Shaker Aamer, the last British resident held in Guantanamo Bay, is to be released, the White House has announced. Aamer is alleged to have led a unit of Taliban fighters and have plotted with Osama Bin Laden, but he has never been charged or been on trial.
His case is one that David Cameron has raised in discussions with President Obama, and one the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have been pressing for a good while too, on the grounds that it is indefensible to lock someone up since 2002 without charge or trial (the Mail’s argument has always been that he may be a ‘very bad man’ but that the evidence of him being a very bad man should be discussed and proven in a court of law, something we tend to lecture other countries on).
But it is also a victory for a group of campaigners who you wouldn’t normally expect to spend much time together. Those campaigners are David Davis, Andrew Mitchell, Andy Slaughter and a Labour backbencher who still wasn’t particularly well-known when he last travelled to Washington with the group in May: one Jeremy Corbyn.
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