ashionable restaurant terraces of Battersea, in South London, carefree young people are enjoying the late spring sunshine and life rolls relentlessly on.
Yet for 40-year- old Zin Aamer the clocks all stopped in December 2001, when her husband was seized by Afghan bounty-hunters and sold to U. S. troops, who deemed him a dangerous terrorist and sent him to languish indefinitely in the purgatorial cell blocks of Guantanamo Bay.
For her, as for Shaker Aamer, locked in a dank cell permanently lit by halogen lights, 7,000 miles away in Cuba, time has become meaningless. Everything revolves around the latest news bulletin and lawyer’s phone call. Flashes of hope punctuate hours of despondency. This is what it’s like when you have spent every waking moment for more than 13 years waiting, waiting, for someone to come home.
According to her father, Saeed Siddique, who described her mood to me this week, this has been a particularly cruel month for Zin and her four children, now aged between 14 and 18, who are suffering their own private trials.
Heartened by the encouraging signals from Washington and London that f ollowed David Cameron’s personal plea to Barack Obama in January, the family had dared to dream that, with the General Election over, this month might bring the answer to their prayers.
Meanwhile, having been warned to expect a rare Skype call sometime this month from Detainee 239, as his U.S. guards refer to Shaker, they have sat expectantly beside the phone, their pulses racing whenever it rings.
By last night, however, there had still been no word from the International Red Cross, which liaises with the U.S. authorities to arrange these calls and supply the specially approved computer via which they are transmitted. And with June just 48 hours away, it seems this has been yet another false dawn.
‘Sometimes it seems they (the Americans) are just playing games with us,’ Mr Siddique, a respected local religious leader, told me wearily. ‘We can only imagine the effects on Shaker, but I can see the effects on my daughter.
‘She has been suffering depression since his arrest. Her condition goes up and down but it is very bad now. The children try to raise her spirits, but they are doing their exams and have enough to cope with.’
When Shaker was last permitted to speak to them, several weeks ago, the skeletal, white- bearded face that appeared on the screen was unrecognisable as the beaming, moon-faced character that the world has come to know from his l ast Guantanamo mugshot.
Nor was he wearing his regulation orange jumpsuit, for, having abandoned his hunger strike for tactical reasons and toned down his belligerence towards the guards, he has been reclassified as a ‘compliant’ prisoner, which gives him the ‘privilege’ of dressing in brown overalls.
As always, the Skype call lasted precisely an hour and was agonisingly stilted. For what can a man say to his family when censors are monitoring his every word? What can he say when they have been living in parallel universes for so long?
‘Shaker will ask about our health and the children’s education, and tell us we must keep optimistic and cheerful,’ Mr Siddique says. ‘And he always says he is doing fine and asks us not to worry about him.
‘But in our language, Urdu, there i s an old saying: “Only the dead really know what it’s like to lie in the grave. ” And only Shaker knows what it is like to be kept in Guantanamo Bay.’
A chilling analogy. Of course, as the Mail has repeated time and again during our campaign for Shaker Aamer’s release, he might well be the seriously bad man that the Americans say he is.
He might, as they suspect, have travelled from London to Afghanistan to fight with Al- Qaeda, as opposed to moving there to start a blameless new life with his family, as he maintains.
But that is irrelevant now. This is purely a matter of one fundamental principle which underpins every decent, civilised society.
It is known as habeas corpus and holds that someone must not be held in prison without having his guilt or innocence tested in a court of law. And, for reasons best known to the American authorities, Shaker is clearly never going to be put on trial.
So, behind the façade of optimism he presents to his family, how is he really bearing up in Guantanamo Bay, a place so nightmarishly surreal and forbidding that my own memories of what I witnessed on my two visits there still haunt me?
A truer picture comes from the letters he sent recently to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights group Reprieve. They certainly don’t depict a man who, if freed, might be a threat to the West. He sounds utterly spent and clinging to hope by his fingertips.
A few years ago, at Reprieve’s insistence, Shaker was examined by an independent psychiatrist. She produced a devastating assessment of his physical and mental deterioration, listing numerous serious ailments requiring medical treatment.
Disturbingly, however, he claims in the letters that he is no longer receiving any medication because of a petty bureaucratic wrangle over whether it is administered by the guards or the camp doctor.
Though he is now supposed to have the right to receive basic items such as books and writing materials, Shaker says all the gifts Mr Stafford Smith brought on his most recent visit have been inexplicably withheld. They included a present from Martin Amis, a signed copy of The Second Plane, the author’s collection of essays and short stories about 9/11 and its aftermath.
‘Why anyone would want to stop him reading that book is beyond me,’ the lawyer told me this week. ‘But then, these are the same people who allowed Shaker to read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four before they banned them as subversive.’
One book he has been permitted to keep i s Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, the story of a misfit Californian boy who becomes an ace wartime pilot before being captured by the Japanese and sent to a brutal work camp.
Tellingly, Shaker says he identifies strongly with the protagonist, who is eventually released to build a happy family life and returns to Japan to forgive his captors.
‘When I read the book, it is so much like what happened to us but worse in so many ways,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘The feeling, the emotions; the way she described the (Japanese) soldiers and how they deprived people of everything, how they enslaved them and beat the hell out of them.
‘I swear by Allah I felt I was the man from Torrance, California. He was picked out from the others and suffered more than everyone else, yet he kept fighting and carrying
‘It seems the U.S.
likes to play games with us’ ‘We’re America’s oldest ally and this is an insult’