Time to Bring Home Shaker Aamer

Shaker Aamer should never have been held by the Americans. He should never have been tortured at Bagram. Guantanamo should never have been set up, and he should never have been kept there for more than 11 years. But he is still there, and still being tortured. Like many of the others held there he has been cleared for release. Like most he is now on hunger strike.

I’m one of the 117,387 UK citizens who signed a petition on the government web site calling for his release, which led to a debate by MPs in Westminster Hall on 24 April.  And while I’ve photographed and written about numerous protests calling for his release and put this on the web, it is only in recent weeks that the campaign to release him has really emerged in the mass media in the UK.  Obviously I’m pleased it has, and hope that it will lead to real action by the government, rather than them supporting the case in public while in private agreeing with the US government that releasing him to the UK would bring out into the open a great deal of evidence about both US torture and the complicity of our security services in this.

I wasn’t there for the debate, nor for all of the protest, leaving shortly after it began to photograph a protest in the City, and only getting back a short while before it finished. But I was please to be able to hear and photograph Conservative MP for Battersea Jane Ellison, one of a number of MPs who came out to talk the the protesters. Aamer’s family live in her constituency and she has given her support to the campaign and hopes to be able to have a debate again shortly inside the House of Commons.


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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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