Boyle Starves Guantanamo Injustice

The pressure to release prisoners from Guantanamo Bay has just been stepped up a major notch. Notorious comedian Frankie Boyle has joined the hunger strike started by Guantanamo inmates in an effort to get Shaker Aamer released. Aamer is a British resident who has never been charged, has been approved for release since 2007 but has been held under detention and torture for many more years. These symbolic protests are gathering sympathy for the detainees who are suffering from the brutal repression of American security policy.

The facts behind the Shaker Aamer case are disputed. He was originally detained as the American government believed he was responsible for leading a group of fighters against US forces in the war in Afghanistan in 2001, with alleged support from Osama Bin Laden. This has been rejected by Aamer and his supporters, who argue that the evidence against him is unreliable, obtained under torture and obscures his innocence. Regardless, his case and those of his fellow detainees expose the hypocrisy and illegality of American actions.

The right to a speedy and fair trial is enshrined in the US Constitution. However, the way they treat enemy combatants reveals their true colours.

Shaker Aamer has suffered physical abuse and forms of psychological torture such as white noise and exposure to severe cold.

Case after case of American human rights abuses have been broken to the media, such as other people that are constructed as security threats like whistleblower Bradley Manning. Now the Guantanamo inmates are taking a stand against their inhumane treatment. Indeed, hunger strikes in the detention facility date back to 2005 when they first began maintaining their innocence and criticising prison conditions such as the playing of music over their religious prayer. This is the latest wave of that protest. Five years after the optimism of Barack Obama’s election, he sustains a security state that abuses the citizens of America and foreign countries. This is the latest protest that has caught the public attention.

Frankie Boyle is the most important thing to have happened to this campaign, which needs publicity to expose it to a broad audience.

He is pushing the cause to his huge twitter following and supporting the charities and campaign websites that are calling for Aamer’s release. Most of us cannot comprehend the horrors inflicted through torture. Frankie Boyle is our window into that world, as a man whose brand comes across as ‘an ordinary guy’ saying what he feels and not holding back. He is something we can relate to. Nonetheless, we can also sympathise with Aamer’s situation. He has been kept from a satisfying life in Britain with his wife and children despite having done nothing wrong under the formal procedures of the American justice system.

It is a campaign that is gaining momentum. Frankie Boyle is exploring the health implications of self-inflicted starvation. He tweeted on the 18th of July that ‘Day 2 of hunger strike feels a bit like being drunk. Feel pretty good, but no doubt I’ll wake up to find myself in bathroom eating soap’. His later tweets offer an even more graphic insight into the experience. This follows another way in which the campaign has gone viral, after a video by American actor and rapper Yasiin Bey. He volunteered to undergo the force feeding procedure used in Guantanamo. It is a disturbing video where he is de-humanised in orange detention clothing, strapped into a chair and force fed through the nose. Not a watch for the faint hearted.

Celebrities such as Bey and Boyle are the impetus needed to spread the message of the campaign so vividly. The political route has not worked. Despite calls for justice from the British government and a chat between David Cameron and Obama at the G8 summit this year, the inmates remain imprisoned. However much we despise terrorists and must act to thwart their destruction, we must not sacrifice our own moral values. It is left up to ordinary people with help from Frankie Boyle to remind politicians that human rights are not just for the humans we like.

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