Shaker Aamer
By P.J. Harvey, streaming here
In 1975, Bob Dylan wrote Hurricane, a protest song exposing the plight of a railroaded prizefighter who was twice convicted of murder – and who "sits like Buddha in a 10-foot cell, an innocent man in a living hell." Unlike the eventually freed Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Saudi national Shaker Aamer has been imprisoned for 11 years and has never even been charged, let alone received a trial. The last remaining British resident detained at the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Aamer is the titular subject of a riveting, required song from P.J. Harvey, the socially engaged English alt-rocker who determinedly strums while singing a crushingly forlorn postcard-ish appeal from the point of view of a despondent detainee. "With metal tubes, we are force fed/ I honestly wish, I was dead." Hurricane's cell may have been hell, but at least it came with due process.