A charismatic Guantanamo Bay prisoner may have a story that would shame Western leaders
Those who were there compare it to a scene from The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke, the moment when the hero-prisoner finally emerges squinting from the darkness of solitary confinement.
In those classic movies, prisoners bang their cell doors in admiration; even the guards acknowledge respect.
It's the triumph of the human spirit over a brutal system, the transient moment power is handed from the prison to the prisoner.
Such a moment happened in 2005 at Guantanamo Bay, America's most famous jail.
Shaker Aamer, a Muslim man from London, was the inmate stubbornly refusing to bend to the will of the governor when he led a protest against the Guantanamo authorities, co-ordinating a hunger strike that succeeded in briefly lifting the harsh regime of the camp.
It may have been the defining moment in Shaker Aamer's incarceration.
As he was led back from the Guantanamo medical centre to the main prison block the whole prison erupted in applause.
Guantanamo warden Colonel Michael Bumgarner recalls the prisoners' respect was apparent: "I have never seen grown men - with beards, hardened men - crying at the sight of another man ... It was like I was with Bon Jovi."
Aamer has now been held at the US naval base in Cuba for more than eight years, and such is his influence over other inmates - and even some of the guards - that he has been held in solitary confinement for three of the last four years.
Since his arrival in Guantanamo in early 2002, following capture in Afghanistan, Aamer's fluency in Arabic and English has earned him the role of unofficial spokesman for the prisoners.
He speaks up for their welfare and doesn't hesitate to chastise camp commanders when he witnesses cruel treatment.
He is responsible for the establishment of a prisoners' grievance council and has helped force the commanders to deal with inmates under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
Even the meals the prisoners eat are based on a healthier diet, which Aamer personally negotiated after he agreed to end the hunger strike.
Aamer has also made it his business to familiarise himself with the Guantanamo Bay rule book, and he now knows the disciplinary codes better than some of the guards in charge of implementing them.
There are stories of soldiers who disagree with his interpretation of the rules, scuttling off to consult with the warden only to discover that Aamer, scholar of the regulations, was right after all.
His resolute determination not to bend under Guantanamo's oppression has brought him notoriety in the camp.
And, largely through his charismatic personality, he has attracted a loyal following, especially among the Guantanamo shahab, the young Muslim prisoners who regard him as something of a demagogue.
But this high profile comes with a price.
Of all the 200 prisoners still held at Guantanamo, Aamer is kept in the harshest of conditions - in solitary confinement, in a cell 2m by 2.5m, with 24-hour exposure to light and next to a noisy generator in a camp that is now empty of three quarters of its prisoners.
According to his lawyers, Aamer has suffered some of the worst tortures experienced by any of the inmates and a succession of hunger strikes has left him weighing half his original 17 stone.
There are those who still believe that for the Americans to go to so much trouble to isolate one prisoner, Aamer must be a high-value detainee, a key al Qaeda operative bent on the destruction of the West.
Shaker Aamer, 42, grew up in Medina in Saudi Arabia with his four brothers and sisters.
His parents divorced when he was a child, his father remarrying. At the age of 17, Aamer ran away to America to stay with a family he had known from home.
He spent the next few years travelling in Europe and the Middle East before moving to London in 1996, when he met his wife, Zin.
Their first child, Johina, was born in 1997 then Michael in 1999, and Saif a year later.
The Americans claim Aamer based himself in Britain because it was a convenient place from which to support an armed conflict in Bosnia and Chechnya.
But his friends say he put his family at the centre of his life in London; his wife talks of him being a hands-on father who changed nappies without complaint.
Outwardly, he led a respectable existence, working as an Arabic translator for a firm of London solicitors specialising in immigration cases.
In his free time he helped refugees find accommodation and offered them advice on their struggles with the Home Office.
It was during this period Aamer met Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo detainee released in 2005, who shared his religious duty of zakat - a responsibility to improve the conditions of impoverished Islamic societies.
In 2001, the pair took their families to Afghanistan to help build schools in parts of the country where few children receive an education.
Begg last saw Aamer in late 2001, when the Northern Alliance launched its offensive against the Taleban.
"We worked on the same project and we were sharing a house. When the cruise missiles started falling on Kabul, I took his wife and children and led them to a cellar and put mattresses over the windows.
"We separated and went to different villages south-west of Kabul. It wasn't a tearful farewell because we thought we would be reunited after the bombing stopped in a few days' time. I didn't know it would be the last time I would see him."
Begg and Aamer were captured by tribal militias before their transfer to Guantanamo.
Zin recalls: "I was pregnant with our fourth child and we were all scared. In the end, I just went. I didn't see Shaker again. Sometimes I regret that decision. What if I stayed - would we all be together now?"
The US has accused Aamer of charges ranging from being Osama Bin Laden's personal interpreter to "being introduced to a humanitarian charity".
But he has never met Bin Laden and until 2000 he had never heard of al Qaeda.
In 2007, the Bush Administration conceded it had no evidence against Aamer and he was cleared for release with the other British detainees.
Aamer's lawyers believed he would be soon reunited with his family in London.
Last year, when it was announced Binyam Mohamed was to be returned to Britain, hopes were raised Aamer would also be aboard the Gulfstream jet that flew out of Guantanamo.
But when the plane touched down at RAF Northolt almost a year ago, Mohamed was the sole passenger.
In public, the case for his release has become a diplomatically-charged issue with Britain repeatedly making requests to the Obama Administration for Aamer's release.
The Americans, who have called on other countries to help them close Guantanamo, say he can be released and the British want him home.
But behind the scenes it may suit both governments to keep him where he is.
Lawyers for Aamer have lodged a torture claim in the High Court in London, where it is alleged MI5 and MI6 agents were present when he was badly beaten by CIA officers in Afghanistan in 2002.
The Government and the Security Service MI5 - reeling from judicial condemnation of their actions in relation to the treatment of Binyam Mohamed when he was detained by the US - must fear more damaging allegations played out in public.
Mohamed, who occupied a cell one door down from Aamer, believes he knows why neither government wants to see Aamer released.
He even raised the question of Aamer with British officials on his flight home last year: "I spoke to the Foreign and Commonwealth officers on the plane about Shaker, and they did say he was meant to be on the plane, and the UK had requested from the US for his release."
Mohamed said last year he thought Aamer's continued detention had more to do with what the prisoner knows about the suicides of three detainees in 2006.
"What happened in 2005 and 2006 is something that the Americans don't want the world to know."
Mohamed's theory is supported by a new investigation of the suicides conducted by American law professor Scott Horton, who claims the deaths may have been the result of abuses committed at Guantanamo.
The three men were all found hanged in their cells with cloth gags stuffed in their mouths. Aamer has said he too was gagged and beaten by guards but somehow survived. Nevertheless, his lawyers believe it is what happened to him before he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay that may support a motive for the UK Government's failure to secure his release.
Aamer's allegations against the secret services, which the UK Government denies, are now the subject of the court case in which he claims he was brutally tortured.
Last month, it emerged in court that Scotland Yard had begun investigating Aamer's allegations of British involvement in his torture; his lawyers say that because he is a witness in a Scotland Yard criminal investigation, the UK has a duty under international law to bring him back to London to help the police.
The last person outside Guantanamo to have seen Aamer is American lawyer Brent Mickum, an experienced attorney who represents a number of high-profile suspects.
The man waiting for Mickum in the visitors' room in May last year was gaunt with a beard and long black hair tied back in a pony tail. He was sitting at a table with his feet and hands shackled. "I persuaded the guard to free his hands but he refused to shake my hand. He was very angry and I don't blame him for being angry.
"He gave me a letter setting out his many complaints. He has the right to be distrustful of America. But I had to get through to him about what I was doing here. I said: 'Here's who I am and what I intend to do in his case."'
Four months later, Mickum flew back to Guantanamo to see Aamer but the prisoner declined the visit. For two days, Mickum tried to see his client without success, leaving the lawyer no choice but to return home.
Then, last December, he was allowed a telephone call with Aamer. "The line was bad and I could hardly hear him. I told him that the last time I came down, they said you didn't want to see me. But he said that wasn't true and in fact he couldn't see me because he was being 'ERFed' (the deployment of an Extreme Reaction Force when guards storm a cell and subject the prisoner to beatings and restraints).
"He couldn't see me because he was hog-tied in his cell." That was the last contact Aamer had with the outside world.
Mickum believes there are now serious attempts to force Aamer to agree to a transfer to Saudi Arabia whose Government has a "rehabilitation programme" for troublesome former Guantanamo detainees with difficult stories to tell.
"Funnily enough, once they go to Saudi they never seem to get their story out," says Mickum, who last month was granted access to classified documents released in America that many believe will confirm Aamer's allegations of torture, including those made against British agents.
Until these documents are declassified, Mickum can't say what they show. But he does say this: "Shaker is a political problem, he is a public relations nightmare. The British problem is that they were present at some of his torture. But the difference between your country and mine is that if they get into court and are required to tell the truth, the impression I have is that they eventually do tell the truth."
The story of Aamer may one day be made into a film. And if it is, it will recount how one man's extraordinary personality overcame one of the most brutal prisons systems in the world. But more than that, it is also a story that has the potential to shame two nations.
- INDEPENDENT
