US Feature: Why is British Resident Shaker Aamer in Guantanamo Bay After 11 Years?

Mark Townsend writes for The Guardian:

Shaker Aamer remembers the frantic knocking on the door, the voices screaming for him to get out. Outside, in the dark streets of Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, the soldiers stripped him of his belongings at gunpoint and marched away their latest prisoner.

It was November 2001 and Afghanistan was the focus of the furious US response to 9/11. The country that Aamer and his family had arrived in from London five months earlier had descended into chaos. The first US bombing waves had flattened the Kabul school where Aamer had taught English to the children of Arabic-speaking expatriates. Terrified, the Aamers fled east towards Pakistan.

Aamer had more reason than many to escape. Even when he was travelling with his pregnant wife and three children, Afghan rebels belonging to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, suspicious of all Arabs in the country, were likely to consider him a natural enemy.

He recounts how, after he had finally been caught and his family were allowed to go, he was driven into the countryside at night, expecting to be executed. Instead, he recalls the throb of a helicopter and friendly accents. He remembers exhaling with relief. "Americans!" he thought. "I am saved!"

More than 11 years later, Shaker Aamer has yet to meet his youngest son, Faris, who was born three months after his capture. On the day Faris was born, 14 February 2002, Aamer was airlifted to Guantánamo Bay, the soon to be notorious US detention camp. The subsequent years have been spent inside what has been condemned as the "gulag of our times". They have included more than 1,000 nights in a windowless isolation cell.

His daughter, Johina, 15, who lives in Battersea, south London, told the Observer: "Try imagining being treated like a circus animal in a cage and being taken away from your home and everything you love. It's painful, isn't it? Well, my dad is going through this."

The US forces who picked Johina's father up in Afghanistan appear to have had no intention of allowing him to go free, transferring him to the notorious Bagram jail at the end of December 2001. There, Aamer says, he was starved, kept awake for nine days straight and chained in positions that made the slightest movement unbearable. He became emaciated. Delirious and desperate to cease his torture, Aamer says he confessed to whatever the Americans wanted.

Those confessions form part of leaked detainee assessment briefs compiled by the joint task force that runs Guantánamo Bay. Marked secret, the documents claim that while in London Aamer had been "assessed to be a key member of the UK-based al-Qaida network with multiple associations to senior al-Qaida members". These allegedly include Osama bin Laden himself, whom Aamer is alleged to have met within the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora. It is also alleged that his family in London received a "monthly stipend" from al-Qaida. For good measure, Aamer is described as having admitted frequenting the once notorious Finsbury Park mosque and the Four Feathers mosque, described as "the home of radical imam Abu Qatada".

These allegations, which Aamer vehemently denies and which no one has ever been able to prove, help to explain why Aamer has spent thousands of days in detention, a stretch of incarceration that has led him, in despair, to embark on a life-threatening hunger strike. So far detainee US9SA-000239DP has endured 68 days without food, far beyond what is accepted as safe. Clive Stafford Smith, his British lawyer, concedes that for the first time Aamer, widely regarded as a robust and resourceful character, has started to raise the possibility that he might die inside Guantánamo Bay. He recently told Stafford Smith, who is director of the legal charity Reprieve, to brief his wife that he might not make it out alive after all.

Shaker Aamer was born on 12 December 1966 in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina. His parents divorced when he was a child, and Aamer never got on with his stepmother. Aged 17, he headed to America to live with family friends. The next few years were spent travelling throughout Europe, the Middle East and finally London. There he met and fell in love with Londoner Zin Siddique, whom he married in 1997. Also that year, their first child Johina was born, followed by Michael in 1999 and Saif the following year. Family photographs from this period show a proud father framed by smiling children. Zin recalls them being very happy, describing their time together as a "dream". Aamer is described as a hands-on father, helping out with domestic chores and changing nappies.

It is the child who has never met his father who is understood to have struggled most. Faris, 11, is reported to play obsessively with the presents bought years ago by his father in the search for a connection. "He loves playing with the toys that Shaker bought for my other children. They are very special for him," said Zin, who returned to Battersea after her husband was taken.

In London, Aamer had forged a career as an Arabic translator for new arrivals. His work with refugees would, in June 2001, prompt Aamer's ill-fated decision to take his family to Afghanistan to do voluntary work for an Islamic charity. "Shaker was there to help the poor in Afghanistan, but himself became the victim of injustice," said Zin.

Aamer's continuing incarceration is all the more mysterious, given that the Americans ruled almost six years ago that he could be freed from Guantánamo. In June 2007, he was officially cleared for release. A security assessment by the US government acknowledged it had no concrete evidence against him. Two years later, the Obama administration reiterated the lack of a case against him, underlining the fact that he could be released.

So why is Aamer the only one among the 16 detainees who possessed British citizenship and residency who is still being held in Guantánamo?

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