Dear Sir/Madam,
This is no time to sit still. We know now.
We listened a few weeks back to Clive Stafford-Smith telling the story of how Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons came into being and what they are. I decided to follow up that talk with another version, perhaps not so much different as more personal.
He wrote poetry while kept in solitary confinement for years, without charge, without hope. At Symondsbury Manor, on 17th December, (Monday) at 8 pm we may (or may not) fill our glasses with wine and the room with conversation, but: we will hear the testimony of someone who was there.
Moazzam Begg is one of the nine British subjects who were held at Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay by the government of the United States of America. He was released without charge on January 25, 2005 along with Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar. He received no compensation or an apology. More details on the following page.
Yours truly,
Ioana Morpurgo
‘what loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing’
The 13th LECTURE on EVERYTHING, Symondsbury Manor,
Monday 17th Dec. 8pm, £5
Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey
Moazzam Begg was born 39 years ago in Birmingham to secular Muslim parents. His mother died when he was six, and his father sent him to the Jewish King David school in Birmingham, because he thought it inculcated good values. In his 20s Begg became more interested in politics – Islamic politics. He never fitted one dogma neatly – conservative when it came to family values, leftist when it came to issues of equality
Moved by the plight of the Afghani people, in 2001 Begg traveled to Kabul with his family to start a school for basic education and provide water pumps. When the allied attack on Afghanistan began in October 2001, Begg and his family moved to Islamabad in Pakistan for safety. It was there that he was seized in January 2002 by Pakistani police and CIA officers, bundled into a back of a car and taken back to Kabul, where he was held in a windowless cellar at Bagram airbase for nearly a year
Hooded, shackled and cuffed, he was taken first to the US detention facility at Kandahar, then on to Bagram, and finally to Guantanamo Bay. During his internment, he was kicked and beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door and left hanging, and led to believe he was about to be executed. One psychiatrist encouraged him to kill himself. In all he spend three years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and was subjected to over three hundred interrogations, as well as death threats and torture, witnessing the killings of two detainees
Begg is one of nine British citizens who were held at Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay by the government of the United States of America. Begg was labelled an ‘enemy combatant’ by the US government, imprisoned for a crime [he didn’t commit and] the precise nature of which [whose precise nature has never been determined] has never been determined / was never explained to him.
Moazzam Begg is spokesman for the Human Rights organisation, Cageprisoners, with whom he has been working since his release from Guantanamo Bay in 2005. He regularly lectures around the country on the effects of the 'War on Terror' and detention without trial. He is also author of the critically acclaimed, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back. It is the first book to be published by a former Guantánamo Bay prisoner
http://www.amazon.co.uk/0743285670
