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DaSangarTalib
03-19-2006, 03:16 PM
REVIEWED BY CHRISTINA LAMB



ENEMY COMBATANT: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back
by Moazzam Begg



Free Press £18.99 pp395


Even the most die-hard supporter of the war on terror is hard put to justify the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. How can you retain the moral high ground and fight for values such as personal freedom if you are keeping hundreds of people caged in subhuman conditions, for years, without charge?

The UN has said it should be closed, as have a growing chorus of Labour ministers including, last week, Peter Hain. President Bush’s most faithful supporter, Tony Blair, can do no better than calling it an “anomaly”.


So the first account of life behind the razor wire has turned its author, former detainee Moazzam Begg, into a celebrity, a regular feature on talk shows over the previous week. Arrested in Pakistan in January 2002 for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Begg spent three years in detention at Bagram, then Guantanamo, one of nine Britons held there. His book confirms the leaked stories that have emerged: of torture, beatings to death, being forced to wear the infamous orange jump suits and share communal toilet buckets, of maggot-infested cells, and prisoners kept awake by bright lights and loud music (the blasting of the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever into a cell was a whole new form of torture to me).


Perhaps most cruel of all for a devoted family man, for two nights he was made to suffer the screams of a woman in the next cell, whom he was led to believe was his wife.


It is hard to read this and not be ashamed that it is being done in our names, by a country that professes to be the great defender of freedom. Surely such treatment would turn anyone against the west? Yet Begg shows a remarkable lack of bitterness, while pointing out that most of his fellow inmates were innocents who were simply caught up in the fighting in Afghanistan in 2001.


Although his account is horrifying, this is nothing we have not heard before. I was more struck by the complete pointlessness of much of the questioning. At the processing centre in Kandahar, two men in FBI baseball caps ask Begg when he last spoke to Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden, as if he would pour forth information.


Later, at Bagram, his interrogators accuse him of planning the assassination of the Pope on the basis of photographs on his laptop: this, he points out, is simply the history of websites he had looked at. At Guantanamo, he finds he has more in common culturally with his guards than with fellow inmates, most of whom are uneducated Afghans, and ends up discussing movies with some of them. But he is condescending on the dim-wittedness of many of his American captors, one of whom asks him to “stop using big words”.


While I read this book with growing discomfort about the treatment of the detainees, I also felt uneasy at the way Begg glosses over visits to training camps of militant Pakistani groups as if they were school trips. The most moving part is his account of growing up as a Muslim in Birmingham in the 1970s and 1980s. His mother died of breast cancer when he was six and he was brought up by his father, a bank manager and frustrated poet, who tells him stories of fleeing India at Partition on the so-called Death Trains.


Subjected to “Paki-bashing” on the streets of Birmingham, he learns martial arts and joins a gang. Not surprisingly, when he hears of the rape of Muslim women in Bosnia, the sense of a religion under siege becomes acute. His life is changed by a holiday to Pakistan that leads to a visit to a training camp in Afghanistan. The commitment of the fighters he meets so impresses him that when he returns home, he gives up going to pubs and nightclubs, and opens an Islamic bookshop.


Trips to Bosnia and Chechnya follow, as well as a period living in Peshawar. Begg claims he took his family to live in Afghanistan in 2001 to drill wells and support a school. Even though it was a question repeatedly asked by his captors, he offers no answer as to why a man who worries endlessly about the welfare of his family might have moved them from a comfortable lifestyle in the Midlands to Taliban Afghanistan.


His attempts to defend the Taliban as not as bad as they were painted seem odd for a man clearly so well read and who witnessed some of their victims hanging from lampposts. Similarly, he dismisses hearing about September 11 in a small paragraph, saying that, as he did not have television in Kabul, he had no idea of the scale of the attack.


This seems odd. Most Afghans listen to the radio and, as a keen news and movie buff, Begg was surely familiar with the World Trade Center. He says the first time he was aware of what it really meant was October 17, yet this is nine days after the bombing of Afghanistan started.


Only when the Taliban fled Kabul did he leave and escape to Islamabad. It was there, in January 2002, that he got the midnight knock that marked the start of a Kafkaesque nightmare in which he found himself in a legal no man’s land — an “enemy combatant” rather than a prisoner of war and thus deprived of rights under the Geneva Conventions. It is a shocking story that might open the eyes of those who still believe “Gitmo” is the best available option.

Available at the Books First price of £17.09 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

THE OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Moazzam Begg appears at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Wednesday, March 29, at 12.30pm. Telephone 0870 343 1001 for tickets



SOURCE: The Times
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HeiGou
03-19-2006, 03:20 PM
Just for the record, this was also published about Begg.

Begg 'told FBI he trained with al-Qa'eda'
(Filed: 09/03/2006)

Was Briton held in Guantanamo a terrorist or an innocent victim of torture? Con Coughlin sees the statement he gave to US interrogators


"Moazzam Begg is an innocent victim of American brutality. That was the way the British-born former Guantanamo Bay detainee presented himself this week as he toured television and radio stations to promote a book he co-wrote with the former Guardian journalist Victoria Brittain.

The well-spoken and articulate Begg said he was nothing more than an innocent teacher in Afghanistan, who was illegally abducted and cruelly tortured by the American military, both in Afghanistan and later at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.

When, for example, Begg was asked directly by Andrew Marr on Radio 4's Start the Week whether he had ever fought with al-Qa'eda or the Taliban, he categorically denied that he had ever been involved in terrorism; Brittain later told Radio 2's Jeremy Vine that Begg was "completely innocent" of any wrong-doing.

But Begg's account is starkly at odds with the signed statement he gave to FBI agents while held in Afghanistan after his capture in February 2002, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by The Daily Telegraph. In the statement, which US officials insist was not obtained under duress, Begg admits to having attended three separate al-Qa'eda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan where he learnt to fire AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and use primitive explosive devices.

In the statement, he also admitted that, when living in Britain, he acted as a "communications link" between radical Muslims in the UK and others living abroad.

During the war in Afghanistan in October 2001, Begg says he "was armed and prepared to fight alongside the Taliban and al-Qa'eda against the US and others".

After the collapse of the Taliban, he retreated to the Tora Bora cave complex with Osama bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qa'eda leadership. From there, he made his way to Pakistan where he stayed with his wife and children until his capture by US forces.

The details contained in Begg's FBI statement bear little relation to the contents of his book, Enemy Combatant, which he wrote after the British Government secured his release from Guantanamo in January last year.

As part of the conditions set by Washington for his release, Begg is still not allowed to leave Britain and his activities are closely monitored by British intelligence, even though no formal charges have been brought against him.

But like Britain's other former Guantanamo detainees, Begg has attracted enormous publicity by alleging he was regularly tortured during the three years he was held in US custody, and that he was innocent of any involvement in al-Qa'eda's terror activities. He claims in his book that the FBI agents wrote his confession and made him sign it.

While Begg is this week busy promoting his book, tonight Channel 4 will broadcast The Road to Guantanamo, a drama-documentary that claims to recount the experience of three British Muslims held at Guantanamo, the so-called Tipton Three. Like Begg, the Tipton Three claim that their motives for travelling to Afghanistan in late 2001 were purely innocent; like Begg they were illegally detained by the US and shipped off to Guantanamo.

Begg, in his book, provides graphic descriptions of how, while he was detained at Guantanamo, he was held for nearly two years in solitary confinement, during which time he was kicked and beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door and left hanging, and led to believe that he was about to be executed.

Begg's accusations of torture and mistreatment have been rejected by the Bush administration, which says the allegations have been thoroughly examined by an independent team of investigators. They looked at the records of Begg's interrogations and found no evidence of abuse.

"It has almost become common practice for former detainees to claim they were abused at Guantanamo," said a senior Defence Department official. "There have been isolated cases of mistreatment, but nothing approaching the kind of systematic abuse that Begg alleges, and nothing that specifically relates to him."

American officials point out that Begg's account of his activities in his book directly contradicts the statement he provided to FBI investigators following his capture.

Before being transferred to Guantanamo, Begg was interrogated at length at the US military base at Bagram, in Afghanistan. And American officials say it was as a consequence of the information he provided that it was decided to transfer him to Guantanamo.

Of the 70,000 Afghan fighters captured during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001-2002, only 750, those deemed to be the most dangerous, were sent to Guantanamo.

In his statement Begg told his interrogators that he first became interested in jihad (holy war) during the Bosnian civil war in the mid-1990s. Begg, who has dual British and Pakistani citizenship, was born in Birmingham in 1968. He became interested in politics in his mid-20s, and was deeply disturbed by the suffering of the Bosnian Muslims.

After undergoing basic training in Afghanistan, he travelled to Bosnia where he linked up with a radical Muslim group called the Convoy of Mercy.

In his FBI statement Begg says: "I conducted five or six missions with the Convoy of Mercy organisation." Of his involvement in the Bosnian conflict he told his interrogators: "In the early 1990s I was focused on the global jihad being waged against Bosnia, Russia, and India, and it became clear to me by 1996 that the jihad was also against the United States. I felt that jihad was an appropriate way to deal with those who harmed Muslims, especially jihad against Russia, and India, since I viewed them as oppressors of Muslims."

Begg makes no mention of these statements in his book. While conceding that he visited Bosnia at the time, he insists he was only involved in aid work.

After Bosnia, Begg briefly travelled to Chechnya, again to do aid work before returning home to set up an Islamic bookshop in Birmingham. Begg writes that his aim in setting up the bookshop was "to make enough money to support our families, to give some of the profits to charity, and to educate people about Islam".

But at Bagram, according to Begg's statement, he told the FBI that the shop was a focal point "for assisting Islamic militants by spreading Islam and recruiting individuals for global jihad".

The shop was eventually raided by Special Branch in the summer of 2000, and Begg was charged with possession of an illegal weapon.

Soon afterwards Begg closed the shop, and emigrated to Pakistan in 2001 with his wife and three young children. From Pakistan he travelled to Afghanistan where, according to the statement, he underwent training at three al-Qa'eda camps: the al-Badr camp, the Khalid bin Walid camp and the Derunta camp. He told his interrogators he underwent a wide range of training in terrorist techniques including conducting ambushes.

According to the FBI, Begg admitted his role as an al-Qa'eda fighter during his interrogation. "While at the front alongside the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, I never wore a uniform, but had a weapon," his statement reads.

"I was armed and prepared to fight alongside the Taliban and al-Qa'eda against the US and others and eventually retreated to Tora Bora, Afghanistan, to flee from US forces when our front lines collapsed."

He also told his interrogators of his sympathy for al-Qa'eda and the Taliban. He said: "I knowingly provided comfort and assistance to al-Qa'eda members by housing their families, helped distribute al-Qa'eda propaganda, and recruited members for terrorist camps, knowing that certain trainees could become al-Qa'eda operatives and commit acts of terrorism against the United States, its citizens and its interests."

Begg's book, however, offers a very different explanation for his presence in Afghanistan during the war in 2001. According to Begg, he was not attending al-Qa'eda training camps but teaching children in Afghanistan and had been there barely two months when the September 11 attacks occurred, closely followed by the American invasion.

In the scramble to evacuate, Begg became separated from his family and ended up in Pakistan. A week later he discovered his family was living just round the corner in Islamabad. They spent three happy months together before he was captured by American forces.

This is a very moving story but the only problem is that, according to US officials, it is very different to the one he gave the FBI. The Daily Telegraph tried to put all these points to Begg, but he was not available for comment.
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HeiGou
03-19-2006, 03:29 PM
format_quote Originally Posted by Fight&Die4Allah
ENEMY COMBATANT: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back
by Moazzam Begg

So the first account of life behind the razor wire has turned its author, former detainee Moazzam Begg, into a celebrity, a regular feature on talk shows over the previous week. Arrested in Pakistan in January 2002 for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Begg spent three years in detention at Bagram, then Guantanamo, one of nine Britons held there.
Just to point out here the claim is that he was arrested because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not that he had trained with Al-Qaeda or because he was a jihadi but because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Let's see what even he admits to.

At Guantanamo, he finds he has more in common culturally with his guards than with fellow inmates, most of whom are uneducated Afghans, and ends up discussing movies with some of them.
Which is not surprising as he was a Western-raised Muslim but ironic in that he wanted to ban these things and destroy the culture that produced them.

While I read this book with growing discomfort about the treatment of the detainees, I also felt uneasy at the way Begg glosses over visits to training camps of militant Pakistani groups as if they were school trips.
Even this soft-soap-sell has problems with the fact that he attended terrorist training camps. Who would have guessed? What was he doing in said terror training camps?

His life is changed by a holiday to Pakistan that leads to a visit to a training camp in Afghanistan. The commitment of the fighters he meets so impresses him that when he returns home, he gives up going to pubs and nightclubs, and opens an Islamic bookshop.
So he becomes militant and undergoes terrorist training. Not quite just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. More being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a terrorist education.

Trips to Bosnia and Chechnya follow, as well as a period living in Peshawar.
Trips to Bosnia and Chechnya where he did what? Look at the flowers? Again not so much being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with terrorist education and experience of some of the world's jihadi hot spots.

Peshawar being a euphemism for Afghanistan I assume.

Begg claims he took his family to live in Afghanistan in 2001 to drill wells and support a school.
Claims being the important word. So not so much being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with terrorist education, experience of some of the world's jihadi hot spots and an open sympathy for the Taleban.

Even though it was a question repeatedly asked by his captors, he offers no answer as to why a man who worries endlessly about the welfare of his family might have moved them from a comfortable lifestyle in the Midlands to Taliban Afghanistan.
See above.

His attempts to defend the Taliban as not as bad as they were painted seem odd for a man clearly so well read and who witnessed some of their victims hanging from lampposts.
So not so much being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with terrorist education, experience of some of the world's jihadi hot spots and an open sympathy for the Taleban which he continues to defend.

[quote] Only when the Taliban fled Kabul did he leave and escape to Islamabad.

So not so much being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with terrorist education, experience of some of the world's jihadi hot spots, an open sympathy for the Taleban which he continues to defend and which he did not abandon until they had been defeated on the battle field.

And this is all stuff that he admits to. Think how bad the truth probably is. My question is simple - why did they let him out?
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