'They don't want me to see the sun again': Shaker Aamer - the last Briton held in Guantanamo Bay - gives searing account of his 14-year ordeal 

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Despite claims that he belonged to Al Qaeda, Shaker Aamer has always denied any involvement in terrorism, and has never been charged with a crime

The last Briton held in Guantanamo Bay – now hoping to be freed within weeks – has given a searing account of his 14-year ordeal to The Mail on Sunday.

Speaking for the first time since the US Government announced that he would finally be released from the notorious detention camp, Shaker Aamer, 46, today makes a series of astonishing new claims. 

It can be revealed that:

• Despite his imminent freedom, he says he is still being subjected to brutal physical abuse by his captors
• He is on hunger strike in protest at an assault by guards, who, he says, forced him to give blood samples
• Mr Aamer has warned his wife and four children in London – including a son who was born after his imprisonment – that he may still not make it out alive from the military prison, where he has been held without charge since he was captured as an alleged Al Qaeda suspect in the wake of 9/11
• And he has provided an eyewitness account of the torture of a detainee whose false confession paved the way for the invasion of Iraq – a revelation that could have grave consequences for Tony Blair and the troubled Chilcot Inquiry into the war

Mr Aamer said: 'I know there are people who do not want me ever to see the sun again. 

'It means nothing that they have signed papers, as anything can happen before I get out. So if I die, it will be the full responsibility of the Americans.' 

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Mr Aamer told detectives that he was 'abused by the US military from the day I arrived' at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in December 2001

The Mail on Sunday first exposed the horrors of Guantanamo Bay to a shocked world in 2002 and has long been campaigning for Mr Aamer's release

He added that he had many people to thank, including The Mail on Sunday 'which has been campaigning for my release for years'.

Last night senior Conservative MP David Davis said this newspaper's revelations 'massively strengthened' the case for an independent inquiry into Britain's alleged involvement in the systematic torture of terror suspects.

He said: 'The time has come for the Government to face up to Britain's role in torture and rendition. 

'Only by dealing with it can we restore our nation's honour and integrity.'

The Mail on Sunday first exposed the horrors of Guantanamo Bay to a shocked world in 2002 and has long been campaigning for Mr Aamer's release.  

On Thursday he was able to talk by telephone to lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the head of his legal team, and a transcript of that conversation provides Mr Aamer's first account of his feelings at being told he will be allowed home.

This newspaper has also obtained a draft of a 24,000-word statement he provided to Metropolitan Police detectives two years ago, giving the most detailed account ever of his ordeal. 

The Met was investigating UK complicity in rendition and torture.

Mr Aamer told detectives that he was 'abused by the US military from the day I arrived' at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in December 2001.

He says he had travelled to the country earlier that year from Britain to work for a charity, but was kidnapped by villagers and sold to the Americans. 

He assumed they would release him but, instead, the military considered him a senior figure in Al Qaeda who knew Osama Bin Laden, and was later described as a 'reported recruiter, financier and facilitator with a history of participating in jihadist combat.'

Despite these allegations – which he categorically denies – Mr Aamer was never charged with any crime and never faced any court.

He tells how he was held in a freezing cold aircraft hangar during the bitter Afghan winter and claims a British intelligence officer was present during interrogations when his head was repeatedly beaten into a wall by the Americans.

And he says he was grilled by two British spies about his time in London, where he had married a British woman and worked as a translator.

On Valentine's Day 2002 – the day his fourth child was born – Mr Aamer says he was stripped naked, given the infamous Guantanamo orange jumpsuit and tightly restrained before being flown to the US military prison on Cuba.

He was first cleared for release in 2007 and again two years later. 

Finally, on September 25 this year, the US announced he would be released within weeks.

Mr Stafford Smith said yesterday: 'It may be that no one has suffered more at Guantanamo than Shaker Aamer, because he stood up for his rights and the rights of others – and for this he has constantly been punished.

'Mr Cameron's government likes to harp on about the need for people to take responsibility for their actions. Surely Britain must now accept its responsibility for this.'

The final barbarity by SHAKER AAMER: Guantanamo Briton held for 14 years without trial gives first account since release order

Last Thursday evening, just over a week after the announcement that he was to be released from Guantanamo Bay, Briton Shaker Aamer was able to talk on a telephone from the prison to the head of his legal team, Clive Stafford Smith of the British human rights charity Reprieve. 

Raw, emotional, despairing and optimistic, this is an edited transcript of his words. Given exclusively to this newspaper, it is his first response since his freedom was declared... 

I saw my kids in a dream three days ago. Not as they are today, but as they were when I last saw them, almost 14 years ago. 

The little children I knew and loved so much no longer exist: they have grown up. I have at least been able to see them: on a handful of rare occasions the Guantanamo authorities have let me talk to my family on a video call via Skype. 

But the images I have from those conversations are not what I saw in my dream. 

The dream brought home to me the scale of the shock I’m about to face. Everything I once knew has changed, almost beyond recognition.

The kids need to see me as a strong father, but that is just not going to happen from the first second I get back. I don’t know how long it is going to be before I can begin to deal with the world out there, beyond the walls of Guantanamo. 

Shaker Aamer said he was grilled by two British spies about his time in London, where he had married a British woman and worked as a translator

It may be a day. It may be a week. It may be longer. I just don’t know, just as I don’t know the date of my release. This ordeal won’t be over until it’s over.

I was first cleared for release eight years ago, yet here I still am. I still don’t believe that at last, I’m on my way home.

That’s why my message for my wife and kids is: stay strong. Regardless whether it is next month, next year, or even in heaven that I am finally released to be with you, stay strong, because you need to be strong, not because you hear some news that I may be coming home, that may not even be true.

In here, I am laughing, I am joking, but I am also screaming. The wound I carry lies deep inside, and I know this wound will start gushing as soon as I leave this place. 

Don’t be fooled by my exterior. The reality is that I am a very sensitive person. The moment I touch freedom, 239 [Shaker’s Guantanamo prison number] is going to come back with a lot of issues, and I will need to solve them one by one. 

To begin with, I need to re-acclimatise by spending time with my wife. I need to reclaim my personality: to put a name to my prison number.

I have so many people to thank for my freedom. First there are all the people who names begin with the letter J – which also stands for justice. 

So there is Johina, my beloved daughter. There is Joy Hurcombe, of the Save Shaker Campaign: for all these years she has stood up for me, and I am overwhelmed. 

There is Joanne MacInnes of We Stand with Shaker. And then there is Jane Ellison, my local MP. I know she is a Minister now, which means there are things she cannot do, but I know she has supported me all this time.

And there is also The Mail on Sunday, which has been campaigning for my release for years, and against the many injustices of Guantanamo since the month it first opened in January 2002. 

One of the first things I did when I was told I was coming home was to write an article for the paper to publish. I still hope it can be, but it has been held back by the military censor, and I don’t know if it will ever be cleared.

All these people need to be congratulated. The lawyers are doing a job that they swore to do. But these people who stood up for me all these years did not give up.

On Valentine's Day 2002, Mr Aamer was made to undress and was made to wear an orange jumpsuit 

He assumed they would release him but, instead, the military considered him a senior figure in Al Qaeda who knew Osama Bin Laden

I say to them you did not do that wastefully. Your fight was for an innocent person. You did a great thing. May God reward you as you deserve for what you did.

Our Prophet told us that if you do not thank people, you do not thank God. Words will never be enough, no matter what I say.

But for now, I am still detainee 239, and as I have so many times before, I am enduring abusive treatment. In turn I am protesting in the only way I can – through hunger strike.

I am not going to stop this, and by the time I get home my condition will truly have deteriorated.

It started on August 3, when they came to me saying they wanted to check for tuberculosis. They have checked me for this many times before: they know I do not have it, but they said they were doing it to everyone.

I told them: ‘Do the skin test’. They said, ‘No, we want blood’. I said, ‘Do the X-ray test’. ‘They said: ‘No, we want blood.’ I refused.

They demanded again. So finally they said they would bring the FCE [the Forcible Cell Extraction team, Guantanamo’s body-armoured specialist rapid reaction force, which has allegedly carried out hundreds of assaults on prisoners – Aamer included].

I said: ‘OK, bring the FCE’.

They came with the FCE. They tied me so freaking tight on the board when they forced me down. I shouted the legal formula – ‘My name is Shaker, I am telling you exactly that I do not want the blood test, I have the right to refuse it. Do you agree you are doing it by force?'

The nurse agreed she was taking it involuntarily. She was an oriental woman. They dragged my arm to one side, stuck in the needle and took four vials of my blood. I said that was too much. They took the blood, and sent me back to my cell.

Over the next two days, I discovered that nobody had blood taken but me. So they lied about doing a TB test on everyone.And even if they were singling me out, this does not explain why they needed four vials.

Why did they take so much blood from me? And the TB test? They refused to tell me the result.

I quit eating from then on in protest. I lost 15lb the first week. Straight away they put me on the scales, not once but twice a week.

Guards watch on at the heavily fortified prison, which has been held by the United States since World War II

An unidentified detainee walks outside his cell in Camp Delta 4 at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba

I demanded: ‘Is this an experiment that you are doing on me?’ Last Tuesday I was 182lb. This Tuesday I was 174. Now, on Thursday, I am around 170.

Of course, everyone knows I am leaving. But I am only going to take what sustenance I need to keep alive, minimally alive.

I will be very sick when I come back home. If anything happens to me before I do, it will be the Americans who are responsible. I am not going to do anything to myself. I know there are people who, even now, are working hard to keep me here.

I know there are people who do not want me ever to see the sun again. It means nothing that they have signed papers, as anything can happen before I get out. So if I die, it will be the full responsibility of the Americans.

The doctor came today [Thursday, October 1]. I told him: ‘Shame on you. If you have any shame you will never come by me.’

He brought a translator, a nurse, and an army paramedic to be witnesses, as he wanted to have witnesses that I was refusing whatever he came to say.

I said: ‘You are the same doctor who was in Bagram, the same as in Kandahar and the same as every doctor in Guantanamo – I do not see the face, I see the uniform.

'You are a tool, you are not a true doctor. You want to write in your documents that you keep trying to help me but I refuse. If I die suddenly, you will say that I chose to die.’

Lately, I have become very interested in reading about Japanese war crimes in World War Two. The film Unbroken is about Louis Zamperini, an American captured by Japan.

‘They deprived us of our title to be prisoners of war so that they could do anything they wanted to us,’ he wrote then. ‘They enslaved us so that we were nothing.’

I could not believe this was 70 years ago. It was just the same as what the Americans have done to us – deprived us of the title of prisoners of war, and decided they can do what they want with us. The Americans treated us as badly as the Japanese did the Americans.

A few years after the war ended, the Americans forgave everyone and set their own Japanese prisoners free. They decided to forget about that time, as they wanted to be friends with Japan. Yet here we are at Guantanamo, 14 years later, and nobody is putting an end to all this.

I do not want to be a hero. I am less than a lot of people who suffered in this place. But all this time I stood for certain principles: for human rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. I cannot give up.

The irony is, I learnt to be this way from Americans. It was they who taught me to shout loudly if I want people to hear me.

I went to America to learn this. When I was nine years old an American family from New York lived next to my house in Saudi Arabia.

The father encouraged me to go to America to learn all those good things. My father said I should not go, so I said goodbye to him.

He would not give me money to study. So I went to the US with $200 in my pocket. I worked hard. I had a bank account. I had a car. I did that by myself, inspired by the American way of life.

When I was kidnapped in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, I had a big smile on my face. The interrogator asked me why I was smiling.

I told him, ‘Because you are Americans. You know I did nothing, so you’re going to send me home.’ How wrong I was. How much I have lost.

But though I can barely grasp it, it seems that the belief I had then is finally going to come true.

How UK knew evidence was obtained under torture: Shaker Aamer's dramatic police statement reveals Britain must have known about chilling methods

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (pictured) was the informant who ‘revealed’ Saddam Hussein’s alleged chemical and gas weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

BY DAVID ROSE 

The dramatic police statement of Shaker Aamer leads to one especially damning conclusion: that Britain must have known so-called intelligence that was used to justify the war in Iraq was based on evidence obtained under torture. 

This conclusion will have grave implications for Tony Blair, his former Ministers, MI6, the Chilcot Inquiry and Scotland Yard.

It also gives a chilling insight into why Aamer has been held so long in Guantanamo.

His vivid testimony to Scotland Yard includes key sections about a prisoner held with him at Bagram US Air Force base in Afghanistan. He was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi – the informant who ‘revealed’ Saddam Hussein’s alleged chemical and gas weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and links to Al Qaeda.

Aamer told Yard detectives that two British intelligence officers were present when Al-Libi was being abused, and when he was later rendered to Egypt – extraordinarily, in a coffin. It was in Egypt that Al-Libi falsely claimed that Saddam’s Iraq had supplied chemical and biological weapons to Al Qaeda terrorists, and trained them in their use. He ‘confessed’ all this after being locked in a tiny cage for more than 80 hours, and then being severely beaten.

This evidence was seen as so crucial that President Bush used it in a high-profile speech in Ohio.

He told the US people that America knew Al Qaeda had been ‘planning for chemical and biological attacks’ with Iraqi assistance and added: ‘We’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.’ This was all based on Al-Libi’s ‘intelligence’.

Last year a report by the US Senate intelligence committee confirmed that Al-Libi’s false assertions were cited again by Secretary of State Colin Powell when he made a last-ditch, unsuccessful attempt to persuade the UN Security Council to back the Iraq invasion in February 2003

Aamer told the Yard detectives how he was brought into a Bagram interrogation room where Al-Libi was present, tied to a chair. The interrogators apparently hoped that each man would give up information about the other, perhaps in the hope of securing more favourable treatment

Top Pentagon officials made similar claims and named Al-Libi personally in background, ‘off the record’ briefings to reporters.

Last year a report by the US Senate intelligence committee confirmed that Al-Libi’s false assertions were cited again by Secretary of State Colin Powell when he made a last-ditch, unsuccessful attempt to persuade the UN Security Council to back the Iraq invasion in February 2003.

Although Blair did not cite Al-Libi’s claims directly, he repeatedly justified the pending war by warning of the risk that Saddam would give WMD to terrorists.

Aamer first met Al-Libi while both men were being brutalised and interrogated at Bagram in January 2002.

His statement to the police says that two UK intelligence officers were present at Bagram while this was happening – and were working closely with their American counterparts.

Aamer told the Yard detectives how he was brought into a Bagram interrogation room where Al-Libi was present, tied to a chair. The interrogators apparently hoped that each man would give up information about the other, perhaps in the hope of securing more favourable treatment.

Aamer first met Al-Libi while both men were being brutalised and interrogated at Bagram in January 2002

Aamer’s police statement says: ‘I was a witness to the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Bagram. His case seems to me to be particularly important, and my witnessing of it particularly relevant to my on-going detention.’ He adds: ‘Because he was detained in November 2001, and I was one of the first five other prisoners in Bagram where he was being held, I was in a rather unique position as a witness to what was going on with him.

‘He was there being abused at the same time I was. He was there being abused when the British came there.

‘Indeed, I was taken into the room in the Bagram detention facility where he was being held. Clearly the fact that I was a witness to all this does not make the US want to let me free, for fear that I may be a witness to one of the most colossal mistakes of all those made in the last eleven years.’

Since making his police statement, Aamer has given further details to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. He told The Mail on Sunday that from his nearby cage, Aamer saw a coffin being taken into the interrogation room where he had seen Al-Libi.

Later, he saw the coffin being taken out, and assumed the prisoner had died. Other sources – of whom Aamer was unaware – have said that when Al-Libi was taken to Egypt from Bagram, he was shipped out of the base in a coffin.

Stafford Smith added that Aamer’s witnessing of these events may well be the real reason why his release from Guantanamo has been delayed for so long: he was first cleared for freedom in 2007.

‘Al-Libi’s torture and its disastrous consequences amount to the single most embarrassing event in the history of the war on terror,’ the lawyer said.

Al-Libi’s treatment later is further evidence of the scale of the intelligence fiasco, Stafford Smith said.

After leaving Egypt, he was held in other secret CIA prisons until 2006, but then was rendered to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya and jailed. He died there in prison in 2009.

According to a newspaper owned by Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, he committed suicide, but because he was a devout Muslim, many consider this unlikely. ‘He was probably murdered,’ Stafford Smith said. ‘For some, this was a very convenient outcome.’

Only one aspect of this is graver for all interested parties: Aamer is set to elaborate even more on what he knows when he is finally released.