Moazzam Begg was abducted and handed over to US forces. Here he tells of endless interrogations, of torture - and one bright moment
Saturday February 25, 2006
The Guardian
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Shackled and hooded, I arrived in Bagram from Kandahar in spring 2003, hoping I was prepared for the worst - whatever that might be. I knew what processing would mean, from Kandahar, and sure enough it included another humiliating strip-search in front of several guards and medics. I was taken, shackled but unhooded, to one of the interrogation rooms on the first floor, and made to sit down facing the door. Above it there was a bright security light glaring in my face. This first interrogation was short. I was faced with two civilian interrogators. They only asked me some basic personal details, but they told me to expect much longer and more intense interrogations in future.
Coming out of the interrogation room, I got my first overview of the prison. It was a huge disused factory, a relic of the former Soviet Union's ambitions, when it was the enemy of both Islam and the west. There were pieces of abandoned machinery, and warning notices on the walls in Russian. I recalled how the USSR met its own Vietnam right here; now the Americans had come "to help the country". In little more than a decade, two global superpowers had occupied this land, one of the world's poorest.
Passing the cells, I noticed something else: each cell had its own name, written in bold white marker - Somalia, Lebanon, USS Cole, Nairobi, Twin Towers and Pentagon. I wondered what all these names and places had in common. Was the USA unleashing pent-up rage for every military engagement it had lost or terrorist act that it had suffered? The common denominator was Islam.
Like Kandahar, the whole place was illuminated with mobile floodlights that were off only during a power failure. I had to cover my head to try to sleep. I found it very difficult to move around with the handcuffs, but then, thinking myself lucky to be small, I twisted my wrists and found that the shackles slid off. I slept every night with the handcuffs tucked under my blanket - empty - until they were finally removed.
During the first few weeks there seemed to be no more than 20 or so detainees in the entire building. But every few days I saw new ones trickle in. The cell I was in first - number four - contained only four other people: a Tajik doctor, an Iranian student, and two Afghani taxi drivers. In cell five, to my left, I could see six people, including an aged Afghan, an old Palestinian, a Saudi, an Egyptian and someone I assumed was African, but soon knew was a fellow Briton, Richard Belmar. Although talking was strictly forbidden, I did manage to exchange a few words with him, and have brief conversations with the Tajik and the Iranian - in Urdu.
They told me they had been there about a week. They seemed as bewildered and anxious as I was. The other prisoners soon discovered that I could communicate easily with the Americans, without an interpreter, and they constantly asked me to translate their requests to guards and medics.
In May, I met interrogators from the FBI and CIA, who didn't like me at all. Two FBI agents began the questioning, convinced I was involved in some nefarious web of plots, from planning to assassinate the Pope to masterminding al-Qaida's finance operation in Europe, or being an instructor in one of its Afghan training camps. They had their perceptions about me and were searching for ways to confirm them - preferably from my own mouth. By now I'd been raised to the status of some rogue James Bond-type figure. They thought I was a graduate from some prestigious British university, that I was fluent in a dozen languages, that I was an expert in computers and several martial arts.
"Had it not been for this ludicrous situation I'm in, I would have been flattered," I once said to them. "I should ask you to write my résumé - I'd find a job anywhere." It would have been funny if it hadn't been so terrifying, being in the power of these people who actually believed their own fantasies. Then they asked if I had been an instructor in one of the Afghan camps. They claimed some detainee had said, "My instructor in the al-Faruk training camp was a Pakistani called Abu Umamah" (Abu means father in Arabic, and Umamah is my older daughter's name). They insisted that in a sworn statement from a ranking member of al-Qaida, I had been identified as an instructor in al-Faruk. "Tell us what you were planning, Moazzam," said Niel, one of the FBI men.
"To translate classical Arabic texts into English..."
"No, not that," shouted Marti, the other FBI agent. "You know what we're talking about, just admit it. Were you planning a suicide operation? Were you planning gas attacks? Were you planning to assassinate...?"
"What the hell are you talking about? I think you've seen too many movies..."
"Do you want to see your children again?" Marti said, producing a print-out from his folder. It was a picture of Umamah when she was two years old, with another child. "Because it doesn't seem like you care very much about your family. You're being very selfish. Think of what would happen to them without you - your children, your wife..."
Suddenly one of them pulled the chair away from me so I had to stand. "Get up off your *** . You've lost the dignity of deserving to sit on a chair when you're talking to us," he said.
Then all of them walked out, except Martin, the CIA agent. He stared at me. It must have been several minutes before he spoke.
"Moazzam Begg," he said, raising his hand in a fist, putting out his thumb, and then turning it upside down - the "let him die" gesture of a caesar. I felt scared to the core.
Then he said, "I've decided to send you to Cairo, where you will talk." He told me that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was supposedly the highest-ranking member of al-Qaida in US custody, had been sitting just where I was, a few weeks before.
"He played the same games with us as you did, and we sent him to Cairo. He talked there within two hours. You'll do the same."
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 "**** 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-Qaida, 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.
For a while, my interrogations seemed less crude and cruel. They were offering me deals, including a witness-protection programme, to testify against anybody and everybody that they wanted. In return I would be free in some sort of environment for my family to visit me, perhaps in America, or somewhere else, at a hidden location, but under house arrest. But the offer was a mirage. Things got worse.
I began to hear the chilling screams of a woman next door. My mind battled with questions I was too afraid to ask. "What if it was... my wife?" They clearly registered the look on my face. I was sure that in all their reports they had written, "Get to this guy through his family..." For two days and nights I heard the sound of the screaming. I felt my mind collapsing, and contradictory thoughts ran through it. Once I thought, when the screams started up, "I am just going to slip my wrists out of the shackles, hit the guard, grab the weapon off him and go next door to stop what is happening." But my other thought was, "Just give them whatever they want." I began to think that the only thing I could do to end this misery and terror was to pretend to admit being involved in some terrorist plot.
Eventually I did agree to say whatever they wanted me to say, to do whatever they wanted me to do. I had to finish it. I agreed to be their witness to whatever. At the end of it all, I asked them, "Why have you got a woman next door?" They told me there was no woman next door. But I was unconvinced. Those screams echoed through my worst nightmares for a long time. And I later learned in Guantánamo, from other prisoners, that they had heard the screams, too, and believed it was my wife. They had been praying for her deliverance. In July, Andrew from MI5, whom I'd met first in Birmingham, reappeared. Much of our talk was quite mundane and I wasn't even sure what he'd come for. When he produced a list of names of the imams of mosques in Britain, I began to realise the magnitude of how Islam itself was being targeted. But I couldn't see the connection between me, in shackles here in Bagram, and some obscure mosque in West Yorkshire that I'd never heard of.
Andrew also wanted to go over and over my trips to Bosnia and the Afghan camps in the 1990s - round and round, always the same questions. I told him what had been done to me during the interrogations in May, emphasising that the Americans had really intended to send me to Egypt to be tortured. What would the British government do if it happened? He said that MI5 would never deign to be involved in things like that. I said that surely any information gathered by the Americans via abuse and torture had been shared with the British. He didn't answer, reiterating that Britain would never take part in rendition and torture. "But it happened. It happened to me, Andrew. Most of their lines of questioning couldn't have been taken without your full knowledge and cooperation."
Strangely enough, I rather liked Andrew, as a person. He was quite a contrast to most of the Americans I'd met. I liked the fact that he was cultured, and aware of regional customs and sensitivities. I once mentioned the film Black Hawk Down to him. He said, "I'd never watch a biased propaganda film like that." That quite amazed me.
Things had changed a lot since I arrived. Now they had built isolation rooms, and every single person who was brought in was put on sleep deprivation. They'd constantly play ear-splitting heavy metal tracks by Marilyn Manson to break down new detainees. Once they even played the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever soundtrack all night.
I often found humour in the most unlikely places. It was one of my tools to counter the grim reality of life. Many of the soldiers, being from the south, liked listening to country and western music, which most detainees regarded as the same as all other "English" music. I had the misfortune of knowing better.
"We'll talk, we'll all talk," I said in half-jest when they played it, "just turn that crap off, please."
In January 2003, one of the better interrogators, Jay, called me in and said, "You're going to Guantánamo. Things will probably be better for you there and from there you'll get a solution." When we left Bagram we were kitted out for the journey with a jacket and an orange hat. We had already had our hair shaved, again. I had heard from a guard that several detainees had been forcibly drugged on previous flights to Cuba. I couldn't bear the thought of sitting shackled to the floor for nearly two consecutive days and asked for a sedative to knock me out. The next time I remember anything was in Guantánamo, in a daze. I felt intense heat and humidity... and I could smell the sea. It was distinctly different from the smell of the sea in Britain, but I could definitely smell the sea.
I was in Camp Echo - or Eskimo, as they called it at that time. My cell, my new home, measured about 8ft x 6ft. It had a toilet, an Arab-style toilet, all metal, on the ground. I didn't know what I was expecting, but it was not this. It is considered a sin in Islam to despair. Here in Guantánamo, in this steel cage, I felt despair returning. All I had in the cell was a sheet and a roll of toilet paper, not even my glasses. I asked for something that I could use as a prayer mat and they brought a thin camping mat, which became my mattress for the next two years. In the morning a guard brought me the first cooked food I'd seen in a year: breakfast. It was a big disappointment. There was tea and awful powdered milk in polystyrene cups. Both were cold. The cooked breakfast was revolting. Rice, mushy peas and a boiled egg, all mixed together. I couldn't eat it.
On the evening of the second day, the person who had told me that I was going to Guantánamo, Jay, turned up. My heart sank when two others arrived, Marti and Niel, the two FBI agents from Bagram. They were both huge, obese, in the style of New York street cops. "We want you to read and sign these documents," they said, placing six typed pages in front of me on the table. They had written my confession.
I read through the pages in utter disbelief. My first reaction was, "This is terrible. The English used here is terrible. Nobody could ever believe that I would write such a document." Then I thought, "This could actually be good - anybody who knows my style of writing would know that I am not the author."
It sounded more like the ramblings of a hysterical 16-year-old college dropout than what one would expect from the FBI.
It was full of exaggerations, lies and presumptions. There were names I hadn't even heard of. The document claimed that I was a long-standing member of al-Qaida; I had trained and taught in their camps; I had financed them, giving funds that had gone to the 9/11 attackers. When I asked how they'd reached this conclusion, they told me that I had already admitted attending and sending financial support to "the camps".
It was maddening to hear them refer to "the camps", as if every training camp in the recent history of the Muslim world had been under al-Qaida's umbrella. I actually laughed as I read through it.
They were obsessed with the word "al-Qaida". Their document suggested that almost everybody I'd ever met in my life was a member of al-Qaida.
"There is no way I'm going to agree to sign this rubbish," I protested. They allowed me to make some selected alterations, but kept in the most blatant untruths, like being a front-line fighter with al-Qaida, and money I had sent to Kashmiris in 1994 being used in the September 11 attacks. "Stop playing games with us..." They were getting agitated. I couldn't forget for a moment that these were the same men who ordered my punishment in Bagram.
"You could be shot by firing squad, Moazzam, do you understand?" Marti said, seeming as if he was controlling himself. "They've built an execution chamber here, I've seen it," Niel followed. "Have you forgotten about your kids, your..."
Finally I resigned myself to whatever would come. Despite the insinuation, there still wasn't a crime in the statement, certainly not one I could see. "You know what, it doesn't make any difference, I'll sign whatever you want, but I have to do something first." I told them I wanted to go into the cell. I prayed that this would be my way out. I asked Allah for this document to be a means to expose their lies. The prayer is called al-Istikharah in Arabic: the prayer of asking guidance for the right choice. Afterwards I signed. I asked them for a copy but they wouldn't give me one. That was it. I never saw any of them ever again.
For around six months, I remained in my cell inside this standalone room, where the lights were always on, though dimmed a little at night. I could barely tell if it was light outside or dark, except during recreation, when the door opened or when the MPs changed shift. I had to ask them for prayer times, as I could not hear the prayer call from the main camp. All I could hear, most audibly in the rec yard, was the US national anthem at 0800 hours and sunset.
I made a huge discovery during incarceration, about relating to people. When I first saw Sergeant Foshee, I thought, "He's too old to be in the army; they must be desperate." And when he asked me, in his Alabama drawl, if I was English, I thought, "Another typical raghead-hating, stars-and-bars, KKK-type redneck."
Most of the time, when he was in my room, Foshee sat there reading the Bible, and we didn't speak. I'd heard from other guards that Foshee was racist, didn't like women in the army, hated JFK, lost his temper quickly and ordered people about.
Back in the US he worked as an undercover narcotics agent. But he was also a Vietnam veteran. "Excuse me, Sergeant, do you mind if I ask you something about Vietnam?"
As a teenager I'd been fascinated by the Vietnam war, and even then I'd identified with the underdog. I felt compelled to ask this vet from Nam about his experiences. I must have asked the right question. Foshee loved giving me his recollections, and I couldn't get enough. He described graphically the assaults he'd been in, the friends he'd seen killed, the civilian massacres, and the stress he'd suffered on return to the US. Several of his comrades had been POWs. Then came the inevitable comparison between them and us. Foshee was deeply disturbed by our treatment as detainees. He couldn't understand why we weren't treated as POWs. For us he had a soldier's respect.
"I don't know if you've done anything, but they say this is a war. You should all be sent home, 'cos the war's over. Or you should be treated like POWs. I know there are people here who fought the Soviets for years and even I'm a baby compared with them - in age and experience. I get so pissed when I see those punkass kids treating y'all that way, when they ain't done a thing for this country." He was talking about soldiers in Echo who had soaked detainees with water, then left the air conditioning on full. To me Foshee was an enigma: his attitudes were clearly Republican, and yet he did not like what he was seeing.
After eight months in Guantánamo, I knew that the early promises by the Americans that I would get a lawyer were hollow and that I was a man in limbo, on the say-so of President George Bush. On July 7 2003, I became one of only six prisoners in Guantánamo facing a potential trial, under President Bush's military order. I didn't know this until almost two months later. So this was it: trial by military commission - a soldier's trial. "What does that mean?" I thought. "What are they going to charge me with? What if I'm convicted based on the statement I signed? Will I get life? Surely they won't execute...? Will I get my own lawyer?"
I started asking the guards, with a nagging increase in anxiety, "What have you heard about the military commissions?" The consensus seemed that it would include the use of secret information, the absence of a jury, and a military defence lawyer. It seemed quite outrageous to me: how on earth was it possible for a soldier to defend me? A soldier who'd given his oath of allegiance to the United States of America, and to George Bush, who had already labelled us as killers and terrorists?
I spent countless nights praying, crying, thinking... and regretting certain decisions in my life. When I finally did get to sleep, my dreams were filled with strange and wonderful visions of life far away from US soldiers and concentration camps. In fact I hated waking up. I wished I would never wake up again.
There had been a nauseating smell, daily growing worse, and my cell was becoming infested with maggots. My complaints fell on deaf ears, so I scooped up the creatures and flushed them down the toilet. But more came, and kept coming until they transformed into flies. An iguana had died underneath my cell.
Something was building up inside me. There was only space enough to pace three steps forward, then back again, up and down. And then I exploded. I lost control of myself, which was something that had never happened to me. Threatening interrogators from afar was the worst I'd done. I picked up everything in my cell and smashed it to the ground; I kicked the walls, I kicked the door, I punched it, I started swearing and crying. The camp commander, First Sergeant Glenn Carnahan, was called, and as soon as I saw him I began to swear. "Come to see the show, you mother****ing ******* ? Either you come in my cell, you wimp, or **** off! Go on, just **** off!" They told me afterwards he was so stunned that he walked right out of the camp.
Later I tried to explain to them, "Listen, when a person like me starts blowing up you've got to know there's something seriously wrong." I apologised to Carnahan, too - not because my complaints weren't genuine, but because it was so unlike me to swear.
When Foshee heard about the incident, he was very upset and tried to comfort me with stories of the Hanoi Hilton, how some of his friends had survived torture and solitary - and some hadn't. I had. I made a few friends with guards over the years in US custody, but only one ever earned my respect.
Just a month later, in March 2004, a man from the Foreign Office visited me and told me that five British prisoners were to be released from Guantánamo. I was elated for them; but it was made clear that I was not going with them. The harsh reality was I had no idea how long I was going to spend in Guantánamo.
Then I received a letter from a firm of attorneys in Newark, New Jersey, telling me that they had filed a habeas corpus case for me on July 2 in the federal court in Washington, DC. They told me that my wife, my father, my solicitor Gareth Peirce, and a British lawyer working in the US, Clive Stafford Smith, had instructed them to prepare this legal challenge for me in the US courts. The letter stressed that they were civil lawyers and had no connection to the US military. I was back on the upward swing of the rollercoaster of emotion.
I received a three-page letter from Gareth telling me my family had mounted a campaign for me, led by my father, so powerful there was hardly a household in Britain that hadn't heard my name, that even the attorney general had declared "the process" in Guantánamo Bay to be unjust and unlawful and, best of all, that President Bush had stated that the British detainees could be returned any time the British would have them back. Gareth went on to say that, regardless of what happened, the proposed military tribunals were not ones to take part in, under any circumstances.
With all this law in my head, frustrations mounting and the month of Ramadan impending, I was agitating to everyone I saw to be put in with other detainees. It was going to be my third Ramadan in captivity, and I felt I just couldn't face another in solitary.
On the eve of Ramadan, October 15 2004, the guards came to my cell in the evening and told me to get my things ready. "You're going." They came for me at 2200 hours and as we walked I could feel wind on my face and hear voices in the distance. I knew this must be Camp Delta, the main camp. We came to a small flight of stairs, my shackles clanking on the metal as they walked me down and along some sort of walkway. Then they took off my goggles and earmuffs, and I could see cages, nothing but cages all around.
Dog kennels was the first thing I thought. It reminded me of when my father, brother and I went to buy our German shepherd, Sheba, when I was 10 years old, at one of the dogs' homes in Birmingham.
It looked exactly like that, except these cages were green. My heart sank. The room I'd been in was air-conditioned. It had been cold. Now I had to get used to the raw heat of Guantánamo.
I just sat there for a while, in a daze. I was utterly dejected. Somebody walked past, but I didn't turn round to have a look. The guards opened a cage and put him in a cell three away from me.
It was Feroz Abbassi, from Croydon, who'd been in Echo, too. In a very relaxed manner, he said, "Oh, is that you, Moazzam?"
"Yes."
"Oh, right, I see, you don't look the way I'd imagined you. You're a lot shorter than I thought you would be."
"Thank you."
It was so strange - finally I'd met my unseen companion of two years. I felt I knew a lot about him, just from the gossiping guards. They had described him fairly well.
A few minutes later the cell slightly in front of me was also opened and I heard the sound of more chains dragging against the ground. Again we exchanged greetings. This prisoner turned out to be Uthman al-Harbi, who was a self-declared member of al-Qaida. In the cell next to me was a man I had met and whispered to in hospital many months before. Now I could talk to him. He was Salim Hamdan. A few cells further up was the Australian, David Hicks. Opposite Hicks was a Sudanese, Mohammad Saleh al-Qosi. We were the six who had been named for military commissions more than a year ago.
We talked incessantly from that first night. The conversations went from one person to another, and I was soon doing a lot of translating, into Arabic for Uthman, Mohammad Saleh and Salim, and into English for Hicks and Feroz. That Ramadan was absolutely unique. It was probably one of the best ones that I have ever spent in my life. Despite the extreme circumstances, the cheerfulness and spirit of everybody was unforgettable. The highlight was the congregational prayer, particularly Taraweeh, the final evening prayer, exclusive to Ramadan. The usual noises of talking and shouting reverberating across the blocks was replaced by a solitary voice, melodically reciting verses of the Qur'an, which brought tears to my eyes. Who knows what those hundreds of others were feeling, remembering, contemplating, at the same time as me? But I knew one thing: everyone there had a reason to weep. And the sadness was almost sweet.
Ramadan is marked with a festival called Eid ul-Fitr, when Muslims are required to give money or food to the poor. We had no access to any of that; but there was a jubilant period of song and entertaining each other, which lasted for three days. The Americans dished out baklava. People began to sing spontaneously, or to recite poetry. Voices would echo around the whole camp, sometimes in Pashto, sometimes in Farsi, sometimes in Arabic, and sometimes in Cockney or Jamaican street rap. I knew that was Martin Mubanga, whom I had never met, but I had heard about, as one of us Britons. I occasionally tried to sing some Arabic songs. I also recited some of my own poetry, which nobody understood except for Hicks, Feroz and the guards. One I recited with some relish was Indictment USA.
Finally the day came. A major came to my cell and said, "Mr Begg, I am here to inform you that the United States..." As soon as he said that, I thought, Oh God, now they're going to charge me, and they're going to put me through this process. "... military has decided to hand you over to the British authorities, and any charges that we had pending have been dropped."
My last memory of Guantánamo Bay is when they led me to the truck that was to take us to the aircraft that would fly us home. They asked me to stand up. They wanted to undo the padlock around my waist before the handcuffs, but they couldn't, because they didn't have the key. All the MPs were looking at each other, one person asking another and everyone accusing the next person: "I haven't got them."
I heard the senior officer, a captain, outside, reprimanding his guards, "How could you do this? It's so embarrassing." Eventually they walked in with a huge pair of wire cutters. There was a big, big snap. The chains were off, and they took me out. The last thing I said to them was, "Have you ever had a soup sandwich?"
"No."
"Try putting soup in a sandwich and see what happens."
· This is an edited extract from Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey To Guantánamo And Back, by Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain, published by Free Press on March 6 at £18.99
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