Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar

Moazzam Begg has given us a rare testimony of the experience of a survivor of torture in his book, Enemy Combatant, My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar. Moazzam starts his story as a child who lost his mother at the age of six. He relates his early education as a Muslim in a Jewish school, his troubled teen years as a member of the Lynx gang. Moazzam is a second generation Pakistani who is born in and grows up as a British citizen. By the time he marries Zaynab and fathers his first two children we are familiar enough with Moazzam that we know him as a fascinating human being in search of an identity. After Moazzam marries he makes a critical decision to live his life as a devout Muslim with a special commitment to practice charity and social justice. This fateful decision leads him to travel to Pakistan, Turkey, and finally to settle in Kabul Afghanistan where he can assist the poorest of the poor. When the United States, in response to 9/11, attacks the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Moazzam and his family, caught in the crossfire, flee to Pakistan. Moazzam's travel and work for the poor brings him under suspicion of the British M15. Soon thereafter he is awakened in the middle of the night and carried off to Bagram, Kandahar and finally to Guantanamo where his harrowing three year experience as a prisoner of US forces begins. Moazzam is branded a terrorist. In fact, Moazzam is considered such a threat to security he is placed in solitary confinement, continually watched by an American soldier for twenty-three long months. He is only taken out of his cage to endure over three hundred interrogations. His interrogation runs the whole gamut of physical and psychological abuse including threats to his family. In the treatment of Moazzam the reader can understand the consequences of the suspension of the Geneva conventions, the denial of the writ of habeas corpus, the endless time it takes for the prisoner to get effective legal representation. Moazzam's life becomes the focal point of the dramatic battle in the courts, the Congress, and the Bush-Blair administrations, human rights organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, concerning the proper (hopefully legal and just) means to "wage the war on terror." Moazzam spends most of his time in Guantanamo in a section of the prison called, ironically, Camp Echo. From Camp Echo, comes a sound that is surely not intended by Moazzam's captors. It is the sound of a beautiful, innocent human being, who with the strength given to him by indomitable character and reliance on his Muslim faith, turns the table on the guards and the prison system. Without minimizing the awful pain, fear and isolation he undergoes, the reader finds Moazzam Begg retains his dignity, defends himself, and in the process, even uplifts the American soldiers who guard him. Some even come to respect him, seek his advice, and even see themselves less free than he. Without any lessening of Moazzam's desir

The author was a second-generation British Muslim born and raised in England, and was seized from his family home in Pakistan in 2002, accused by the U.S. of being a terrorist, and held for over three years. His story of his imprisonment and detention including two years at Guantanamo Bay provides the first account by a detainee of life inside the prison. From his intense interrogations to his release in 2005, this account is co-authored by Victoria Brittain, former foreign editor of the UK Guardian, and provides an engrossing, condemning eyewitness account of the US prison system and civil rights pertaining to terrorist suspects. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Moazzam Begg was a young muslim working in Pakistan shortly after 9/11. He had been an idealist. He had visited sensitive places particularly in Afghanistan. And that was about it. Although it was enough to see him abducted from his home and, via Kandahar and Bagram, to become one of the British detainees in Guantanamo Bay. He remained in detention for 3 years. He was in solitary confinement for much of the time. He was interrogated time and time again. He was threatened with death and torture. Finally he was freed without ever finding out what he was supposed to have done. Neither has he ever received an apology or explanation. This is a well written book that confirms what we have all suspected about Guantanamo. The nightmare is made more stark by Begg's writing. He comes across as a quiet intelligent young man with a dry sense of humour. One poignant moment is when he and other detainees discuss the rights and wrongs of militant Islam - Begg taking a moderate tone which contrasts with the attitude of the powers that have detained him. Indeed he also shows a remarkable lack of bitterness. For months on end his only human contact was the particular guard who was watching him. He builds up a sympathetic relationship with these guards against whom no persoanl grudge is seen. Anyone who has any doubts about this affront to human rights which should embarass all of us in the West should read this book.

This book, "Enemy Combatant," draws its power from simple, straight forward descriptions of what it was like for an innocent man to be arrested in the night as a suspected terrorist in Pakistan, torn from wife and children, and then spend the next years of his life in US prisons at Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo. No preaching or polemics. The author, UK citizen Moazzam Begg, even has compassion and forgiveness for the frightened young military police, soldiers and a few of the interrogators. Even for people who brutalized him physically and psychologically. In 2002 or 2003, I heard the author's father, a British banker and other parents of Gitmo detainees, speak at an event sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights at Cooper Union in New York City. When I heard these parents speak, I and many others assumed all prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba were probably terrorists. The Center held the event to increase our awareness that it was only humane for the prisoners to know the charges against them, contact their families, and get a (fair) trial even if military. I had worked daily on the 101-105th floors of World Trade One until March 01 and know hundreds of the dead, could have been with them, so I took terrorism threats very seriously. But I went to hear the parents of detainees speak because I believe Americans can protect ourselves from terror attacks without, in the process, destroying the Bill of Rights and our nation's commitment to fair treatment of every individual. When the author's father told us why his son Moazzam had gone from the UK with his wife and children before 9-11 to work with a girls' school and a water project, I remember thinking, "This may be the lie of a terrorist's father or his naievete about his son, but it certainly sounds truthful." In the book, I have met many of those "enemy combatants" in Gitmo, many of whom even the US now says were not trying to attack Americans or the US. In the book, I met men who were arrested because they had been in Afghanistan training camps before 9-11 to fight the Russians... Men who were sold to Americans looking for terrorists... Or who went to Afghanistan before 9-11 to help impoverished people and got scooped up like the author who had gone to set up schools for girls, water projects and other charity services as part of Muslim charity similar to Christian missionary work... Or heard about the collateral damage - deaths of civilians after American started bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 and went to help protect the Afghani people caught in the bombings. Much as Lebanese and Israelis are leaving the US to help their countrymen now. Throughout the book, Moazzam Begg, with the help of former Guardian editor Victoria Brittain, invites us to become a part of his childhood in England, his family in Pakistan, Kashmir and India, and then his life as a prisoner without any legal protection from guards who were terrified that he had funded the 9/11