When Moazzam Begg was kidnapped by the American government and its Pakistani foederati on 31 January 2002 - 'kidnapped' appears to be the appropriate legal term to use of Guantánamo Bay prisoners, none of whom has ever been charged, tried or formally designated a POW - he experienced a curious moment of melodrama. Seized from the house where he was staying in Islamabad and dropped in the back of a 4x4, Begg couldn't help laughing at the atrocious Pakistani disguise of one of the Americans. A second American then waved a set of handcuffs in front of him. 'Do you know where I've gotten these handcuffs from?' he said. Begg replied that he didn't, and the American said: 'I was given these by the wife of a victim of the September 11 attacks.' Even though Begg was already cuffed behind his back, the American snapped the second pair of cuffs on him. The American's prop and scripted line were part of a pattern Begg came across repeatedly while in US custody in Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan, and subsequently in Guantánamo: he was always a character in somebody else's narrative, and nothing he said or did could alter the part that had been written for him. It was in the names of the cells at Bagram: Lebanon, Somalia, USS Cole, Nairobi, Twin Towers, Pentagon. To Begg, this list referred to an eclectic set of episodes over twenty years which had nothing in common except the deaths of Americans and Muslims, but to whoever wrote them, this was a coherent, tightly linked sequence of outrages demanding revenge. The same pattern was evident in the only piece of news Guantánamo prisoners were officially given by the US authorities: the news that Saddam Hussein had been captured. To Begg, it signified the fall of an apostate tyrant, one of the secular Arab dictators against whom underground Islamicist movements had fought, but to whoever ordered the news to be given out, it signified an American triumph against one of the captains in a mythical, unified, global terrorist army which would have the Guantánamo captives reeling in despair.

LRB 8 June 2006 | PDF Download