A nation rejoices! After a campaign waged from the political right and left, the UK can now finally welcome back Shaker Aamer. This is the man generally described as ‘the last British resident’ in Guantanamo. As he returns to these shores we can confidently predict that he will now be accorded the same human-rights hero status previously accorded to such luminaries of that scene as Moazzam Begg.
Of course Aamer’s supporters claim that he was only in Afghanistan in 2001 because he was carrying out ‘voluntary work for an Islamic charity.’ Another case of someone just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Funnily enough Shaker Aamer is an old friend of Moazzam Begg. Which is interesting not least because at Gitmo, Begg himself identified Aamer as a ‘recruiter for al-Qaeda’. He said that Aamer had fought in Bosnia and had been a member of the jihadist group run by Abu Zubair al-Haili (a senior al-Qaeda operative from Saudi Arabia) and had among other things spent ’30 days training on the AK-47 and rocket propelled grenades’. Seven separate sources at Guantanamo also described Aamer’s connections to al-Qaeda.
Of course this and much more about Aamer (available here if anyone is interested) is unlikely to come up in the post-Gitmo homecoming parade. From the Daily Mail to the Guardian, the British public will now be able to watch Aamer enjoy a veritable ticker-tape parade return. We will soon be able to read his descriptions of the horrors of Guantanamo and pleas of his ‘wrong-place, wrong-time’ innocence. And it will be swallowed up, as it has been for every previous returning detainee, because of undoubted complaints about the way in which America has done things at Guantanamo and an unbelievable societal naivety. And whereas we can expect every charge against Aamer to be dismissed by the media, we can expect every charge he makes against the US to be swallowed whole.
http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/20...ntanamo-and-the-questions-that-wont-be-asked/
.
