Robin Simcox on British Guantanamo Bay Detainee Shaker Aamer

The latest to join this strike is Harry Ferguson, apparently a former MI6 agent. Actress Julie Christie, comedian Frankie Boyle and Clive Stafford-Smith, Aamer’s lawyer, are among the others that have also done so. In a further show of solidarity, PJ Harvey has written a song for Aamer (listen, if you can, here). This hunger strike has been complimented by a variety of media articles – both in the U.S. and the U.K. – championing Aamer’s cause. Aamer’s defenders highlight how he went to Afghanistan to work for an Islamic charity and not fight jihad; how he has not been charged; that he has been cleared for release by the U.S. government and yet, because of his apparent ability to expose state complicity in torture, he will not be released. However, this is a depiction of reality that needs challenging because there is a whole other side to Aamer’s story. According to U.S. Department of Defense documentation, the facts of Aamer’s case are actually quite simple, even though they are rarely aired. As Aamer's Detainee Risk Assessment describes, he was fighting alongside al-Qaeda and its associated forces at the end of 2001, an entity the US is at war with. Under the rules of war, enemy belligerents can be removed from the battlefield until hostilities cease; thus, Aamer was lawfully detained at Guantanamo Bay. There is no obvious reason to charge him, and no obvious piece of legislation to charge him with. Aamer was born in Saudi Arabia, but is a British resident. In summer 1998, he visited Moazzam Begg (a British former Guantanamo detainee) in Afghanistan. He returned a year later and again in 2000, this time specifically to fight with the mujahideen (although he claims not to have fired a weapon). By August 2001, Aamer was back in Afghanistan. Upon arrival in Kandahar, he met a member of al-Qaeda’s shura council, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. He was captured by Afghan forces in Tora Bora in December 2001, shortly after the U.S. and its allies attacked al-Qaeda and Taliban positions in the cave complex there. Aamer had acquired an AK-47, and had a fake passport with him upon capture. The U.S. believes Aamer served as a sub-commander at Tora Bora under the command of Ibn al Shaykh al-Libi. Aamer knew al-Libi from one of his trips to Afghanistan, as he attended training at Khalden, the camp where al-Libi was emir. The two had breakfast together during Aamer’s time there. Aamer’s defenders argue he was in Afghanistan for benign, charitable reasons. Yet seven separate sources at Guantanamo have outlined Aamer’s closeness to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda: Abu Zubaydah, Abdul Bukhary, Muhammad Basardah, Moazzam Begg, Tariq Mahmud Ahmad al-Sawah, Abdallah Yahya Yusif al-Shibli and Humud Dakhil Humud Said al-Jadani. That Begg briefed against Aamer – describing him as an al-Qaeda ‘recruiter’ who had received weapons training – is particularly ironic, as he now spends his time in the U.K. lobbying for his return. Aamer’s time in the U.K. is instructive. He was associated with Abu Qatada al-Filistini, the jihadist ideologue who the U.K. recently deported to Jordan after a decade-long legal battle. Aamer attended Abu Qatada’s lectures and sold items at a mosque he regularly spoke at. Aamer also admits to regularly attending Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, which served as a terrorism recruitment and planning centre in the 1990s. A known associate of Aamer’s, shoe bomber Richard Reid, also attended this mosque (Aamer and Reid would eventually be seen together in Reid’s Kabul apartment). Another attendee was Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be convicted of involvement in 9/11. Aamer and Moussaoui lived together for a time in London. Furthermore, Abu Hamza al-Masri, the mosque’s hook-handed emir and an associate of Aamer’s, has recently been extradited to the U.S. to face terror charges. Aamer was also good friends in London with Babar Ahmed, another Brit recently extradited to the U.S. on terrorism charges. Aamer credits Ahmed, who he met for the first time in Bosnia in 1994, with convincing him to practice Islam more actively (Saajid Badat, an accomplice of Reid’s in the shoe bomb plot, also recently admitted to being radicalised by Ahmed). Back in the present, Aamer remains an influential figure at Guantanamo Bay. One detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, claims Aamer ‘constantly’ attempts to make other detainees swear loyalty to him as the emir of the camp. Former detainee Muhammad Hamid Al Qarani has stated that Aamer’s influence is such that he can issue orders for other detainees to try and commit suicide. Abd al-Majid Muhammad claims Aamer ‘runs all the other detainees’ there; while Humud Dakhil Humud Sa'id Al-jad'an said that a previous hunger strike at Guantanamo had begun after Aamer’s lawyer ‘told them exactly what they needed to do’. Aamer’s defenders will argue that since this information comes from the U.S. government, it must be biased. However, it is worth considering just how many people would have had to fabricate stories for Aamer to be as harmless a figure as they claim. Regardless, this case shows no sign of being resolved. Aamer has been cleared for release to Saudi Arabia, but he refuses to return. The British Foreign & Commonwealth Office has requested his return to the U.K., and presumably he will eventually end up back in London. The other British residents and citizens formerly detained at Guantanamo Bay did not face many difficult questions when they returned to the U.K. Their explanations for being in the middle of an Afghan war zone---such as setting up girls’ schools or sightseeing---were taken at face value by the media. This cycle looks to be repeating with Aamer even prior to his return, and Guantanamo’s bad reputation means neither the government nor the media steps in to question whether there may be more to his case than his defenders are letting on. The argument about Aamer’s conduct is not being lost because the facts support his side of the story. It is being lost because those in authority no longer have the will to make it.