He was supposed to return to Britain in 2007 – but Shaker Aamer is still being held inside Camp Delta. Who is this charismatic prisoner? And what happened to him at the hands of MI5? Robert Verkaik reports
Those who were there compare it to a scene from The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke, the moment when the hero-prisoner finally emerges squinting from the darkness of solitary confinement. In those classic movies, prisoners bang their cell doors in admiration; even the guards acknowledge respect. It's the triumph of the human spirit over a brutal system, the transient moment power is handed from the prison to the prisoner.
Such a moment happened in 2005 at Guantanamo Bay, America's most famous jail. Shaker Aamer, a Muslim man from London, was the inmate stubbornly refusing to bend to the will of the governor when he led a protest against the Guantanamo authorities, co-ordinating a hunger strike which succeeded in briefly lifting the harsh regime of the camp. It may have been the defining moment in Shaker Aamer's incarceration. As he was led back from the Guantanamo medical centre to the main prison block the whole prison erupted in applause.
Accompanying Aamer to his cell, the Guantanamo warden, Colonel Michael Bumgarner, recalls the prisoners' respect was only too apparent: "I have never seen grown men – with beards, hardened men – crying at the sight of another man ... It was like I was with Bon Jovi."
Hell of a story. Literally.
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