Gitmo From the Inside

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2006.

When Moazzam Begg was abducted from his home in the middle of the night on Jan. 31, 2002, he thought he was being kidnapped by thugs. Those thugs turned out to be the U.S. military and CIA. Begg was shuffled from Kandahar to Bagram to Guantanamo and held for three years before he was finally released in January 2005. As with the majority of the other detainees, Begg was never charged with any crime.

He and others endured routine physical and psychological torture, indefinite imprisonment, and solitary confinement. While it's nearly impossible to fathom emerging from years of this abuse and wrongful imprisonment, it is perhaps even more of a stretch to imagine being capable of forgiving your captors. Begg’s new book, "Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back," co-written with Victoria Brittain, puts his experience in context of the broader war on terror. As one of the few English-speaking detainees, Begg is a powerful witness to the massive failure of U.S. and British military intelligence in preventing terrorism.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: When did you first decide you were going to write this book?

Moazzam Begg: Oddly enough, the suggestions to write the book came from U.S. soldiers, interrogators, and other detainees. They were fascinated by the story, by my experiences. The more open-minded ones even understood that writing about this episode is a very important piece of history.

Roychoudhuri: Can you take me to the beginnings of your story? What led you to Afghanistan and Pakistan? Were you were abducted and taken to Kandahar?

Begg: In 2000, I had already begun working on a project to build wells in the northwest region of Afghanistan. At that time, there were some severe droughts. We had built over ten wells as a community from here where I lived with my family and other members. We'd also begun a project to build a school for girls in Kabul, which was a novelty because we were all told that the Taliban wouldn't allow female education. That's something that my wife and I had invested in and that we pursued as a family in 2001when we moved there to continue to help the progress of the school.

Roychoudhuri: You were first abducted in Pakistan. Can you describe what happened?

Begg: We had evacuated to Pakistan after the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Pakistan is where my parents are from, and I speak Urdu, so it was easy for me to be there. I was safe for a few months until I was abducted on the night of Jan. 31, 2002. There was a knock on the door, [and] I answered to be faced with people pointing guns. They pushed me to the ground, dragged me across the floor, took me into the front room, put a bag over my head, bound my legs and wrists, and then carried me off into the back of this vehicle.

Roychoudhuri: What were you thinking at the time?

Begg: That this was a kidnapping. I thought that they were local gangsters. They didn't identify themselves, ask me who I was, or show identification and they didn't search me. For the first ten minutes, I thought that these guys were gangsters until one of them pulled my hood up.

There was a Caucasian trying to look like a local and doing a pretty bad job at it. He had this black thing wrapped around his head in a style that no local would ever do; it just looked funny. It was funny and frightening all at the same time. He produced handcuffs and said that he was an American, and that he got the handcuffs from one of the wives of the 9/11 victims who had told him to go catch the perpetrators. So then I realized that this was obviously the CIA, and that things were going to get worse probably before they got better.

Overkill is a good description of how people reacted in the broader picture of both the terrible terrorist attacks, but also the response to that attack. We occupied two countries with populations in total of over 30 or 40 million. That's a huge overreaction.

Roychoudhuri: When you were first kidnapped, you were taken to a Pakistani jail. What happened there?

Begg: I was afraid of being in Pakistani custody because it's well-known that you get beaten. They're notorious for getting all kinds of confessions. At first, I was glad that there were Americans there. But the irony is that the Pakistanis were extremely apologetic, they called me "son," they said they felt bad about what was happened, that I was fully legal in the country as far as they were concerned. But they said the Americans were telling them to do this, and that they have to be either with them, as the president said, or against them. The great paradox was that the second I was transferred to U.S. custody, that's when the brutality began.

Roychoudhuri: From Pakistan, you were sent to Kandahar, then Bagram?

Begg: I was held in Kandahar for about six weeks. That was the most brutal processing experience I had. When I was held by the Pakistanis, they didn't shackle me, they just put a towel over my head when I was moving around so I couldn't see things. But with the Americans, it was the legs shackled, hands behind your back, clothes torn off with a knife, dogs barking, being beaten, punched, shaved, having trophy photographs taken by soldiers, and being naked and interrogated. I could never have imagined this was how the United States treated people. It was clear that the process of dehumanization was already in effect from the moment I reached Kandahar.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. A former assistant editor at AlterNet, she has also written for MotherJones.com, Women's e-News and PopMatters.

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