Enemy Combatant, A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back
By Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain
Free Press, 2006
395 pages, $34.95
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
After the suicide of three inmates of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp on June 10, an American official described it as a publicity stunt and an example of "asymmetrical warfare".
Moazzam Begg has written a telling account of the asymmetrical morality of US policy in this chilling account of his illegal capture in Pakistan followed by incarceration in American prisons, first at Kandahar, then Bagram and finally Guantanamo Bay.
After three years he was released without explanation or apology. But along the way he was subjected to more than 300 interrogations, was kept in solitary confinement for months and suffered death threats and torture.
Begg witnessed the murder of other detainees and was closely confined with Australian David Hicks. He also witnessed Mamdouh Habib's horrific state after the Egyptian torturers were finished with him.
One of the most bizarre twists of this tale is that in all Begg's years jailed as an "enemy combatant", he only ever met one self-confessed member of al Qaeda. Virtually all the other prisoners were just unfortunates who had been sold to the US by various criminal gangs in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Begg was born in Birmingham, England, of Pakistani parents. His father and forefathers before him had loyally served the Raj on the Indian subcontinent but Moazzam resisted the urge to join the British armed forces because of their racism.
Instead he found himself as a teenager testing his mettle in street fights with some of the neo-Nazi skinhead gangs that infested Britain in the 1970s. He was a founding member of the Lynx street gang, and though he "pubbed, clubbed and dated", wearing his Islam lightly, he earned the grudging respect of his elders through his fierce defence of the community.
His self-awareness as a Muslim emerged only after the 1991 Gulf War and visits to the Middle East. In the 1990s he found himself drawn towards providing direct humanitarian help for Muslims struggling for survival in Bosnia, Pakistan and other places.
His journeys broadened his political understanding and cemented his religious convictions. But being a well-travelled Muslim, who had visited a series of places where Islam was labelled as the cause of terrorism, was enough to make him a "person of interest" to both British intelligence and the CIA.
Begg eventually ended up living in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, organising girls' schools and community water projects with charity funds raised in Britain.
His account of his time in Afghanistan is the weakest part of this book. While the rest has an edge of candour, he can't bring himself to really critique the Taliban; he appears mealy mouthed at this point.
But Begg's detailed recitation of what happened to him at the hands of the US is jolting and terrifying. One interesting feature of it is that he had a higher cultural level than many of his US Army guards. As a well-educated English speaker, in many cases he affected them more strongly than they affected him.
For long periods he was kept alone in a cage with a guard assigned to record his every movement, twenty-four hours a day. He inevitably got into conversation with them and sometimes got them thinking about the war machine.
Begg's FBI and CIA questioners rarely demonstrated that they understood a thing about him, Islam or what was really happening in the Middle East. They appeared to have set theories about him that they tried to put flesh on through endlessly going over the same questions.
What emerges is a portrait of an immoral torture machine guided by idiots.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 28, 2006.
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