Three Years in US Guantanamo Death Camp for Aid to Chechnya

In Enemy Combatant, co-authored with Victoria Brittain, Moazzam Begg becomes the first prisoner to give book-length voice to the experience of being on the other side of America's "war on terror". Begg's memoir details the three years he spent as a U.S.-held detainee in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before being released without charges in his native Great Britain.

A devout Muslim, he grew in a secular middle-class immigrant family in Birmingham, England. Increasingly, he found meaning and purpose in Muslim causes - raising money and traveling to provide aid to Muslim fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan.

In the fall of 2001, Begg had just moved his family to Afghanistan, which he hoped would provide a cheap and welcoming Muslim environment in which to raise his children. Instead, he and his family were caught in the harrowing U.S. assault and forced to flee to Pakistan. They had just resettled in Islamabad when, after midnight on Jan. 31, 2002, as his family slept, he answered a knock on the door in his stocking feet and was made to kneel by a small group of silent, plainclothed Pakistani and Western strangers. They forced a hood over his head, bound his wrists and ankles, and carried him into a waiting vehicle.

His account of his journey during the following three years is full of fascinating insight.

He hears screams from unknown prisoners, including a hauntingly tortured female voice at a U.S. military prison in Afghanistan. He witnesses two murders of fellow captives in Afghanistan by sadistic U.S. servicemen. He is interrogated more than 300 times during which the authorities get nothing they can prosecute him with, other than a laughably false confession. Meanwhile, the allegations against him are fuzzy, the conditions of his imprisonment Kafka-esque.

 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?