Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, And Kandahar - Hardcover

Begg, Moazzam; Brittain, Victoria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595581367 ISBN 13: 9781595581365

Publisher: New Press, The, 2006

Synopsis

The searing story of one man's years inside the notorious American prison—and his Kafkaesque struggle to clear his name.

"Under the hood I felt I couldn't breathe properly....Flashing lights—obviously from soldiers' cameras taking trophy pictures—came and went in front of me, despite the hood's darkness. From beside me a voice said in Arabic, 'Shall we pray, brother?' A guard came and screamed in my ear, 'Shut up, motherfucker, if you speak again I'll kill you.'"—from Enemy Combatant

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has become a worldwide symbol of the dark side of America's War on Terror. Here, for the first time, is a powerful and moving story from the other side, the first detainee's account of life inside the notorious prison. A highly educated British Muslim, Moazzam Begg spent three years in U.S. custody, nearly two of them in Guantánamo, before being released without charge in January of 2005.

Enemy Combatant, written with respected UK journalist Victoria Brittain, is the wrenching narrative of Begg's detention, including his eighteen months in solitary confinement. Secretly abducted at midnight from his home in Afghanistan, held incommunicado in Kandahar and Bagram Air Force base, Begg was eventually flown to Guantánamo, where, like more than 800 Muslim men and boys—550 of whom remain in custody—he was held in shackles and the now-trademark orange prison uniform, subjected to relentless interrogations and abusive and degrading conditions.

A riveting, personal story by a thoughtful and eloquent man, Enemy Combatant is a uniquely personal indictment of America's establishment of a global gulag that flouts the Geneva conventions—one of the great miscarriages of justice in our time.

About this title

About the Author:

Moazzam Begg was born and raised in Birmingham, England, where he established an Islamic bookstore and aided in relief efforts in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He moved to Kabul with his family in 2001. Since his release he has returned to Birmingham, and speaks and lectures widely. Victoria Brittain is a journalist and a research associate at the London School of Economics, and the former foreign editor for The Guardian. With Gillian Slovo, she compiled the play Guantánamo.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. In a fast-paced, harrowing narrative that's likely to become a flash point for the right and the left, Begg tells of his secret abduction by U.S. forces in Pakistan, his detainment at American air bases for more than a year and at Guantánamo for two more years as an enemy combatant. A British Muslim of Pakistani descent, Begg grew up in Birmingham and excelled at school before becoming involved with Islamic political causes and later moving to Afghanistan to become a teacher. After fighting broke out in Kabul, he and his wife and children moved to Islamabad in 2001, where U.S. operatives seized him. In March 2004, Begg was released from Guantánamo under pressure from the British government, but over the objections of the Pentagon, which still considers him a potential terrorist. Despite considerable media speculation over what Begg may have left out of this memoir, it's a forcefully told, up-to-the-minute political story. Whether Begg is describing his Muslim and Asian friends fighting white supremacist skinhead street gangs in Birmingham, or telling how he shared poetry with a U.S. guard at Guantánamo, his tone is assured. His work will be necessary reading for people on all sides of the issue. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1595581367
• ISBN 13: 9781595581365
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 397