MPs Visit US to Discuss the Release of Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo with John McCain and Dianne Feinstein

On Tuesday, in an open letter to President Obama and defense secretary Ashton Carter that I drafted, 13 rights groups, including Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, as well as Amnesty international USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and others, called for the release of 57 men from Guantánamo (out of the 122 men still in the prison), who are still held despite being approved for release, the majority for over five years.

One of the 57 is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and one of the reasons I initiated the letter was to coincide with a visit to Washington, D.C. by a delegation of British MPs, from the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, which was established last November, and, in March, secured the support of the government for the following motion — “That this House calls on the US Government to release Shaker Aamer from his imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay and to allow him to return to his family in the UK.”

The MPs who flew to the US for meetings to try to secure Shaker’s release are the Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn (a longtime colleague of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group’s chair, John McDonnell) and Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter, and the Conservative MPs David Davis (a former Shadow Home Secretary) and Andrew Mitchell (a former Chief Whip and former International Development Secretary).

On Tuesday the MPs met with three Senators — Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), who, with their colleague, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), recently wrote a letter to President Obama calling for the release of the 57 men approved for release, and Joe Manchin (D-WV). The MPs also met Paul Lewis, the Special Envoy for the closure of Guantánamo in the Pentagon, and Charles Trumbull, the Acting Special Envoy for the closure of Guantánamo in the State Department.

Yesterday the MPs had two more high-level meetings with Senators — with John McCain (R-AZ), the former Presidential candidate who is currently the chair of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who, as chair, oversaw the creation of the Committee’s report into the CIA’s torture program, whose executive summary was published in December.

As Reprieve explained in a press release yesterday, Shaker, who is now 48 years old, “has never been charged, never faced a trial and has been cleared for release under both the Bush and Obama administrations – a process requiring unanimous agreement by six US Federal agencies including the Departments of State and Defence and the FBI.”

Alka Pradhan, one of Shaker’s lawyers in the US, who accompanied the MPs in their Washington meetings, said, “It is enormously encouraging that the MPs are meeting with such high-level US congress people as Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein. Hopefully this will convey to those in the US the strength of British support for Shaker’s return home to London. For thirteen long years Shaker’s British wife and their four children have endured life without him, despite his having been cleared for release twice. US officials must give the MPs a clear timeline for Shaker’s return home.”

After the visit, Alka Pradhan told me that the MPs “presented a completely united front” and “did a truly spectacular job in speaking for Shaker, his family, and the UK.”

Prior to the MPs’ departure for the US, David Davis spoke to ITV News, and said, “Guantánamo itself is not a good symbol for the West. We are in a battle with Islamic extremists, but it’s a battle not just of bullets and bombs, it’s a battle of ideas, a battle of ideals. We’re the good guys in this argument. We’re the people who believe in democracy, believe in freedom, believe in liberty, believe in the rule of law. None of these are really advanced by the symbol of Guantanamo. And so we want it over, we want it behind us, really, and we share that view with a large number of American Senators and Congressmen.”

Andrew Mitchell also spoke to the Birmingham Mail before his departure, saying, “We are heading to Washington to seek to promote and extract the release of Shaker Aamer, who is held in Guantánamo. He’s not been charged with anything, he’s been cleared for release by all the top US agencies.”

Mitchell added, “The Americans have said there is no evidence available to try him. The reality is you’re innocent until proven guilty and it’s just wrong that he’s been treated in this way.”

In Washington, D.C., Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Mitchell spoke to RT. Jeremy Corbyn said, “He’s been twice cleared for release, by President Bush and later by President Obama, and this has still not happened.” He added, “We’re concerned for his future, we’re concerned for his health, and we’re concerned for justice, because there’s no charge against him, there’s no legal process against him. He is a man that should be freed.”

Corbyn added that “the reasons for Shaker’s long imprisonment are unclear,” as RT put it. “There’s much speculation,” he said. “Either he knows too much, or has seen too much, or Saudi Arabia has put pressure on. I have never been given a definitive reason as to why he’s not been released.”

Andrew Mitchell said, “We’ve come as a very broad representation from the British Parliament. From the left to the right, the four of us probably represent the widest spectrum of British political views. But on this issue the House of Commons in Britain is absolutely clear, that we unanimously want Shaker Aamer returned from Guantánamo.”

He also said that the delegation “met a great deal of sympathy” at meetings in the US capital.

Speaking to RT prior to his departure, Mitchell said that Shaker “needs to be brought back to his family in London not only because it is the right judicial decision in the interest of justice, but also because there are credible medical reports that he is not terribly well, and therefore in his family, with their support structure in London, he will be able to make the necessary recovery.”

See below for RT’s brief news feature on the MPs’ visit, which includes comments from Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Mitchell, as does the Sky News feature here.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers). He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, the co-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 the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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).

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