Cleared captive Shaker Aamer gone from Guantánamo

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, CUBA -- The U.S. military on Friday released a British resident who had been held as a war-on-terror captive at Guantánamo for more than 13 years but was never charged with a crime.

Shaker Aamer, 48, was one of Guantánamo's best known prisoners because some Britons, including his wife and four children living in London, turned his case into a cause célèbre. In May, a bipartisan delegation of British members of parliament stumped for his release in meetings with Obama administration officials as well as members of Congress.

The transfer, the second release from the prison in 42 hours, left the detention center population at 112 captives. Of them, 52 are like Aamer was on the eve of his flight off this remote U.S. Navy base: Approved for release with security arrangements that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

In the U.S. Aamer has been heard on a 60 Minutes segment hollering, "Tell the world the truth" at a CBS camera crew in a rare scrap of prison camp audio to survive the U.S. military censor's delete button.

Aamer had been cleared for transfer from Guantánamo since 2007 although behind the scenes negotiations never sealed a deal until Carter notified Congress last month that he'd approved Aamer's repatriation to the United Kingdom.

In part he confounded U.S. efforts to send him to his native Saudi Arabia by both refusing to agree to go through the Saudi rehabilitation program, a prerequisite imposed by the Saudis on repatriation, and by renouncing his citizenship.

In his departure, however, Aamer left like more than 100 Saudis held in the detention center: In a private aircraft, not shackled and bound inside a U.S. military cargo plane secured by American soldiers. The small executive jet went wheels up from remote Guantánamo at 12:03 a.m.

U.S. military and diplomatic officials did not immediately disclose the downsizing at the detention center, leaving it to British officials to make the announcement. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond did it, while Aamer was still en route to a small executive airport in South East London.

Aamer aspires to set up set up a "Peace and Philanthropy Center" at a London university, said his British-American lawyer Clive Stafford Smith of the non-profit legal defense group Reprieve. The goal is to "share his experience -- in the spirit of reconciliation, not persecution, to ensure that in the future nobody has to go through what he had gone through."

Aamer has three teenaged children, including son, Faris, 13, who he's never met. The boy was born Feb. 14, 2002, a day after Aamer was brought to Guantánamo for initial custody at the crude open-air compound called Camp X-Ray.

"Shaker is an indomitable spirit," Smith said, calling him "a friend as well as a client" and future partner on the peace and reconciliation enterprise.

A 2007 military intelligence profile considered Aamer a "close associate of" Osama bin Laden with a history of "jihadist combat" -- as well as a disruptive detainee who spent years on disciplinary status for inciting disturbances and refusing to do what the guards told him.

"Shaker is not and never has been a terrorist, and has been cleared by the Americans themselves for eight years," Smith said in a statement following disclosure of the release order.

Stafford Smith called the announcement "great news, albeit about 13 years too late."

He had urged the British government to pressure Obama to ignore the statutory 30-day notice period and put the prisoner "on a plane tomorrow" so he can be reunited with his family and "start rebuilding his life." Neither side budged and Aamer left five days after the period expired.

This story was originally published October 30, 2015 at 7:40 AM with the headline "Cleared captive Shaker Aamer gone from Guantánamo ."