Time out in Cuba

For three years Moazzam Begg, former DHSS officer, one-time Birmingham estate agent and top al-Qaida suspect, survived at the sharp end of America’s war on terror. Seized in the middle of the night from his home in Pakistan, Begg was taken through grim makeshift prisons, endured hundreds of hours of interrogation and ended up one of the faceless caged figures in Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility in Cuba.

Thanks to a campaign by Western human rights lawyers and the fact that he is a British citizen, Begg emerged from captivity last year to be reunited with his family. He has now produced the first authoritative version of conditions in Guantanamo and the legal no-man’s-land where hundreds of terrorist suspects are trapped.

His account is utterly plausible and very disturbing. The writer is a devout Muslim, openly hostile to US policies and sympathetic to the cause of militant Islam. But his story of daily life is written without rancour. More often than not American soldiers and intelligence officers are portrayed as naive, ignorant, sometimes brutish, but rarely evil. Most of the guards he encounters — and for two years in solitary confinement they were his only human contact — are simple soldiers from middle America glad to have an English-speaking prisoner to chat to.

Begg’s contempt is not directed against them but against the system they serve. Guantanamo was established by the Pentagon as a means of keeping suspected members of al-Qaida and their allies out of circulation. As ‘enemy combatants’ they do not enjoy the rights of bona fide prisoners of war. Most have never had access to a lawyer or been charged with an offence. In theory they could be incarcerated in this manner for the rest of their lives.

I do not challenge Begg’s account of his time in American custody.