Close Guantanamo-- Daily Star/Lebanon

[TexasLawyer]

Close Guantanamo, it's turning the captors into prisoners

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=73193

By David Ignatius
Daily Star staff
Thursday, June 15, 2006

When I hear American officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp - not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the captors.

<snip>

A start in re-humanizing these prisoners is a remarkable book called "Enemy Combatant" by Moazzam Begg, a British-born prisoner who was released in 2005 after nearly two years in solitary confinement at Guantanamo. The book appeared earlier this year in Britain, and an American edition will be published in September by The New Press. It came to my attention because the publisher asked me to write a brief foreword.

Begg was seized in Islamabad in January 2002. Though he was never charged with any crime, he was held for three years - at Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan and then at Guantanamo. In one early interrogation at Bagram, he says an FBI agent told him: "After 9/11, Moazzam, the rules changed. We have new laws, and according to them, you're already convicted." What's chilling about that line is that it was essentially true.

<snip>

What gives me hope - not just for Begg but for all of us - is that he never lost his humanity at Guantanamo. He talked constantly with his American guards, asking where they were from, what they wanted out of life. When guards made racist remarks, he shamed them by answering back in perfect English. He describes a guard named Jennifer from Selma, Alabama, who painted her fingernails black and dressed like a Goth on weekends, and once confided: "I don't know if they've ever accused you of anything. But I know y'all can't be guilty." Begg says of her: "She left me with a lasting impression. All Americans were not the same."

<snip>