Will the Obama administration cave to international pressure and transfer a Guantanamo detainee it has previously found too dangerous to release?
Amnesty International has launched a major public relations campaign on behalf of Shaker Aamer, a citizen of Saudi Arabia who established residency in the U.K. Aamer was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and in early 2002 he was transferred to Guantanamo, where he has been detained ever since.
The British government has actively lobbied for Shaker’s release for years, and, in a move timed to coincide with Amnesty’s new campaign, a top UK official recently repeated the request.
In a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, according to Reuters, British Foreign Secretary William Hague requested Aamer’s release. “I have been discussing that with Secretary Clinton today and reiterated our position that we would like to see this gentleman returned to the United Kingdom and that is under consideration by the United States,” Hague said on November 17 during an appearance at Georgetown University.
According to an article published in the Washington Post that same day, however, the Obama administration’s interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force “recommended that Aamer not be released.” (Aamer reportedly declined to be repatriated to his native Saudi Arabia.)
The Bush administration declined to release Aamer as well. This in and of itself is remarkable as every other Guantanamo detainee with any connection to the U.K. whatsoever (including U.K. citizens, residents, or some who were even denied residency) has been transferred.
In other words, successive American administrations have determined that of all the detainees with ties to the U.K. who have been held at Gitmo, Aamer is the sole one who is too dangerous to transfer.
That hasn’t stopped human rights organizations and the British government from lobbying on his behalf.
Hague’s request has been backed up with what Amnesty calls a “two-pronged” strategy: pressuring British MPs and lobbying other American officials. The Amnesty U.K. web site says that “Amnesty activists” are “also lobbying the U.S. official responsible for Guantánamo – Ambassador Daniel Fried, special envoy for the closure of Guantánamo Bay – asking Mr Fried to expedite Aamer’s release and return to the U.K.”
There is really a third prong to Amnesty’s campaign too: favorable media coverage. Journalists in the U.K. have been especially friendly to Amnesty and Aamer. Press outlets have repeatedly published a photo of Aamer holding two of his children. The photo is undoubtedly intended to portray Aamer as a simple family man. The U.K. press coverage has also generally downplayed or outright ignored the nefarious details of Aamer’s biography, with only a few noteworthy exceptions. Some press outlets have even repeated the specious claim that Aamer was merely a charity worker in Afghanistan when he was captured.
Who is Aamer in reality? As I’ve written previously, when British officials approached the U.S. about Aamer in 2007, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Sandra Hodgkinson described the intelligence accumulated against Aamer in an interview with the Associated Press.
Hodgkinson said that Aamer shared an apartment with Zacarias Moussaoui in London in the 1990s. Moussaoui was later scheduled to take part in either the September 11 attacks or a similar follow-on plot at the time of his arrest in August 2001. Aamer had also met with convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid, Hodgkinson said, and received a stipend directly from Osama bin Laden.
“He has been involved in a lot of significant terrorist plots,” Hodgkinson explained.
Documents prepared for Aamer’s hearings at Guantanamo further outline the allegations against him. Aamer “was an advisor to Osama bin Laden and organizer at Tora Bora, Kandahar and Kabul,” a memo produced for Aamer’s first administrative review board hearing reads. Aamer “was very close to Osama bin Laden and would ask him for advice.”
He also allegedly acted as a “special interpreter” for bin Laden and knew the terror master’s “former representative…in the United Kingdom.” This may be a reference to Abu Qatada, who has been one of Osama bin Laden’s chief representatives in the U.K. for years.
U.S. intelligence officials believe that Aamer was a member of an al Qaeda cell in London and that he compiled an extensive dossier of terror prior to his detention. Aamer allegedly trained and fought in Bosnia (a jihadist hotspot in the 1990s) and Afghanistan.
And if you want a sense of how influential Aamer is among the detainee population at Guantanamo, then read Tim Golden’s account for The New York Times in 2006.
The Bush administration came to the conclusion that Aamer is a hardened jihadist with ties to the highest levels of al Qaeda. The Obama administration concluded that it is not safe to release Aamer and has, thus far, declined to transfer him to the U.K.
Human rights organizations and the British government are trying to force the Obama administration to change its mind. Will the American government succumb to the pressure, just as the British government has?
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
