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Yesterday, I visited Shaker Aamer at his home in London, to record a short video message to President Obama, of Shaker urging the president to close the the US prison at Guantánamo Bay before he leaves office in January.
Shaker was the last British resident in Guantánamo until his release last October, and I, along with many others, worked hard to secure his release — via the We Stand With Shaker campaign, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign and the London Guantánamo Campaign, and through working with supportive MPs and the media.
The video I recorded yesterday was for the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up in January 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner, and, specifically, for the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative that I launched in January this year with music legend Roger Waters (ex-Pink Floyd).
For the Countdown, every 50 days those calling for the closure of Guantánamo send in photos of themselves holding posters reminding President Obama how many days he has left. The recording of the video yesterday coincided with 100 days remaining for President Obama to close the prison, and if you’d like to join us, please do. Print off a poster, take a photo with it, and send it to us. See the photos here and here, and see below for Shaker’s video, via YouTube (it’s also on Facebook here):
Nearly a year on from Shaker’s release, he still manifests the charisma, the enthusiasm for life and the thirst for justice that first emerged from descriptions of him while he was held at Guantánamo, from his own words, when they were allowed out of the prison by the authorities, and, towards the end of his long and unjust imprisonment, via his voice, calling out for justice — captured by a CBS news team as they walked the cell blocks of Guantánamo, which I later used in my “Song for Shaker Aamer”, recorded with my band The Four Fathers. The original version is here, and also listen to the post-release version with the lyrics amended to reflect Shaker’s freedom (and see me playing it live in Washington, D.C.)
Graceful as ever in his video (which was his idea, suggested to me a month ago, when we last met), Shaker urged President Obama “to carry the torch in this dark time we are living and lead and go forward with it,” and called on him to be reassured that, in closing Guantánamo, “you are doing the right thing.”
He added, “Even if they don’t approve of you today, I have no doubt in the future the whole world will remember that you did something great because closing that place [Guantánamo] is going to help the whole world — not just the people inside Guantánamo.”
Yesterday’s 100-day anniversary was a difficult milestone in President Obama’s long journey towards the closure of Guantánamo, with just three months remaining for him to fulfill the promise to close the prison that he made so confidently on January 22, 2009, his second day in office.
Over 2,800 days later, 61 men are still held, even though the president is to be commended for having secured the release of 46 men this year, and for having accelerated the Periodic Review Board process that has led to 33 men being approved for release. 13 of these men are still held, however, along with seven others approved for release back in 2009, and President Obama needs to make sure these men are released as soon as possible.
Whether President Obama will succeed in closing the prison before he leaves office is, at present, unknown, although I believe it is worth maintaining the pressure on him to try and make sure it happens. He is, admittedly, stymied by cynical Congressional obstruction, with lawmakers having passed legislation to prevent him from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason.
He could issue an executive order to bypass Congress, but that is fraught with problems of legitimacy, as well as the problems of moving and holding the remaining prisoners on the US mainland if the local authorities resist his plans, as seems probable. In theory, he could order the military to sort out a facility, but as we have learned over the years, some in the military — in positions of power and influence — are evidently happy to keep Guantánamo open.
The most optimistic outcome might be if Democrats win the Presidential Election and a majority in Congress, allowing him to close the prison in the dying days of his presidency in the new year, but whatever the case it is important to keep the pressure on the administration, and Shaker’s message is a key part of this pressure, as are your photos, so if you haven’t sent us a photo yet, please do!
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’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), 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.