SHAKER AAMER is finally at home with his family, but the 13 years he suffered in the Guantanamo Bay torture camp stand as an eternal badge of shame for Britain.

Successive British governments colluded with Washington’s denial of justice and humanity to prisoners in US-occupied Cuba, putting a mythical “special relationship” before the rule of law.

Aamer, in common with most other Guantanamo inmates — or “residents” as the BBC quaintly refers to them — was not, despite Pentagon propaganda, captured on the field of battle fighting for al-Qaida.

He was kidnapped in Afghanistan by bounty hunters in 2001 and sold to the US military to be subjected to inhuman treatment in Bagram airbase, before being flown to Cuba and misrepresented as a terrorist and a threat to peace and democracy.

After years of torture and false testimony, his US captors accepted that this was nonsense and cleared him for release from the Guantanamo Bay hellhole in 2007, confirming this position three years later.

Despite initial assurances that legal charges would be laid against inmates who would then face trial, this was never a possibility since US politicians would not countenance the transfer into the land of the free of what they were told were the “worst of the bad guys.”

So the men were left to rot, tortured and humiliated by their guards, while US political careerists played to the gallery about the supposed war on terror.

Any prospect of legal process disappeared within a sort time as it dawned on investigators that the men banged up in Guantanamo bore no relationship to the characters described so luridly by media and politicians.

They were simply unfortunates caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and suiting the financial opportunism of the bounty hunters and the political interests of US imperialism.

British governments should have spoken out strongly against the treatment meted out by our US ally not only to Aamer but also to his wife and four children, the youngest of whom, now a teenager, has never met his father.

But supposed quiet diplomacy — in effect, craven subservience — was the order of the day as ministers downplayed the scandal of their compliance with Barack Obama’s cowardly refusal to use his executive powers to free the innocent.

Were it not for the tireless efforts of the Save Shaker campaign led by Joy Hurcombe and the Shaker Aamer all-party parliamentary group headed by John McDonnell, Aamer’s plight might have disappeared from public awareness.

Aamer insisted from the start that he had been engaged in charity work in Afghanistan, helping to build wells and to provide schools for girls.

No evidence has ever been adduced to contradict this, although there remain unashamed supporters of the torture regime happy to give credence to “facts” established through physical and mental mistreatment.

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), which enjoys the patronage of dozens of British MPs — including, to their shame, a number of Labour members — proclaims its attachment to “freedom, liberty, constitutional democracy, human rights.”

Yet it pronounces Aamer a potential threat to national security on the grounds that the US government thought that he may be and that both detainees and guards at Guantanamo Bay found him impressive.

Repeated smearing of a man treated so abominably must be given short shrift, as should the HJS call for Aamer to be monitored carefully by security services, which have yet to confirm their role in his interrogation under torture.

He should be assisted to regain his health fully and to rebuild his relationship with his family, both of which would be best assisted by awareness that his years of being harassed and snooped on are at an end.