Surge

Published in The Mancunion October 2015

On the 25th September 2015, both the US Department of Defence and the UK Government confirmed that Shaker Aamer, the last British resident to be held in Guantánamo Bay would be released, and he returned to Britain on the 30th of October. Mr Aamer has been imprisoned in Guantánamo for 13 years, without charge, and has been cleared for release since 2007. His wife and four children, the youngest of which he has never met, as he was born when Aamer arrived at Guantánamo, were left behind in London.

Moazzam Begg, a former detainee of Guantánamo Bay and Bagram prisons and CAGE outreach director, said that Aamer’s “case encapsulates everything wrong with the War on Terror; detention without charge or trial, torture with the complicity of the UK government, crude and dehumanising treatment, destruction of a young family, and lack of accountability for war crimes committed against this man and those held with him—these are key features of the Shaker case.” I wholeheartedly agree.

Aamer’s lawyers have stated that he has been abused and tortured over the years with methods such as being hung from his wrists, beatings, and solitary confinement—all of which continued after he was cleared for release. I can’t help but wonder if the US and UK governments are frightened of what they have done and the prospect of people like Aamer—from whom they have stolen years of their lives and made endure unimaginable suffering—at last having a voice.

Aamer is lucky that he’s a British citizen, as it means our government is somewhat bound to care about his life and injustice he’s suffered. What about the masses of innocent, non-British citizens who are wrongly incarcerated and tortured in Guantánamo in some warped name of freedom? Eight detainees have died in the prison camp. In Aamer’s case, both Tory and Labour MPs, including David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, have recently aggressively petitioned for his release and put pressure on the Obama administration, but it’s almost laughably late. Of course, Obama himself vowed to close Guantánamo in 2013, as he had before during his initial election campaign, but the executive order to shut it down has been rejected over and over again.

Nine British citizens have been imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay and were transferred there in two groups—one on March the 9th 2004 and the other on January the 25th 2005. A further five prisoners from Guantánamo have been released to the UK.

One of these was Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who was transferred on February 23rd 2009 and who claims that MI5 was heavily involved in his torture. Moreover, Andy Worthington’s book, The Guantánamo Files exposes several disturbing accounts of the torture of Guantánamo’s inmates, including ‘Guantánamo’s child’ Omar Khadr—a Canadian citizen who was imprisoned in the camp after being arrested in Afghanistan after he was shot in the back in the 2002. He was only 15 at his time of arrest and remained incarcerated there for six years. Khadr was never treated as a juvenile, even though the United States is a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. It is this kind of shameful twisting of important protective measures which make my stomach turn with disillusionment and disappointment.

Moreover, the fact that our own government has been complicit in torture is disheartening on multitude of levels. How can we support the US, as leader of the ‘free world’ in a ‘War on Terror’ when this ‘free world’ has its own torture chamber? It’s not unreasonable to expect more than this from our government. We can’t just gloss over the fact that we played a part in the incarceration of these innocent people, for whatever reason, whether it be our government yielding in the face of pressure from the US or people within it genuinely believing that torture was the right thing to do.

Shaker Aamer recently stated that he believed, despite his recent approved release, that he will die in Guantánamo. I should have a faith in the justice system strong enough to confidently oppose him, rather than a faith which has slowly been eroded by the failures on the part of UK and US government regarding his release and the closure of the camp.

Again, I agree with Moazzam Begg when he says that Aamer’s “greatest test will be in how he will once again be a father, husband and a member of society. What he endured is beyond comprehension for most people in the UK. There is no escaping the story of Shaker Aamer and those who instigated his mistreatment. This will be a black page in the history of UK and US.”

Published in The Mancunion October 2015

I’ve often been attracted to studying human aberration in history, finding out why and what went wrong and how we can prevent it going wrong in the future. Therefore, as a British citizen with Pakistani Muslim heritage and a student of both history and politics at university, I’ve been disturbed and intrigued by the radicalisation of young British Muslims, both in itself and by the British government’s attempts to understand and quell it.

However, due to recent cases of young Muslims in the US and the UK being wrongly accused of terroristic activity and involvement with IS, I can’t help feeling on edge about my interests, as if someone is going to denounce me for being interested in an important phenomenon which needs to be discussed openly by those who have the means of understanding it best.

Most recently, Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was detained by police after teachers became suspicious of a clock he’d made in order to impress them. Obama tweeted him in solidarity, but a tweet doesn’t remedy the sinister paranoia which underpinned the accusation. Similarly, another 14-year-old in London was taken out of class and held in a room for interrogation after he used the word ‘ecoterrorist’ to communicate how some people describe economic activists who put nails and spikes in trees in order to stop them being chopped down.

This is, quite frankly, ridiculous. The fact that a British child can’t use the word ‘terrorist’ while making a valid point in a French lesson about environmental activists without being carted off to a room for questioning is testimony to a dark paranoia which we cannot let bleed into education and academia.

We should be able to question the world around us in safety and it is cases like these, which build up resentment towards authority, which is obviously counterproductive to the anti-radicalisation cause. Moreover, Mohammed Umar Farooq, a postgraduate university student at Staffordshire university, was questioned about homosexuality and ISIS, among other things, despite his only ‘suspicious behaviour’ being his enrolment in a terrorism, global security, and crime masters programme and being seen reading a textbook for the course. He is, essentially, studying counter-terrorism. Farooq said that he felt compelled to make a statement about the accusation and has been “looking over his shoulder” ever since. Furthermore, he said that this could happen to “any young Muslim lad.”

Rather than opening a can of worms with general stereotyping in this article, I’d like to point out that all these examples point to a threat to intellectual liberty, as everyone questioned in these cases were students and the paranoia is somehow infringing on their education. If this paranoia seeps into academia we are in very big trouble.

I’m not saying that we should not have any state-sponsored anti-radicalisation measures but I think that the state should channel energy into more effective programs, such as recruiting reformed extremists to speak at schools, instead of perpetuating a harsh denouncing policy which eventually leads to huge resentment.

Ultimately, I agree with Farooq’s lawyer who stated that he has had over 100 cases like Farooq’s since October the 14th and described it as “…something we have seen frequently: Most notably the over-reporting of normative behaviour, and a fear-based approach that alienates and antagonises communities.”

In the same vein, I remember watching a documentary called ‘9/11 in Academia’, outlining how the event could not be discussed in universities in the US without a sense of discomfort and uneasiness at the prospect of being seen as unpatriotic and receiving complaints.

If we understand that 9/11 was a transformative event in the way it sparked the so-called ‘War on Terror’, led to the increase of the US military budget, reformulated foreign policy, and led to restrictions on civil rights, it surely warrants historical study and evaluation like any other historical event?

However, academics who tried to examine the event would receive hate mail for identifying anomalies in reports or pointing out that most of the evidence used to identify the terrorists was obtained under torture, and therefore does not technically stand up in the European Court of Human Rights, as tortured testimony is invalid.

The fact that 9/11 is so ingrained into the American conscious that it cannot even be discussed in academic institutions there is worrying to say the least. That is exactly the kind of mentality we want to avoid in the UK, as a pioneering country for free speech and open intellectual debate.

I was honestly worried about writing this article just because I thought I’d be accused of ‘defending terrorists’ and that the colour of my skin and the country my parents were born in would all count against me. Staffordshire University commented that making a distinction between “intellectual pursuit of radicalisation and radicalisation itself” was a massive challenge. That may be a fair point at the moment, but I would argue that we should train people to understand the difference because it is definitely worth it.