“Wish you weren’t there” - send a postcard of your home town for Shaker Aamer

Funny things postcards, aren’t they? It was always the case that you’d usually get back from holiday before your postcards did. Now that you’ll have been showing off about sunny weather and cheap cocktails in tweets and Facebook status updates from the moment your plane touched down, they seem even more like a relic from a bygone age.

That said, my mum and dad still send me a postcard whenever they go on holiday and it’s so much more touching than a text message. You get the feeling that someone cares a bit more if they’ve taken the effort to buy a card, write it and post it.

That’s also the thinking behind our new postcard action campaign for Shaker Aamer, a former UK resident who’s been locked up for nearly nine years in Guantanamo Bay without ever being charged with a crime or put on trial. We want the US authorities to know that people in the UK still care about him.

We’re asking people to send a postcard of their local area to Special Envoy Daniel Fried in Washington, the man tasked with closing Guantanamo. We want people to ask him to ensure that Shaker is either charged and given a fair trial, or released back to the UK to be with his wife and kids in Battersea, south London.

Here’s the text that we suggest you write:

Dear Special Envoy Fried
Please release former UK resident Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo Bay to be with his family in the UK, or charge him promptly and give him a fair trial.
President Obama has committed to close Guantanamo. Returning Shaker Aamer to the UK, a safe country that is willing to take him and where his family lives, would be real progress towards closure.
Yours sincerely,
NAME (plus address if you want to include it)

SEND YOUR POST CARD TO:
Special Envoy Daniel Fried
US Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington DC, 20520
USA

We’re also keen to get as many people as possible doing this, so please tweet a link to this post and send it to your facebook friends.

If you’re really keen you could even get a load of people to send postcards – hold a stall in your town centre and invite local people to fill in postcards that you have already bought and addressed, or host a “postcard writing marathon” where you ask people to write postcards for Shaker.

You can find out more about Shaker Aamer at www.amnesty.org.uk/shaker