My poignant visit to jail to tell him: You are free

IT WAS not my first time walking up the dusty path to the gate of Camp Echo at Guantanamo. Over the past decade, in nearly 40 trips to the prison, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked that way, heading to or from meetings with shackled clients.

But this was no ordinary meeting. I had come to inform my client Shaker Aamer that, after 14 years in captivity without charge, trial, or fair process, he was about to be set free and returned to his wife and their four children in Britain.

News had broken that morning of the American government’s intent to transfer Shaker to Britain. Under American law, that notification begins a 30-day countdown. At the end of that period, around October 24, the path will be clear to Shaker’s release. His return home could take place any time on or after that date.

Still, the routine remained all too familiar. The soldiers rifled through my legal papers then ‘wanded’ me for metal contraband before escorting me through another set of clanking iron gates to one of the plywood shacks where attorney-client meetings take place.

Shaker was sitting, shackled by one ankle to a steel loop jutting out of the shack’s flooring. He wore jumpsuit pants in signature Guantanamo orange. He had taken off the top because of the tropical heat, and was in a sleeveless white undershirt. His beard thick and dark, his long hair braided neatly and resting over his right shoulder, Shaker also sported a knitted white Muslim prayer cap, off to the side. This was exactly how he wore his cap when we first met in that shack, almost four years earlier. Shaker stood up to shake my hand and we exchanged customary greetings as it was Eid, the most important holiday in the Muslim Calendar. I sat down, inhaled deeply, paused, and said, in Arabic: ‘Shaker, finally, the end of your ordeal seems near.’ I then explained that morning’s news and its implications as clearly as I could.

Shaker sat silently with a blank stare on his face. After a few, long seconds, he began to tell me about his prison-issue shoes, how they were falling apart and held together only by duct tape. He took off and held up the black sneakers, unraveling the tape. They were tattered and dismembered as a beggar’s. The prison administration had not replaced them since 2010.

At first my news of his impending release didn’t register. After I repeated everything, Shaker looked at me, his eyes wide, and asked: ‘Are you being serious right now?’ Then an impossibly large smile lit up his face and his gaze suddenly grew distant. A door had finally swung open, and he was looking ahead at everything that lay beyond.

Laughing at his own earlier digression, Shaker quipped that the prison administration now had no choice but to issue him new shoes – they couldn’t possibly risk embarrassment by letting him return to the UK with these things on his feet!

He also expressed the hope that it would be a British plane – not an American military one – that would take him home. The last thing Shaker wants is to relive his terrifying flight to Cuba over a decade ago, where he was chained in a painful position, blindfolded, ear-muffed, and cold.

Shaker shared with me that he hadn’t slept properly in almost an entire month, the uncertainty of his situation gnawing away at his rest. The night before our morning meeting, he had barely slept two hours. In the morning, soldiers insisted on conducting a groin search, for the first time in weeks. He was asked if he wanted to ‘refuse’ his legal meeting to avoid the humiliating search. Did the administration want to keep the news from him by preventing our meeting?

We spent the remainder of our meeting contemplating Shaker’s return home. Overjoyed though he felt, Shaker was discovering that the prospect of life after Guantanamo is not free of worry.

Shaker is anxious. He knows that his reintegration into his family’s life and into society at large will be challenging at times. Shaker and his family will need time and privacy.

As I looked at him and thought of all the years he had spent in captivity, all he had lost, the horrendous abuse he had survived, how mightily he had struggled to preserve his dignity, one thing became obvious. Shaker Aamer should get to leave Guantanamo on his own terms. It’s the least we can do for him.

Ramzi Kassem is a professor at the City University of New York school of law.