Video: We Stand With Shaker – Andy Worthington on RT, and the Islam Channel on the Human Rights Day Event with Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave

13.12.14

What a busy three weeks it has been — first with the launch of the We Stand With Shaker campaign outside Parliament on November 24, and then, this week, with the release of our short film for Shaker for Human Rights Day (featuring Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey) and, rather tending to overshadow everything else, the release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into CIA torture; in other words, the report examining — and condemning — the Bush administration’s torture program.

My first thoughts about that report are here, in an article for Al-Jazeera, entitled, “Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report,” which I’m glad to say has had over 6200 likes so far.

In addition, the We Stand With Shaker campaign continues to make waves. Just as revulsion at the torture inflicted in the “war on terror” seems to have become somewhat fashionable, so the unjust imprisonment of Shaker Aamer is awakening indignation within the British establishment. This week the Daily Mail got on board, calling for Shaker’s release from its front page!

Below I’m posting a short interview I did on RT, on the day of the launch, which was only made available a few days ago, but which, I believe, captures well Shaker’s plight and the unjustifiable nature of his ongoing imprisonment:

Also included here is Wednesday’s episode of “The Report” on the Islam Channel, a 25-minute programme that focused on Human Rights Day, when few other media outlets did, even though they were almost all covering the torture report. I’m glad to note that, as well as looking at Human Rights Day around the world, the Islam Channel also filmed our event outside Parliament, when Mark Rylance and Vanessa Redgrave read out passages from Shaker’s Declaration of Shaker’s Declaration of No Human Rights, written in Guantánamo in response to the US betrayal of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the UN 66 years previously, on December 10, 1948 (the same topic covered in our short film for Human Rights Day featuring Juliet Stevenson and David Morrissey.

The whole show is below, and the sections dealing with the event for Shaker run from 12:44 to 14:36 and right at the end of the show, from 24:20 to 25:24. In between, Shaykh Suliman Ghani, the imam of the Tooting Islamic Centre, which is attended by Shaker’s family, also shares his thoughts about Shaker’s case with presenter John Rees:

I hope you have time to watch these shows, and to share them if you find them useful. We were also featured on Al-Jazeera and on RT, but those news stories do not appear to be online, unfortunately.

Please also visit and like our Facebook page (now with 1500 likes), follow us on Twitter, watch the campaign video featuring Andy’s “Song for Shaker Aamer,” played by his band The Four Fathers (now with over 1000 views), and send in photos of yourself to our website, holding up a sign that reads, “I Stand With Shaker.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the director of “We Stand With Shaker,” calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).