Shadow Lives: lest we forget the hell of internment without trial

 
6 March 2013

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC chaired a Commonwealth Club discussion last night about the wives and families of men held in Guantánamo Bay without trial. She was helping to launch Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror, by Victoria Brittain, former associate foreign editor of the Guardian.

Dame Harriet Walter read a moving letter to Tony Blair and Prince Charles from Anas el Banna, whose father is in prison in Cuba. “Dear Sir Tony Blair, I am a boy, I am seven years old ... writing to you this letter from my heart because I miss my father ... Every night I think of my dad and I cry in a very low voice so that my mother does not hear and I dream that he is coming back home and gives me a hug ... I wish you a happy life with your children in your house.”

No reply from the then PM’s office but Prince Charles’s private secretary wrote to say he was not in a position to intercede. I understand Lady Helena also wrote to her colleague in chambers Cherie Booth but received no reply. “Poor Cherie is in an impossible position,” she told me last night.

Kennedy said Victoria Brittain shone a light in dark places. And she made the best chocolate brownies in north London.

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