TORTURE BRIT: MY 14 YEARS OF AGONY
6-PAGE SPECIAL REPORT
LAST Thursday evening, just over a week after the announcement that he was to be released from Guantanamo Bay, Briton Shaker Aamer was able to talk on a telephone from the prison to the head of his legal team, Clive Stafford Smith of the British human rights charity Reprieve. Raw, emotional, despairing and optimistic, this is an edited transcript of his words. Given exclusively to this newspaper, it is his first response since his freedom was declared…
ISAW my kids in a dream three days ago. Not as they are today, but as they were when I last saw them, almost 14 years ago. The little children I knew and loved so much no longer exist: they have grown up. I have at least been able to see them: on a handful of rare occasions the Guantanamo authorities have let me talk to my family on a video call via Skype. But the images I have from those conversations are not what I saw in my dream.
The dream brought home to me the scale of the shock I’m about to face. Everything I once knew has changed, almost beyond recognition. The kids need to see me as a strong father, but that is just not going to happen from the first second I get back. I don’t know how long it is going to be before I can begin to deal with the world out there, beyond the walls of Guantanamo. It may be a day. It may be a week. It may be longer. I just don’t know, just as I don’t know the date of my release. This ordeal won’t be over until it’s over. I was first cleared for release eight years ago, yet here I still am. I still don’t believe that at last, I’m on my way home.
That’s why my message for my wife and kids is: stay strong. Regardless whether it is next month, next year, or even in heaven that I am finally released to be with you, stay strong, because you need to be strong, not because you hear some news that I may be coming home, that may not even be true.
In here, I am laughing, I am joking, but I am also screaming. The wound I carry lies deep inside, and I know this wound will start gushing as soon as I leave this place. Don’t be fooled by my exterior. The reality is that I am a very sensitive person. The moment I touch freedom, 239 [Shaker’s Guantanamo prison number] is going to come back with a lot of issues, and I will need to solve them one by one. To begin with, I need to re-acclimatise by spending time with my wife. I need to reclaim my personality: to put a name to my prison number.
I have so many people to thank for my freedom. First there are all the people who names begin with the letter J – which also stands for justice. So there is Johina, my beloved daughter. There is Joy Hurcombe, of the Save Shaker Campaign: for all these years she has stood up for me, and I am overwhelmed. There is Joanne MacInnes of We Stand with Shaker. And then there is Jane Ellison, my local MP. I know she is a Minister now, which means there are things she cannot do, but I know she has supported me all this time.
And there is also The Mail on Sunday, which has been campaigning for my release for years, and against the many injustices of Guantanamo since the month it first opened in January 2002. One of the first things I did when I was told I was coming home was to write an article for the paper to publish. I still hope it can be, but it has been held back by the military censor, and I don’t know if it will ever be cleared.
All these people need to be congratulated. The lawyers are doing a job that they swore to do. But these people who stood up for me all these years did not give up. I say to them you did not do that wastefully. Your fight was for an innocent person. You did a great thing. May God reward you as you deserve for what you did. Our Prophet told us that if you do not thank people, you do not thank God. Words will never be enough, no matter what I say.
But for now, I am still detainee 239, and as I have so many times before, I am enduring abusive treatment. In turn I am protesting in the only way I can – through hunger strike. I am not going to stop this, and by the time I get home my condition will truly have deteriorated.
It started on August 3, when they came to me saying they wanted to check for tuberculosis. They have checked me for this many times before: they know I do not have it, but they said they were doing it to everyone. I told them: ‘Do the skin test’. They said, ‘No, we want blood’. I said, ‘Do the X-ray test’. ‘They said: ‘No, we want blood.’ I refused. They demanded again. So finally they said they would bring the FCE [the Forcible Cell Extraction team, Guantanamo’s body-armoured specialist rapid reaction force, which has allegedly carried out hundreds of assaults on prisoners – Aamer included]. I said: ‘OK, bring the FCE’. They came with the FCE. They tied me so freaking tight on the board when they forced me down. I shouted the legal formula – ‘My name is Shaker, I am telling you exactly that I do not want the blood test, I have the right to refuse it. Do you agree you are doing it by force?’ The nurse agreed she was taking it involuntarily. She was an oriental woman. They dragged my arm to one side, stuck in the needle and took four vials of my blood. I said that was too much. They took the blood, and sent me back to my cell.
Over the next two days, I discovered that nobody had blood taken but me. So they lied about doing a TB test on everyone. And even if they were singling me out, this does not explain why they needed four vials. Why did they take so much blood from me? And the TB test? They refused to tell me the result.
I quit eating from then on in protest. I lost 15lb the first week. Straight away they put me on the scales, not once but twice a week. I demanded: ‘Is this an experiment that you are doing on me?’ Last Tuesday I was 182lb. This Tuesday I was 174. Now, on Thursday, I am around 170.
Of course, everyone knows I am leaving. But I am only going to take what sustenance I need to keep alive, minimally alive. I will be very sick when I come back home. If anything happens to me before I do, it will be the Americans who are responsible. I am not going to do anything to myself. I know there are people who, even now, are working hard to keep me here. I know there are people who do not want me ever to see the sun again. It means nothing that they have signed papers, as anything can happen before I get out. So if I die, it will be the full responsibility of the Americans.
The doctor came today [Thursday, October 1]. I told him: ‘Shame on you. If you have any shame you will never come by me.’ He brought a translator, a nurse, and an army paramedic to be witnesses, as he wanted to have witnesses that I was refusing whatever he came to say. I said: ‘You are the same doctor who was in Bagram, the same as in Kandahar and the same as every doctor in Guantanamo – I do not see the face, I see the uniform. You are a tool, you are not a true doctor. You want to write in your documents that you keep trying to help me but I refuse. If I die suddenly, you will say that I chose to die.’
Lately, I have become very interested in reading about Japanese war crimes in World War Two. The film Unbroken is about Louis Zamperini, an American captured by Japan. ‘They deprived us of our title to be prisoners of war so that they could do anything they wanted to us,’ he wrote then. ‘They enslaved us so that we were nothing.’
I could not believe this was 70 years ago. It was just the same as what the Americans have done to us – deprived us of the title of prisoners of war, and decided they can do
‘They stuck in the needle and took 4 vials of blood’ ‘If I die, the Americans will be responsible’
what they want with us. The Americans treated us as badly as the Japanese did the Americans.
A few years after the war ended, the Americans forgave everyone and set their own Japanese prisoners free. They decided to forget about that time, as they wanted to be friends with Japan. Yet here we are at Guantanamo, 14 years later, and nobody is putting an end to all this.
I do not want to be a hero. I am less than a lot of people who suffered in this place. But all this time I stood for certain principles: for human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. I cannot give up.
The irony is, I learnt to be this way from Americans. It was they who taught me to shout loudly if I want people to hear me. I went to America to learn this. When I was nine years old an American family from New York lived next to my house in Saudi Arabia. The father encouraged me to go to America to learn all those good things. My father said I should not go, so I said goodbye to him. He would not give me money to study. So I went to the US with $200 in my pocket. I worked hard. I had a bank account. I had a car. I did that by myself, inspired by the American way of life.
When I was kidnapped in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, I had a big smile on my face. The interrogator asked me why I was smiling. I told him, ‘Because you are Americans. You know I did nothing, so you’re going to send me home.’ How wrong I was. How much I have lost.
But though I can barely grasp it, it seems that the belief I had then is finally going to come true.