Cleared captive freed from Gitmo

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba - The U.S. military on Friday released a British resident who had been held as a war-on-terror captive at Guantanamo for more than 13 years but was never charged with a crime.

Shaker Aamer, 48, was one of Guantanamo's best-known prisoners because some Britons, including his wife and four children living in London, had turned his case into a cause célèbre. In May, a bipartisan delegation of British members of parliament pushed for his release in meetings with Obama administration officials as well as members of Congress.

The transfer, the second release from the prison in 42 hours, left the detention center population at 112 captives. Of them, 52 have been approved for release with security arrangements that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

Aamer had been cleared for transfer from Guantanamo since 2007, although behind-the-scenes negotiations never sealed a deal until Carter notified Congress last month that he'd approved Aamer's repatriation to the United Kingdom.

Aamer had confounded U.S. efforts to send him to his native Saudi Arabia by both refusing to agree to go through the Saudi rehabilitation program - a prerequisite imposed by the Saudis - and by renouncing his citizenship.

In Britain, activists highlighted Aamer's captivity at Guantanamo as a special case because he was the last captive awaiting reunification with family in the U.K.

Aamer has three teenage children, including a son, Faris, 13, whom he's never met. The boy was born Feb. 14, 2002, a day after Aamer was brought to Guantanamo for initial custody at the crude open-air compound called Camp X-Ray.

A 2007 military intelligence profile considered Aamer a "close associate of" Osama bin Laden with a history of "jihadist combat." "Shaker is not and never has been a terrorist, and has been cleared by the Americans themselves for eight years," Aamer's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, said in a statement.