'Guantanamo Bay will stay open': Ex-detainee and Wolverhampton student Moazzam Begg
Former Wolverhampton student Moazzam Begg, who was held at Guantanamo Bay for three years between 2002 and 2005, has greeted the announcement by Barack Obama that it will finally be closed with scepticism.
The US president has released his plans to shut the controversial camp by January 2017 - eight years after he first ordered it to close in 2009.
There are currently 91 detainees at Guantanamo Bay – 35 are expected to be transferred out to other countries by this summer while the rest are either facing trial by military commission or have been determined too dangerous to be released but are not facing charges.
Mr Begg was accused of being an al-Qaeda member and alleged to have recruited for the group, but was released without charge and allowed to return to the UK.
He said: "No, I don't think so.
"I think it will remain open, because what are the alternatives?
"What is he saying?
"Obama is saying we settle 35 prisoners abroad and all the others – 50 odd – we are going to bring them to the US mainland.
"They have already had statements from people on the US mainland, where they are proposed to go, from the locals there who have signed petitions saying 'we don't want these folk coming over here'.
"I think it is going to be very difficult for it to happen on a practical level."
He added: "Obama is a former constitutional lawyer, he understands the rule of law.
"And if he said the one thing he hasn't said so far, I think it would make it very difficult not to close Guantanamo.
"That is to say that those people who have been held without charge or trial and there is no evidence against, are innocent.
"Whether we think they are dangerous or not, they are innocent according to the law.
"You have had 14 years of the world's most powerful law enforcement security agencies interrogating these guys, if you don't have the evidence now you never will."
Together with other British citizens who had been detained at Guantanamo, Mr Begg launched a legal action against the British government for complicity in their alleged abuse and torture while in US custody.
In 2010 he received a payout estimated to be around £1 million.
In March 2014 Begg was charged with providing terrorist training and funding terrorism overseas, regarding Syria, and appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court, entering a plea of not guilty. In October of the same year all of the charges against him were dropped.
