Enemy Combatant. A British Muslim: Journey to Guantanamo and Back by Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain. Simon and Schuster, £18.99.
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/57367.htmlOn that terrifying night in Islamabad in January 2002, normality drained from the life of Moazzam Begg, reducing him to a non-person. For the next three years he was invisible to all but his captors, his fellow internees and his interrogators, who interviewed him 300 times, never producing evidence of their terrorism accusations, never putting him on trial yet shackling and branding him as an enemy combatant, a threat to the United States.
If the words Guantanamo Bay were not so familiar we might think his was the story of a gulag in Soviet Russia. But it's an ugly measure of our changed world that violating human rights is no longer the exclusive hallmark of barbarous regimes. It has crept into the unseen corners of George Bush's war on terror.
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Recently, the prime minister, seeking to fend off criticism that he had not been forceful in his own condemnation, described Guantanamo as "an anomaly" which should be shut down, a rebuke so tame, his critics say, that it will hardly dent President Bush's sensibilities.But now comes Michael Winterbottom's ferocious docu-drama, The Road to Guantanamo, which will do nothing to lessen the tarnished image of America abroad.
"I saw the film last night," says Begg, "and it brought back all the horrors of incarceration in that cage where I paced up and down like an animal, unable to take more than three steps either way. And, you know, watching the movie's graphic reconstruction was more difficult than writing the book, which was sort of therapeutic." Unlike the film, Begg's narrative in Enemy Combatant is calm and reflective, but running through it is the underlying sorrow of a man still haunted and in shock from the nightmare that befell him.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m21096&l=i&size=1&hd=0http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329420538-101750,00.html<snip>
from The Guardian: After that first heavy interrogation they took me into another room and left me there. Guards tied my hands behind my back, hog-tied me so that my hands were shackled to my legs, which were also shackled. Then they put a hood over my head. It was stuffy and hard to breathe, and I was on the verge of asthmatic panic. The perpetual darkness was frightening. A barrage of kicks to my head and back followed. Lying on the ground, with my back arched, and my wrists and ankles chafing against the metal chains, was excruciating. I could never wriggle into a more comfortable position, even for a moment. There was a thin carpet on the concrete floor, and a little shawl for warmth - both completely inadequate.
I lost track of day and night - not only was I usually in the hood but, in any case, the window was boarded up. Eventually, someone came in and removed the hood. I was there in isolation for about a month. Once they kept me from sleeping for about two days and two nights. A guard kept coming in and if I nodded off he woke me. By the end of that I was completely drained and disoriented.
I never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes they'd take me to an outside toilet - used by the military as there wasn't one upstairs. But even then I was hooded, and the hood came off only when I was in the latrine area. There on the wall, in big black letters, were the words "Fuck Islam".
For days on end I was alone in the room. Then they'd come for me and go over and over exactly the same ground: the camps, my role in training, my role in al-Qaeda, my role in financing 9/11. Sometimes it was the CIA, sometimes the FBI; sometimes I didn't even know who they were. All of them wanted a story that didn't exist. There are no words to describe what I felt like.
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