Crossposted at Empire Burlesque
When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg’s account of his years in Bush’s Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners — deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against “terrorists” and “traitors.”
Solzhenitsyn’s books — not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful 
First Circle and Cancer Ward — were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued — and continues — to represent.
How sickening, then, to find myself last Saturday reading of the precisely the same kind of state terror that Solzhenitsyn described (and survived) once again being inflicted on innocent people — and this time in my name, under the flag of my country, at the express order of the leaders of my government. Bush is trying to turn us all into the kind of quiet collaborationists and cowed enablers of atrocity that we habitually decry when speaking of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: “Oh, how could they have let such awful things go on? Why did they stand silently by? How could they swallow all those monstrous lies? I would never have stood for that kind of thing!”
Well, tens of millions of Americans are standing for it right now –- every bit as quiescent as the most head-down, eyes-averted Soviet citizen or German burgher: countenancing, condoning, even celebrating brutal acts of state terror, and swallowing the tyrant’s eternal lie that his crimes are committed to protect the people. For a few crumbs of prosperity from the elite’s banquet table, for a few flattering fairy tales about national greatness, national goodness and historical destiny, for a few comforting murmurs to chase away the craven fear of madman monsters across the sea, they have sold their priceless birthright of liberty. It’s no longer a matter of what crimes Americans will swallow; now the great question of the day is: what won’t they swallow? They’ve walked this far down the road of darkness – how much farther will they go? Will we one day need a Solzhenitsyn to catalogue our shame, our cruelty and our cowardice?
Excerpt from My Years in Captivity,
from The Guardian:
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 “Fuck 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-Qaeda, 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.
And yet, underneath the massive slab of state terrorism, tendrils of human understanding and sympathy do survive between individuals, as was widely evident in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany. Begg describes one such thread formed with what he considered the most unlikely suspect: an old, Bible-reading Alabama redneck, one of the guards responsible for holding him captive – away from his family, away from his life, for no reason, without any evidence, save for wild accusations most likely extracted by torture – for weeks, for months, for years on end.
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…
When Foshee heard about the incident [an episode when Begg, maddened by years of pointless confinement, exacerbated by the invasion of his room by a stream of maggots, lost control and trashed his cell] , 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.
Moazzam Begg was kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002. As the Guardian notes in an accompanying story: “During his internment, he spent virtually two years in solitary, 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.” The only “evidence” against him was the statement by a Pakistani captive that his instructor in an al-Qaeda camp had been named “Abu Umamah.” This is a common Arabic construction, whereby parents are called after the names of their children: “Abu Umamah” means, “father of Umamah,” which was the name of Begg’s oldest daughter. (Similarly, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is usually referred to as “Abu Mazen.” Although this is often called his “nom de guerre” in the Western press, as if it were the kind of sinister nickname that Bolshevik terrorists took to cloak their true identity – “Stalin,” the man of steel, “Molotov,” the hammer, etc. – it is in fact just a homely way of saying that Abbas is the father of a boy named Mazen.)
From this tidbit of meaningless information — there are countless Muslims known as “Abu Umamah” – American 
interrogators spun a wild fantasy of Begg – a British teacher born and raised in Birmingham, where his secular parents sent him to the Jewish King David School for years – as an international mastermind, a veritable Doctor Evil: “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-Qaeda’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.”
But it was no joke, of course. One of the tools they used to torment Begg was photos of Umamah herself, which they had somehow obtained – stolen from his family home perhaps? – shortly after his capture. When that didn’t work, the beatings and bindings described above began.
As I wrote two years ago, describing the plight of three other innocent British Muslims who’d been ensnared in Bush’s global net: “The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the “war on terrorism.” We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.
“But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn’t designed to fight terrorism; it’s designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of “military necessity” – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It’s part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime’s openly-stated ideological goal: “full spectrum dominance” of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, “asymmetrical” scale.
“Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over.”
Moazzam Begg was released from captivity in January 2005, with all the false charges against him dropped.
Crossposted at Empire Burlesque
