Responses to Shaker Aamer’s Release from Guantánamo – from MPs, and a Poignant and Powerful Article by Cori Crider of Reprieve

Since Shaker Aamer returned to the UK from Guantánamo last Friday, much has been written — most of it, I’m glad to say, positive about a man so evidently wronged; held for nearly 14 years without charge or trial, and approved for release twice, under George W. Bush in 2007, and Barack Obama in 2009.

When Shaker returned — in part, I’m prepared to accept, because of the We Stand With Shaker campaign I conceived and ran with Joanne MacInnes — I wrote an article that was widely liked and shared and commented on, publicized the gracious comment Shaker made on his return, posted a photo of myself holding a “Welcome Home Shaker” card that reached over 20,000 people, and made a number of TV and radio appearances during a brief media frenzy that coincided with the long-overdue news of Shaker’s release.

It was so busy that I haven’t had time to thank the supporters who made such a big difference — John McDonnell MP, the Shadow Chancellor, who set up the All-Party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group and was its co-chair, the Conservative MP David Davis, the other co-chair, and his colleague Andrew Mitchell, Jeremy Corbyn (now the Leader of the Labour Party), and Andy Slaughter (the Labour MP for Hammersmith), who, with David Davis, visited Washington D.C. in May to call for Shaker’s release. Also noteworthy for her contribution over many years is Caroline Lucas, our sole Green MP.

John McDonnell wrote:

Shaker Aamer’s return to British soil from Guantánamo this morning is a momentous occasion and a tribute to the tireless work of the dedicated campaigners that have fought so resolutely for him to be freed. [His] 14 years of incarceration in Guantánamo Bay, despite never having stood trial, never having been convicted, and cleared for release by successive US administrations is a dark chapter in the history rights abuses.

As chair of the Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, I am proud to have contributed to securing his release. We will now do all we can now to provide Shaker and his family with the support they need to reintegrate back into our society and lead a normal life. In the fullness of time we expect now to be given answers to what happened to him, why this gross miscarriage of justice was allowed to occur and the extent of British involvement in his plight.

Jeremy Corbyn wrote:

I attended an all-party delegation to Washington, in May of this year, which demanded his release. The pressure mounted by the British Parliament contributed to Shaker’s freedom. But we must recognise the crucial role played by the steadfastness of his family and the commitment of all those who campaigned for his release, whether they lobbied their MPs or demonstrated on the streets against this huge injustice.

Now that Shaker has been released, the scandal of the Guantánamo detention camp itself must be brought to an end. I hope that Shaker and his family will now be given the time and space to rebuild their lives.

Caroline Lucas wrote (also including a photo of me, which was a pleasant surprise!):

Shaker’s prolonged detention was entirely unjustifiable. The Government and security services must now guarantee the safety of Shaker and his family upon his arrival home. His lawyers must be also allowed to implement a care programme for him without any interference.

Shaker’s case reinforces the urgent need for the judge-led enquiry into UK complicity in torture that the Prime Minister promised in 2010 but then backtracked on.

Huge thanks must also go to Shaker’s indefatigable lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, who has, of course, spoken extensively about him over the years — and was on the Victoria Derbyshire Show on BBC2 on November 2, at the end of an eight-minute section that began with Dr. David Nicholl, neurologist and human rights campaigner, discussing Shaker’s return as the head of his post-release medical team.

However, the most poignant words I’ve read about Shaker since his return were written by another of his lawyers, Cori Crider, the Strategic Director of Reprieve, in an article for Newsweek that was published on the day of Shaker’s release.

In it, Cori recalled meeting Shaker for the very first time, and explained how and why he stood up to the authorities so persistently. In just a few paragraphs, she captured perfectly the man who has been informing so many of us of the crimes committed at Guantánamo by the US government in his messages from the prison over the years.

And Cori concluded her article by thinking of others, as Shaker had, and as I’m sure he is now — those left behind in Guantánamo, and those, like her client Younous Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), the Moroccan repatriated six weeks before Shaker, who has been unjustly imprisoned by the Moroccan authorities, as I explained in an article yesterday.

Shaker Aamer’s Lawyer: Obama Must Now Free the Remaining Guantanamo Inmates
By Cori Crider, Newsweek, October 30, 2015

The first contact between a Guantánamo prisoner and a lawyer is often dramatic. You have had plenty of time to worry about how your new client is, and you will have wondered whether he will accept you. Will a man imprisoned without charge or trial and tortured by the U.S. government trust me, a lawyer from rural Texas?

Years ago, I sat in the brutal Cuban sun and imagined what Shaker Aamer would be like. It is hard to believe that today — over a decade on — Aamer has finally been sent home to London, to his British wife and children.

The minders at Camp Echo are bored young military police. Many regard the “detainee lawyer” as a curious species. They have been told the lie that all detainees are somehow connected to 9/11, so any American who has chosen to help them is one step from Osama bin Laden. If anyone has told them the truth — that the majority of Gitmo prisoners, like Shaker, should never have been sent there and pose no threat — they give no sign of it.

“You here for 239?” the sergeant of guard drawled. This was Shaker’s prison number. Throughout his time in Gitmo, he had no name.

A guard escorted me through a warren of chain-link fences and gestured toward a shack. He unbolted and pulled open the cell door. I peered inside, but the contrast between the sun where I stood and the shade of the meeting room was such that I could not make Shaker out at first: He was a shadow at the back of the room.

You can tell a lot about a client from the first moment you look at each other. Some men are withdrawn, depressed. Some look away. Some don’t even lift their heads, they are so tired and sad.

Not Shaker. After the famous photo of him, rotund and serious, the last thing I expected was a massive expanse of grinning teeth. Hard years and intermittent hunger-striking had shrunk him to nothing. I saw a thin, aging man — but my very first memory of Shaker is his smile.

We got to know each other — though the meeting belonged to Shaker, and he had a lot he wanted to say to me. He was warm, engaging, but also defiant, and over our years together, I came to realize the reason Shaker Aamer so irritated the authorities at Gitmo. He stood up to them, in their own language — and he has a quintessentially British sense of fair play.

Shaker also has a Briton’s compassion for the underdog. If a prisoner was punished unfairly or abused, Shaker was the first to object. This got him into trouble — he was one of the first and few to protest in English, and he paid for it dearly, with 14 years of abuse.

While Shaker is, thankfully, set to settle back in London with his family and begin the long journey of recovery and recuperation, we at Reprieve, where we represent prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay and provide legal assistance to many more, have serious work to do to help other men who’ve faced the same ordeal — both those still stuck in Guantánamo and others who’ve had the misfortune to be released only to be detained on arrival.

Among these is my client Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan man who was just transferred back to his home country after some 14 years of detention at Guantánamo. Since his release [seven] weeks ago, the Moroccan authorities have detained him — violating their assurances to the U.S. that he would not be detained more than 72 hours. Now it appears the Moroccan authorities may even charge this innocent, traumatized man on the basis of evidence so faulty that even the U.S. could never build a case. The Moroccan authorities have steadfastly refused to let me see him, even though I am his lawyer.

In 14 years of imprisonment, Younous was never charged with a crime by the U.S. — like all the men at Gitmo, he was taken there on the basis of a tissue of lies and distortions fed to the U.S. by tortured and coerced prisoners at notorious black sites like Bagram and Kandahar. Last week, the U.S. State Department finally admitted, in an unclassified letter to Reprieve, what we knew all along — that years ago it “withdrew all reliance” on its own faulty “evidence” during secretive U.S. court proceedings, ultimately accepting that Younous should be released.

If Morocco — a close ally — charges Younous on the selfsame charges, it will be to the eternal shame of the U.S. government.

Shaker paid the bitterest price for insisting on the rights enshrined in Britain’s Magna Carta. The Obama administration has finally freed him to his home country, but Guantánamo remains open — and Younous catastrophically imprisoned based on the mistake of the U.S. Now that Shaker is home, the U.S. must urgently turn to the many others whose rights it has trampled on for 14 years.

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, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), 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).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.