09/01/2012

The only British detainee remaining at Guantanamo Bay is suffering from serious physical health problems and is gradually dying, according to the leading human rights activist, Clive Stafford Smith. Shaker Aamer has been in Guantanamo for nearly ten years. He's never been charged by the United States and therefore obviously has never been put on trial. In 2007 he was cleared for release by the then Bush administration which conceded it had no evidence against him. Clive Stafford Smith visited Shaker Aamer last November and immediately after wrote to the Foreign Secretary outlining a serious of physical health concerns, stressing that the detainee "had suffered abuse that is unfathomable in the twenty-first century." He concluded that "it wasn't stretching matters to say that he is gradually dying in Guantánamo Bay."

Also the former editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, defends his approach to journalism at the Leveson inquiry into media ethics.