Archive for December, 2011

In Truthout today, four British MPs — Jeremy Corbyn, John Leech, Caroline Lucas and Michael Meacher — wrote an open letter to Congress seeking the return to the UK of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. Mr. Aamer’s story is familiar to those of us who have long campaigned for the closure of Guantánamo, and I have been covering his story since I began writing articles about Guantánamo on a regular basis in 2007.

His story features prominently in the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” that I co-directed with Polly Nash. In August, I publicised a report that he was on a hunger strike, and just last week I cross-posted, with my own commentary, an article by his lawyer, Ciive Stafford Smith, who had just paid his first visit to Guantánamo for a number of years, and a letter Stafford Smith had written to the British foreign secretary William Hague, revealing how ill Shaker Aamer is after ten years in US custody.

In their open letter, the MPs eloquently called for the return of Shaker Aamer to his wife and children in the UK, and mentioned, for the first time ever in public, that he was “cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo” as a result of the review of all the remaining prisoners’ cases that was conducted throughout 2009 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama when he came into office. The document that contained that information also informed him, “The US government intends to transfer you as soon as possible.” Read the rest of this entry »