OC Weekly interview: “America came to me.”

The OC Weekly’s Nick Schou interviews Moazzam Begg about ENEMY COMBATANT and his work since writing the book. A powerful excerpt from the end of their talk:

Bush agreed to release you over the objections of the FBI, Pentagon and CIA.
That’s what I’ve read. But Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq on the advice of the CIA and FBI, and against their advice he releases me? It sounds like a special favor to Tony Blair, but I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as that. The fact is, nobody could charge me with anything to justify what they did to me. President Bush says that I, along with the other detainees, are the worst of the worst, and now I’m free, walking the streets of London. And now I’m working with an organization called Caged Prisoners, which highlights the cases of all the detainees in Guantanamo.

What should American people know about your experience right now, as Bush tries to convince us to allow torture of detainees there and elsewhere around the world?
Back in Bagram, a week before they threatened to send me to Egypt, there was another man held there who they did send to Egypt and he was tortured to the point of saying he helped Al Qaeda give weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein. I could have been that person. If they sent me to Egypt, I could have been the person to admit to being a high-ranking Al Qaeda person helping Saddam get WMDs. That confession was used as an excuse to invade Iraq. That invasion has put Americans in more danger than at any time in their history, at least any American who travels outside their country is in more danger now than ever before.

Have you ever been to America?
No. I’ve never been to America. America came to me.

Two reviews from Texas

The Houston Chronicle and The Austin American-Statesman both picked up the Washington Post review.

More Moazzam on Morning Edition Friday

NPR will air more of Moazzam Begg’s interview with Morning Edition on Friday, according to the program’s editors’ meeting blog.

Morning Edition + excerpt

You can listen to Moazzam Begg on today’s Morning Edition, plus read an excerpt from ENEMY COMBATANT, at NPR.org.

Begg tells Steve Inskeep that he “never ever was a threat to the security of the United States of America.”

The Pentagon, however, says that Begg is still a dangerous man.

Begg agrees that he is dangerous.

“The danger now comes in the so-called PR war,” he says. “I can speak about things [the Pentagon] thought, perhaps, that they could get away with.”

Begg op-ed in Boston Globe

Moazzam Begg authored an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe. He writes about being called as a potential witness against a soldier alleged of mistreating detainees:

The then specialist, Damien Corsetti , didn’t mistreat me. He never interrogated me and he always passed by my cage with a smile, often stopping to talk. He even gave me reading books at a time when they were hard to come by. One of the books, ironically, Heller’s “Catch-22,” is described as “the classic antiwar novel of our time.” I was even allowed to bring it with me to England, where it remains on my bookshelf, next to another book from US soldiers: a military issue of the Bible, in full camouflage jacket.

He concludes:

In his defense, Corsetti’s lawyer is reported to have said: “The president of the United States doesn’t know what the rules are. The secretary of defense doesn’t know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. [private first class] to know what the rules are?”

Corsetti cannot escape culpability by this argument. But it does suggest that responsibility stretches higher up the chain of command. Meanwhile, we continue to pay the price because nobody knows what the rules are.

Moazzam Begg on Morning Edition on THURSDAY

Sorry for the mix-up, folks. Moazzam Begg’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition will air Thursday morning. 

You can listen live and read more about it here.

Listen to the Rachel Maddow Show!

Moazzam Begg will be on a major national radio show on Tuesday, September 12:

– The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America, scheduled for 7:30 am (EST). You can listen live or read about it after it airs.

Chicago Sun-Times review

Calling ENEMY COMBATANT a “shocking firsthand account,” Sun-Times Books Editor Cheryl L. Reed writes:

We often forget that Americans weren’t the only victims of 9/11. Even people who have never been to our country and weren’t members of al-Qaida have suffered at our country’s rush to judgment, our fear, our lust for vengeance. …

As Americans, we like to believe that even with its flaws our jurisprudence is superior to European countries. But since we initiated the “War on Terror,” Muslim detainees weren’t even held by standards established for prisoners of war, a status that President Bush refused to give the Guantanamo prisoners. Begg’s interrogators defended their policy of “presumed guilty”: “After 9/11, Moazzam, the rules changed,” an FBI interrogator told him. “We have new laws, and according to them, you’re already convicted.”

In the book’s opening scene, Begg was shoved into the back of a pickup truck and two Americans, badly disguised as Pakistanis with cloths on their heads, snapped pictures of him. Though Begg was already wearing plastic flexicuffs, one of the Americans waved a pair of metal handcuffs at him.

“I was given these by the wife of a victim of the Sept. 11th attacks,” he told Begg. But Begg, who was stifling laughter at the Americans’ poor Pakistani outfits, responded: “She would think you were really stupid, having caught the wrong person.”

Clever and increasingly fearless, Begg often responded to his captors with a sardonic wit, providing the only comic relief in an otherwise painful, sad book. Throughout his ordeal, Begg wrote poetry and drafted long letters complaining of his treatment and lack of any charges or access to a lawyer, things he expected as a British citizen. He befriended his guards and often engaged his interrogators in philosophical discussions.

Washington Post review

Sunday’s Washington Post — available online now — has a great review of ENEMY COMBATANT.

Jane Mayer points out that Begg’s writing provides a rare chance to hear directly from a detainee, a point of view virtually silenced by the US government:

His book shows that he does indeed pose a serious threat — but not the sort for which our intelligence and military establishments have steeled themselves. Begg has launched a devastating public-relations attack against American policies, one that is all the more effective because it is restrained, fair-minded and highly readable.

It’s both fascinating and frustrating to read this firsthand account. To this day, no impartial outsider has been allowed to interview a single one of the more than 500 detainees still caged in Guantanamo, with the possible exception of the Red Cross, which is proscribed from publicizing its findings. Thanks to the intervention of U.S. courts, over the objections of the Bush Administration, many of the detainees now have lawyers representing them. But the lawyers are forbidden to release full and uncensored transcripts of their clients’ statements, or to pass on details that the U.S. government hasn’t cleared. The Pentagon has yet to allow unfiltered journalistic access to the detainees, many of whom have now been held without being charged or allowed to have contact with their families for more than four years. Instead, we have had to take it on faith that these prisoners are, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously dismissed them, “the worst of the worst” or, as another U.S. military official put it, “people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down.”

In the midst of this information vacuum, Begg provides some ideological counterweight to the one-sided spin coming from the U.S. government. He writes passionately and personally, stripping readers of the comforting lie that somehow the detainees aren’t really like us, with emotional attachments, intellectual interests and fully developed humanity.

She concludes:

His account of his journey during the following three years is full of fascinating insight. He realized, at one point, that only fear could explain Americans’ ridiculous overkill in their treatment of the detainees. On his last day in U.S. custody, as he was being transferred to the plane that would finally take him home to freedom, American soldiers lost the key to the extra chains and padlock in which they had ensnared him. Why, he wondered, would they expect him to try to escape at this point, when he was about to board the plane home? As he stood there, contemplating the futility of his entire imprisonment, as the soldiers scurried to find wire cutters, each pair bigger than the last, the metaphor is clear: In Guantanamo we don’t know how to get out of the bind into which we’ve put not just our prisoners but also ourselves. ·

AP article on secret prisons quotes Begg

Bush’s Prison Revelations Irks Europe [via Political News]

GENEVA – President Bush’s confirmation of secret CIA prisons re-ignited controversy Thursday — with European lawmakers demanding the exact locations and other critics saying the system tacitly approves torture.

…
Moazzam Begg, a 38-year-old British citizen held captive in Afghanistan and Guantanamo before being freed in January, said he spoke with several detainees who described being held in secret prisons.

He said they used transport time, smells and sounds to guess where they were. Most said they were held in Egypt or Indonesia and he cited at least two detainees who described being tortured in secret detention.