The US military base Guantanamo Bay has long faced allegations of torture and abuse. Bobby Higson talks to former detainee Moazzam Begg to find out about his experiences

In 2001 Moazzam Begg, a 37-year old father of four from Birmingham, planned to move to Kabul, Afghanistan with his family. En-route, in neighbouring Pakistan, he was captured, beginning an ordeal that would take away three years of his life. Begg’s abduction was to be the start of a journey to Camp Delta detention centre in Guantanamo Bay and his release, amidst heightened public awareness of the camp’s alleged human rights abuses, has been eagerly followed.

As I ask him what he was doing in Pakistan when he was captured, I instantly recognise the uneasy irony that Moazzam has been asked this hundreds of times by his interrogators. “I was building schools”, he explains. “I had a plan to go to and help build girls’ schools there, as well as help build wells for those who did not have water. It was a plan of mine I’d had for a long while.” With the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the family had decided to delay their original plan and avoid the hostilities by taking up residence in neighbouring Pakistan where Begg held dual nationality along with Britain.

It was on the night of the 31st January 2002 that Begg was seized from his house whilst his wife and children lay asleep. “Literally one night there was a knock on the door. I was dragged out by Pakistani police with a gun to my head and then bundled into the boot of a car.’

He was first taken to a US detention facility in Kandahar, south of Kabul in Afghanistan, and then on to Bagram Airbase where he was held in what he describes as “appalling conditions” . In a letter to his father dated December 2002, Begg writes, “I haven’t seen the sun, sky, moon, etc. for nearly a year.

“I am in this state of desperation and I am beginning to lose the fight against depression and hopelessness.”

There was a knock on the door and I was dragged out by Pakistani police with a gun to my head.

On February 6th 2003 Begg was taken to Guantanamo Bay. He asked to be sedated for the journey: he says it was that or being tied to the floor for two days. In the book he has written about his experiences, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back, he recounts the time he spent in solitary confinement there.

Camp Echo - or Eskimo, as they called it at that time - was the location of Begg’s new home: a cell measuring about 8 x 6ft, barely big enough to walk in. Under such oppressive conditions, I ask if it was hard to occupy himself.

“Yes it was. I spent hours just pacing up and down, which was literally just a few steps. Back and forth for hours. I also did sit ups - hundreds of different styles - just to try to keep busy. But it was hard.” He also began to write a lot of poetry, “once allowed paper and pencils” . In order to keep his spirits up and to pass the time, Begg read the Qur’an extensively. He recalls his time there with a calm and mild-mannered tone, as if almost belying the terrible ordeal he is being asked to remember.

In November 2004, Begg was subject to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal to evaluate his status as a prisoner. Amongst the allegations against Begg were that he had visited and become a member of Al-Qaeda military camps and had been trained in the use of Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), AK-47s and the manufacture of weaponry. He was also accused of providing finances and materials to these training camps at different times.

“They claimed I was in Al-Qaeda repeatedly”, he stresses. “I was asked when was the last time I’d spoken to Bin Laden as if I knew him - as if I was his friend.” So, I ask, could there have possibly been any truth in these claims?

It is only at this point in the interview that Begg breaks his calm, and the anger about the way he was treated surfaces. “Well, some of the claims were true; some based on half-truths, some completely untrue and ridiculous.

“They’d built up this idea of me as a serious threat, some sort of mastermind even, and basically picked the allegations that would fit their view of me. You see, they never came to me with any corroborative evidence to prove anything, but just kept trying to get me to admit to these charges.” The fact that he had visited military camps in the past, he says, meant that his interrogators “twisted the words into various other charges”.

In some of the nations the detainees had come from there was no campaign to free them.

Some of these charges crossed into the realms of the comical. Begg describes how, in Bagram, FBI agents examined his laptop, “my web histories, documents and things like that. Amongst the things on there was an image of the Pope stored on the hard drive. They looked at my history, and seeing this they then claimed I was attempting to assassinate him.” We share a laugh about the scene he describes, but if Begg’s captivity and his safety depended on such accusations it is disconcerting to say the least.

Of course, stopping to examine the fact that Begg has visited military training camps makes the issue far more ambiguous. He tells me that he has twice visited military training camps in Afghanistan and he admits to supporting militant Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. He recounts how, in 1993, he went on holiday to Pakistan to visit his Aunt and met people who had been wounded fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

“I met people there who told me of some terrible things that had happened to them and other people. It made me want to meet them, so I ended up visiting the camps they told me about in Afghanistan.” He insists he was there strictly to meet fighters, observe what they were doing and listen to their stories, not to take up arms with them. “My aim was to help the Afghan people” , he argues, “not to train.”

His harsher critics, however, simply refuse to accept such altruistic tendencies and claim that he is disguising his radical leanings. Begg maintains he has never wished to train to fight and he ardently believes the killing of innocents to be wrong and contrary to the most fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.

At one point, he says, the FBI agents wrote a confession for him to sign. On the second day in Guantanamo, they produced a six-page document telling him to sign it, despite being riddled with ridiculous assertions and charges of a long-standing involvement with Al-Qaeda.
In his book he describes the terrible English used in the document, knowing no-one who knew his style of writing would even believe that he was the author.

Begg was to be interrogated repeatedly, threatened psychologically as his interrogators played on anxieties about the well-being of his family. “I was lied to about friends back home” , he says. “I was told that they’d had their houses raided and were under surveillance. I was told to think about my family and what could happen to them. Eventually, though, through later communication with them, I came to realise it wasn’t like this.”

Callous mind-games weren’t all Begg had to endure during his imprisonment. I ask what other methods they used. “I had guns put to my head” , he alleges. “After the first interrogation, I was kicked and punched, beaten up to get me to talk. They tied bags over my head. Everything.”

In Bagram Airbase it was worst, he claims. “I was hog-tied - the guards tied my hands behind my back, then my hands were tied to my legs. I was then left in this position. Can you imagine that?” It was there that Begg claims he saw people and even children die in custody.
In such a situation, one would think it is impossible for friendships to form, let alone between the prisoners and the guards. Remarkably, Begg was to form an unlikely relationship with a Sergeant who was an old Alabaman Vietnam Veteran. They came to share thoughts and experiences, despite the power he held over him daily.

“He was the sort of person I’d expect to not get on with. To be honest, I just saw him as a Republican from Texas, who I perceived as a Bible touting southern redneck.” Over conversations, Begg would ask him to recount his experiences in the War in Vietnam; a subject Begg was curious in. As the two got to know each other better, it became apparent that the Sergeant was embarrassed that Begg was not afforded Prisoner of War status and was unhappy with the “˜enemy combatant’ label and the illegitimate treatment of some of the detainees.

“To him it didn’t seem right how a lot of people were being treated. He believed even as enemies you were supposed to treat a soldier with respect.”

Eventually, in January 2005, Begg and three other British detainees were flown back to the UK by an RAF aircraft. On arrival they were taken to Paddington Green police station for questioning under the Terrorism Act, but within hours all four had been released without charge.

Yet, despite the actions of MI5 and the Foreign Office, Begg still professes a nostalgia for Britain. “I had really come to miss it. Despite what had happened it’s my home, it’s where I grew up.”

But returning home was an adjustment that Begg did not make easily. Life outside after three years’ captivity made adapting a struggle. “For a time, I just wanted to be alone.
“It was quite hard for me. Though I had had so much time alone, so much time by myself in solitary, it was for so long that I actually came to value it a little.”

Did he feel guilty about those he has met who were still imprisoned? “Yes, every day.” Countries whose politics were indifferent to the human rights of those imprisoned was to be an issue that weighed further on Begg’s mind, despite being home. “Those people, I met their families, their kids, and in some of the nations they’d come from there were no campaigns to free them. They don’t even know what to do with some of these people there in Guantanamo: the Uyghurs could be executed if sent back to China, for example.”

George W. Bush has repeatedly described the prisoners of Guantanamo as killers that had been plucked from the battlefield. However, Begg is not a killer and was seized from his family home. The fact that he has not even been offered an apology after his release is worrying proof of the US’s disregard of due process and its mammoth bludgeoning of international concern. Even Tony Blair has only managed the courage publicly to call the Guantanamo Bay prison an “anomaly” .

Away from the focus of the international media on Guantanamo Bay, there are less well known imprisonment centres such as Bagram Airbase. The Red Cross are not being allowed to enter certain areas there and this denial of legal process, alongside a growing prison population that the U.S. administration refuses to even name and reports of hideous methods of torture, means that people like Clive Stafford Smith, the British human rights lawyer who represents 40 people held in Guantanmo, argue that they are even “worse.” He has said there are things happening there that would make your “skin crawl” .

Some commentators hold that places such as this, and the continuing conflict between the US, its allies and the Muslim world, are proof of the inevitable “Clash of Civilisations” , as if the two worlds are doomed to cataclysm. It’s not a view that Begg agrees with.

“No, I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think our communities are more together than we ever have been. If you take, for example, Norman Kember - the 74-year-old Christian aid worker, recently freed hostage in Iraq - there were appeals from all communities, Muslim, Jew, and Christian.

“Even people like Hamas made an appeal.” Begg remains optimistic despite the existence of places such as Guantanamo, that there is no need for any further polarising of our communities.

That Begg manages to find humour and friendship in the story he has just described to me makes it one of the most remarkable I have heard. Told with a devastatingly calm tone and sober judgement, Begg’s ordeal allows us to hear the voice of reason, and it’s a voice often drowned out amidst the clamour of the political debate surrounding the so-called “˜War on Terror’. For now, Begg shall continue to try and make his voice heard; he wants people to know what is still going on in these camps today, in our name, and refuses to allow the three years spent captive and taken from his life to be for nothing.

Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back
Free Press (2006) - RRP £14.99 paperback

Moazzam Begg’s book chronicles his experiences from growing up in Birmingham through to his release from Guantanamo in early 2005

Related posts:

• Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back, Moazzam Begg (with Victoria Brittain)
• ‘Soldiers around you, kicking, spitting, screaming, swearing’
• It’s better late than never for Guantanamo
• Archbishop attacks Guantanamo Bay following UN human rights report
• EU members implicated in US ‘torture flights’