I am delighted that Shaker Aamer is finally to be released from Guantanamo. This is something I have worked, campaigned and spoken for, along with groups including Cage, which I am proud to support and which the government is attempting to ban.
We cannot give back to Shaker the thirteen years of imprisonment without charge, let alone trial. We cannot undo the physical and mental damage of all the torture. We can see him reunited with his family and demonstrate our support and affection.
Just as nobody has been charged over the illegal waging of a war of aggression against Iraq, nobody faces prosecution over the equally illegal policy of complicity in torture, to which policy I personally was an eye-witness.
The reason Shaker has been detained longer than any other British resident is that he was tortured with MI6 personnel directly in the room, as opposed to waiting outside. If the British establishment were not totally corrupt, his return to the UK would finally make it impossible to avoid prosecutions over torture, up to and including Dearlove, Straw and Blair.
The one thing we know for certain about the stinking cesspit of the British political system, is that justice is not possible.
Mary, what do you make of Robert Irwin’s critique of Edward Said? I am not a great fan of RI’s fiction, but his Memoirs of a Dervish: Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties is really worth reading; it strikes me as an honest book and one with a heart. I haven’t actually read Irwin’s critique, but have been meaning to give it a go….and when I do I might post something.
Habbs: lots of typos in my post re Bush etc which probably rendered it undecipherable, or in any event partially undermined by Mary’s link to the Guardian story about Southampton University (which I didn’t read properly and foolishly thought was about something about to happen not something which had happened). In any event I kind of concluded that there was not so much between the two world leader’s CVs save that one might have been more cloaked than the other (which is what you might expect in that work and which might indicate that in the States some things are best not done openly; is such apparent hypocrisy a positive sign of standards, or does it mean that Americans are asleep whilst Russians might be more awake to their own situation such that their authorities do not even see the need for any niceties or concealments in such matters). Anyway, what is your view on why Southampton University decided to cancel that controversial conference? I appreciate that all states (including those with liberal media laws at home) might consider it a fair game to try and influence how they are perceived abroad, but I would be interested to learn more about that. If anyone thinks that Israel’s domestic press is not open and free and that I have a naïve view then please say so.