Moazzam Begg: Living the War on Terror Storyville

On February 24, I think it was, 2014.

It was deja vu.

All of these police officers coming into my house.

Again, they didn't storm in, they didn't bash the door down.

They knocked the door and they turned up

into my room, after my wife had opened the door.

They gathered all my children into one room...

..allowed me to put some clothes on.

I went and hugged my children and my wife.

My wife was in tears.

The children were not so much.

I said, "Don't worry. I'll be back soon."

They raced from Coventry,

where I was held in the police station, with six vehicles,

as if I'm one of the greatest terrorist catches ever.

Sirens blazing, going at about 90mph,

straight to the court.

Rushing in. People, media all outside.

And then denying me bail,

and then sending me off to Belmarsh.

And not only did they do that, they put me as a Category A prisoner,

like the most dangerous prisoners in Belmarsh.

-PRESIDENT BUSH:

-Five months ago,

Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against Kuwait.

Tonight, the battle has been joined.

Around 1990, '91, I was a regular teenager

and was someone who was struggling with concepts of identity, really.

Was I British? Was I Muslim? Was I Asian?

Was I Pakistani?

As I started to think about my options for the future,

it was then that the Gulf War broke out.

-REPORTER:

-Many Muslims have watched developments in the Gulf

with growing dismay.

Some Muslims see the present conflict as a war against Islam.

They feel that, once Saddam Hussein offered to withdraw his troops,

the Allies should have ordered a ceasefire.

Saddam Hussein should pull out of Kuwait

and so should President Bush move out of Kuwait,

because it's quite wrong.

I had been beaten up by racist skinheads.

I'd been told numerous times from school onwards,

from secondary school, never in the Jewish school that I went to,

"Paki, go home."

How do I call myself British

when there are organisations like the British Movement

who tell me that I'm not British?

Everybody wants to be part of something

and so part of my journey would be finding belonging in a gang,

finding belonging in my father's tales of old India,

trying to be black -

speaking with a patois accent.

And so there was a whole process of trying to find where I fit

and eventually I came, at the end of that journey...

Actually, Islam...

..includes it all.

When the war began in the Balkans,

I remember being shocked at these people being killed

because they were Muslims.

Some of them had come to the Birmingham Central Mosque

as refugees seeking asylum in the UK.

Learning about them was one thing

but then, learning about them in this manner,

in the manner of which they described the atrocities

that they had endured, was unbelievably shocking.

When I saw what was happening to them I thought,

"That's happening to me because I'm a Muslim."

I went on this land convoy

and in a matter of days we were in Bosnia.

When I got there and saw destroyed houses,

the famous bridge in Mostar...

I remember the graveyards filled with new graves

and then spending time at refugee centres

in these picturesque villages,

contrasted against the brutality.

Then I came to a place which was part of...

..the 3rd Corps.

The 3rd Corps of the Bosnian Army

was made up of foreign volunteers and local Bosnians.

It reinforced, for me, the sense of a Muslim identity

that transcends national boundaries.

There was a sense that these were the bravest

and most effective of the fighting forces.

They called themselves, of course, mujahedeen.

This is the terminology they used to describe themselves.

The idea of jihad and the idea of mujahedeen

is something that we are told from a very early age,

in terms of the Prophet and his companions.

Khalid ibn al-Walid, this great Muslim general

who defeated, fought against the Romans.

This is the 20th-century version of those guys for me.

Meeting with people like that, I think,

who'd literally abandoned everything else

in order to come to save these people

who the world knew was being ethnically cleansed...

This is a place where the United Nations forces are all present.

I met them all. I met the Brits, I met the Dutch,

I met the Pakistanis and the Malaysians and the Turks.

I sat and spoke with them. I saw them armed to the teeth,

and yet the massacres of Srebrenica were taking place.

So when I saw that mujahedeen had come from around the world

to do what these United Nations forces would not do...

..I felt, not only is this the right thing to do,

it's the only thing to do.

I supported them.

So by the end of this experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina...

..the son of this conservative bank manager had been radicalised?

I'd say to a degree. I mean, not radicalised in the sense...

and, of course, this is very important to understand

that, when we talk about radicalisation,

it wasn't that I believed in the concept

of what they claimed Osama bin Laden is stating, or Al-Qaeda,

or anything like that at all.

I just believed in the right of these people to defend themselves.

I believed that if somebody is getting raped,

if a child is getting his throat cut

just because someone doesn't want to waste a bullet on him,

then he has to be protected.

And if the world community is not doing it,

then it's the people of the country

have to be helped in defending themselves.

Did you take up arms there?

No. No, I didn't. No.

-Did you feel tempted to?

-Oh, yes.

I felt tempted to, but I had no experience, no knowledge.

I haven't got a clue how to fight.

In '98 you quit your job.

Was that connected with Bosnia and with that personal development?

In '98, I think that's when we opened,

my friend and a colleague of mine, a book shop. An Islamic book shop.

That was part of my development into...

from being somebody who was...

..partially Islamic to somebody who's fully Islamic.

And...

..it was, of course, during this period

that I started getting under the radars of the security services.

-REPORTER:

-The bodies of 11 Americans killed in the Nairobi bombing

are on their way home to the United States -

a sombre process that's brought grief to the nation

and anger to government leaders

vowing to track down those responsible.

Today, I ordered our armed forces to strike at

terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan,

because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security.

-JOHN SIMPSON:

-This man was the target of the American missiles,

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fundamentalist,

who's used his personal fortune, estimated at £200 million,

to fight American interests worldwide, pledging holy war.

-REPORTER:

-To ordinary people in Sudan,

the American missile strike on Khartoum was shockingly unexpected.

And, from their government, all that they have heard

is that it was a totally unjustified act of United States terrorism.

I've always understood that my view on the West

was that I've been extremely critical of it, it's also my home,

it's also where I live.

It's the language I speak, I think in this language.

It's the place where my mother is buried and my sister's buried

and my kids grew up and where I grew up.

It's where I have all my memories of childhood and happiness and joy.

Coming into conflict with the West

would also mean coming into conflict with home...

..and that's something I've never, ever wanted or advocated.

I remember distinctly there was a...

..a knock on my door, early in the morning, around six o'clock

and I opened the door and there were three people,

two men and a woman,

and they said, "Mr Begg, we'd like to talk to you."

I found it really odd.

One of them identified themselves as a police officer.

The other guys didn't really say who they were.

They sat down and we spoke

and it was about an individual, somebody I knew,

who'd gone to the Emirates and had been detained in the Emirates...

..and he'd been beaten and tortured

and had written to me asking if I cab get him a lawyer,

because they were forcing him to sign confessions

of all sorts of stuff related to terrorism.

This was the first of...meetings with one particular individual

out of these three.

The two I never saw again,

but this one person became...

..I don't know if the right word is "nemesis" for me,

but he...he was haunting me,

like a spook, for the next several years

and this man...

..introduced himself as Andrew.

I've always known him as Andrew. There is no other name.

Andrew seemed, to me...

..just more aware of what he wants, why he's there.

He was...

To me, it was clear, it's an intelligence gathering exercise.

The police officer was more about, "I'm a police officer,

"I need to be looking for crimes and I don't see one

"so I don't really know what I'm doing here."

When Andrew first left, he said some words to me which resonated,

or they stuck with me for quite some time.

He said...

.."Moazzam, if there's anything that you can do to help us,

"don't forget, this is your country, too."

And I found that interesting that he'd say that.

"This is your country, too."

Well, I know it's my country,

but why do you need to remind me of that?

I was flying out, I think, in '99,

the following year, to Turkey...

..and before I took the flight, I was stopped at the airport

and taken by airport security to a room.

They said, "We've got somebody who'd like to speak to you."

And so I was surprised, but not completely taken aback...

..because the person who walked in next was Andrew.

He started to speak to me about all of my political views,

which he hadn't done before, in the presence of the police officers.

Now I knew Andrew,

I had an understanding of what this man is like, in terms of...

..his power.

I mean, if he wants to, he can have me stopped

and prevented from flying,

which is what he did.

Did it seem to you unexpected

that you would be stopped at the airport on that journey?

This was 1999.

This was before the Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act,

before people were being stopped at airports and being questioned.

So this was well before...

..something that happens quite regularly now.

Did they make enquiries to you about the purpose of your visit?

Was Andrew interested in why you were going?

Yes, of course, he was interested in why I was going, and he...

..he asked me a couple of rudimentary questions,

but he was more interested in my views.

What I found odd about this

is that he could have come to my house again, if he wanted to.

He knows where it is.

The next time I saw Andrew

was when I was kneeling...

..with a hood over my head,

my hands shackled behind my back

and a gun pointed to my body in Bagram, and...

..that was a shock.

You're telling me this story

as though you were going to sit on the beach in Turkey

but, like, that's not what you were going to do.

You're kind of withholding the kind of crucial details.

I'm interested in why you would spin it that way.

I was going to Turkey to go and meet some friends

to go and possibly go over to Chechnya.

The Cold War had ended

and MI5 and the CIA were turning their priorities towards

understanding the threat of radical Islam.

You did have friends

who had been facing terror charges in other countries

and they had come to you for support.

Mm.

You had volunteered, or visited the Bosnian mujahedeen,

and was now, in 1999, exploring a mission to Chechnya.

So it seems kind of reasonable that the security agencies

would have an interest in you at that point.

Yes and no,

because a lot of the things that I have spoken to you about

they didn't know about.

They didn't know about Bosnia and going to Bosnia

and they weren't interested.

They'd never once spoke to me about Bosnia.

Chechnya was one of these places

where there was a growing sense, I think, in the Muslim world,

or some parts of the Muslim world,

that, "Here's another place of resistance."

I found it inspirational and I wanted to go and see for myself.

I went to the border with Georgia with a friend.

We were not allowed in, and...

I was, of course, arrested in 2001

under the Terrorism Act

and they raided my home and the book store.

-REPORTER:

-Last night, officers from the West Midlands Police and MI5

carried out raids on three premises in Birmingham

under anti-terrorist legislation.

The police, at the time, told the press that the raids were linked

to Islamic extremist activities.

The authorities really didn't know what they were doing.

They couldn't explain to me, they really couldn't explain to me,

what it is that they think I've done.

Yes, "terrorism".

In what context? According to whom?

With whom? Which dates? Which times? Which places?

Who's been hurt?

This is what I think it culminated into,

that MI5 were gathering some sort of intelligence.

They didn't really know themselves what was happening

and then it culminated into an arrest

and I still don't understand what the arrest was about.

I don't understand where a crime was committed

and, of course, the charges were dropped,

but that did shake me up, that...

..I'd actually been arrested for terrorism.

You ran a book shop in Birmingham, al-Ansar,

which you and Imran Khan founded

and it sold a range of radical conservative texts and videos.

The bookshop was raided a couple of times under the Terrorism Act 2000,

but no subsequent action was taken.

If there had been an offence of indirect incitement...

..do you think that you might have been...

..prosecuted and found guilty under such a law

-for what you were then doing in the book shop?

-I don't think so

because the things we were selling were available in the media.

They were available in other shops. They were available in bookshops.

So, I don't think so. I don't think so at all.

And I took advice from my lawyers at the time

to discover whether these things were against the law,

whether there were any possible prosecutions.

So, even in the light of incitement,

and because it's such a broad thing that has been unexplored,

it's very difficult to say.

I don't think so, because I certainly didn't produce them,

I didn't speak with them.

I wasn't the one fighting or giving those lectures.

We were simply selling those books in our shop.

But the law that's proposed now is a law of indirect incitement.

Do you think that the law that's now proposed,

if you could imagine the situation back then,

would have had you breaking the law then?

It's very difficult to look in retrospect how things would work.

It's, erm...

I don't know the answer to that question.

-Quite possibly.

-Is that your concern?

That the sort of things that you wanted to do then,

the books that you wanted to sell and the videos you wanted to sell,

they included philosophical works going back

and they included Bin Laden videos.

Do you think that doing that now...?

All right, I don't, for the record,

I don't recall any Bin Laden videos when I was here.

Things may have happened afterwards,

but I certainly don't recall any Bin Laden videos.

I do recall some of his books,

or books that had sections written about him,

but then those books were also available

in Waterstones and Dillons.

Did you ever question the path that you were on,

as you realise that you are now,

if not a terrorist or if not a criminal,

flying into confrontation with the state?

Was that something that caused you...

..to rethink your choices?

I think it was that the state was flying into confrontation with me.

I wasn't anti-state, the state was anti-me.

-REPORTER:

-The UN is about to publish a major report

condemning the Taliban regime in Afghanistan

for its repression and violence against women,

since it imposed its brand of Islam four years ago.

-REPORTER:

-Amnesty International claims tonight

that Afghanistan's Taliban militia has massacred thousands of civilians

in the past few weeks.

Victims, they say, include women, children, and the elderly.

Taliban officials have strongly denied the accusations.

-INTERVIEWER:

-Can you talk me through the decision to travel again?

It was nothing to do with the arrest?

I didn't flee the United Kingdom.

I wasn't...

fleeing anything, because I'd already been arrested.

I stayed, I was given bail.

And if I wanted to run, I could have run on bail, but I didn't.

Let's talk about the Taliban.

There's a kind of common perception

that you went to Afghanistan to practically join the Taliban.

Mm.

No, I didn't join the Taliban...

..but I went to live under them.

My views on the Taliban were not formed by the media.

That's one thing that I wasn't going to do

and that's one reason why I wanted to see things for myself.

The talk was all that the Afghan Taliban

are not allowing female education.

So, when my friends told me actually that's not technically true,

they are allowing schools for girls,

as long as they have an Islamic ethos,

we helped to set up curriculums,

we helped to buy playground equipment and computers

and send all of that from Britain to Afghanistan.

What was your attitude towards the Taliban?

The Taliban were clearly conservative Muslims.

They had been born out of the conflict of Afghanistan

and they felt that the solution lay in Islam and in Islam only,

but in their version of traditional Afghan Islam and not another one.

Part of what I felt was

something that I could do as a Westerner

is actually introduce ideas from the West.

I think being involved in the school was one of those things -

where you could teach English in a school like that,

whereas the Taliban had closed down schools

that were run by various UN agencies,

because they said these are Western influences that we don't want.

Yet they would allow those same Western influences from a Muslim.

I think this was a step in my journey.

Before I'd gone to these places, to conflict zones,

I had thought about, "What does this mean for me?

"What does it mean for my family?"

When I've gone or tried to go, I've left them behind.

They've never been with me. So this time round, I said,

"OK, I'm going to go and I'm going to go with you."

Yes, there's conflict in Afghanistan but there wasn't any in Kabul.

Kabul had been safe for several years by that time.

So I made sure that it was safe for me and my family

but also that whatever I'm doing now, my family can be close to me.

My experiences of the Taliban, of course, living in Afghanistan...

..made me question what they were really about.

I remember once, I was driving through Kabul centre

and there was a crowd of people

gathered at one of the major roundabouts,

so your car couldn't drive through

and I had to get out to walk to see what was going on.

As I got closer and closer,

I realised there were four cranes at this roundabout

and each crane has, off it, hanging a person.

There are four people being executed,

ironically for terrorism...

..and the crowds were just standing around, looking at these bodies

and the tongues were blackened.

So, I remember thinking,

"I wonder what sort of legal process these guys must have gone through."

I can hear you!

CHEERING

I can hear you,

the rest of the world hears you,

and the people...

CHEERING

..and the people who knocked these buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

CHEERING

-CHANTING:

-USA! USA! USA! USA!

-GEORGE BUSH:

-By aiding and abetting murder,

the Taliban regime is committing murder...

..and tonight, the United States of America

makes the following demands on the Taliban.

Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of Al-Qaeda,

who hide in your land.

APPLAUSE

-REPORTER:

-The Taliban has reiterated

that it won't hand over Osama Bin Laden

without evidence of his involvement.

...assist them to carry out...

-REPORTER:

-"If unbelievers attacked the territory of Muslims,"

said the Taliban today,

"then jihad, holy war, becomes an obligation."

In other words, "We'll fight."

Here in the border city of Quetta,

Islamic leaders raged that an attack on Afghanistan

will be an attack on Islam.

Whether this is a war, or a more limited campaign of retribution

against America's elusive tormentors...

..this was how the counter-assault unfolded.

I understood the need for reaction.

I understood a reaction had to happen and...

they needed to protect themselves and find those who were responsible.

I understood all of that but I believe their response,

still, to this day, has never been explained,

in terms of the sheer number of bombs

that they dropped on Afghanistan.

I still can't describe to people

the idea of a 15,000lb bomb landing anywhere

and how many people that kills.

HE SCREAMS AND CRIES

The number of people being killed was so much,

nobody had an idea of the actual number.

Nobody really cared of the numbers

but I'm sure it far exceeded the number of people

that died terribly on September the 11th.

I took my own family,

a couple of other families and their children, into the cellar.

We had a big house

and just waited in the cellar, hoping that this would stop...

..and once it did...

..the very next day, we all got out.

Logar is a couple of hours away from Kabul centre.

We'd evacuated to this place,

just looking to find ways to get into Pakistan.

We stayed in Logar, I think, for a few weeks,

until, eventually, my family evacuated

but I got separated from them.

Can you tell me the story of how you got separated from your family?

I'd gone to Kabul to clear out the rest of our house

and get some things from there, with some friends.

I'd left my family in Logar

and during the night...

..there was mayhem and commotion.

Kabul had fallen, the Taliban had evacuated

and abandoned their positions

and they're looking at foreigners.

Anybody who is a foreigner, a foreign Muslim,

they regard as Al-Qaeda.

It was a very, very scary time and I wanted to just get to my family.

I couldn't, because the roads had been blocked off.

All the entry and exit points into Kabul were being blocked.

So, there's a group of people that I was with, Pakistanis and others,

who said they know a route over the hills,

the mountains, that will take me to Logar.

They drove all night long.

It doesn't take all night to get to Logar.

They weren't going to Logar. And I kept on telling them,

"I need to get to Logar, where my family is," and...

..they just carried on.

They said, "We have to keep going here

"because it's not safe, it's not safe."

Eventually, we ended up near Jalalabad somewhere.

And then, in Jalalabad...

..also firing started there and fighting started there.

So we couldn't even stay in Jalalabad, and that fell.

Then we had to push back to this mountain range

between Pakistan and Afghanistan

and the only way into Pakistan was to walk.

So...

me and a group of these Pakistani guys walked...

..and I was wearing sandals...

..and it was the winter.

It was freezing cold.

And we walked, I think...

..two, maybe three days over these mountains,

up and down, up and down...

..across goat tracks...

..across frozen streams.

It was amazingly beautiful.

An unbelievably beautiful place to walk through, these mountains.

And perhaps that was...

one sense of solace, but I had one mission in my head -

that I had to get to my family.

And after this, er...

..odyssey of a journey across the mountains,

eventually did get to Pakistan.

And I was going insane.

I was going mad with worry about what had happened.

There were refugees everywhere, people coming in and out.

I phoned home and...

..I remember telling my father that I'd lost my family,

"I don't know where they are."

It was...

It was heartbreaking.

Almost two, maybe three weeks had passed, and still I'd heard nothing.

So I was planning to go back into Afghanistan,

knowing that it was going to be extremely risky for me,

but I had to go back in.

And just as I was about to go back in, I got a phone call...

..from a friend, who said, "Don't go anywhere, Moazzam.

"Your family's here, right here in Pakistan, in Islamabad."

I rushed back all the way, thanking God,

thanking everybody I could...

..and eventually got to Islamabad,

where my family was staying at the house of some people

who'd took them in.

We decided we were going to stay in Pakistan for a while

and just ride this through and then eventually go back to the UK.

Just to go back to the beginning of that -

I'm not quite clear why you were in Kabul.

I went to Kabul to go and get the...

..our goods.

So we'd evacuated from Kabul but I still had the house there, in Kabul.

So there was still lots of things, lots of belongings of ours,

that were still in the house that I went to go back and get.

But you went more than once, right?

Once your family were in Logar...

Oh, yeah, of course. I'd go to Kabul often.

-I'd go to Kabul often.

-What...?

I mean, that's a heavy conflict zone

and you've got your family safe in Logar,

so what are you doing going back into Kabul every week?

Because Kabul is still a city.

If you want to go and buy, for example, you want to buy a cooker,

you can't buy one in Logar. It's not even a village.

Who were these people that you were with?

Again, I can't quite visualise it.

There are some men that you're with

and then you get in a car and then you find yourself in Jalalabad.

These were Pakistanis. Pakistanis, who lived in Kabul.

So these guys were...

..the ones that I ended up going back to Jalalabad

and all these other places with

and people who'd lived there for a while,

who knew Afghanistan better than I did.

So these were...

..people I got to know over the time that I was there.

And the mountains that you were in were the Tora Bora mountains.

I don't know.

I didn't know the name of those places.

I've heard the name Milawa.

It was called Milawa, as far as I understand.

-REPORTER:

-These are the first pictures of Al-Qaeda fighters

who've been captured.

In all, 35 were caught today.

These men gave themselves up in no fit state to fight on,

after days of brutal temperatures and bombing.

This is what Osama Bin Laden's force has been reduced to.

Up in the mountains,

Osama Bin Laden's elaborate cave network was hurriedly abandoned.

Papers left behind will be scrutinised

for any clues as to his whereabouts.

The world's most wanted men, Al-Qaeda's leaders,

could now be anywhere in these hills,

or they may have fled to Pakistan.

Do you think...?

Do you think that's, in the end...

..what he's now suspected of?

Do you think that's the problem? That he...?

Yes, exactly.

What, I think, if I grew my beard tomorrow

and put a long coat on me

and go out, and people will think that I am a fundamentalist.

This has become a sign of a fundamentalist.

Although I do not have any view of that sort.

But my dressing and my beard

will indicate that I am a fundamentalist, though I am not,

and this is what possibly happened with Moazzam.

The way the West is treating us now,

it's got like a campaign on the Muslims, trying to persecute them,

wherever they are.

We're made to feel as if we are the guilty party,

although we have nothing to do with it.

I think the majority of Muslims realise that,

whether we like it or not, things have changed.

Whether we like it or not,

we're on the defensive position most of the time because,

whether it's said or unsaid now,

there is this link between Islam and terrorism.

The night of the 31st of January, 2002...

..the wife and kids had gone to sleep

and there was a knock on the door.

KNOCKING

It was midnight

and it was strange to see the knock at the door at that time.

I opened the door.

There was a group of people standing there.

A large group of people.

Nobody in uniform. Nobody identifying themselves.

Hardly any words said at all.

They didn't even ask me who I was

and they just stormed in and pushed me to the side,

and one of them put a gun to me, to my head and...

..pushed me on to the ground, onto my knees.

They shackled my hands behind my back,

put me into the prone position, shackled my legs.

They hooded me and physically picked me up

and carried me into the back of one of the vehicles

they'd parked beside the house.

And...that was it,

I never saw my family again from that night.

He rang me up round about one o'clock,

according to our time...

and said, "Daddy..."

"..I have been arrested and kidnapped.

"I'm speaking from the boot of a car."

I do not understand how could he...

..speak to me

and who was speaking to me.

Because it was whispering noise, or talk.

And he said, "My wife and children are there...

"..in a place where she doesn't know any language,

"she doesn't have any money.

"She has got all the children.

"Please, help me."

Inside the vehicle, they lifted the hood off my head, from the back.

I saw two Caucasian-looking men and they spoke with American accents

and they were dressed, I'd say very badly, as Pakistanis.

And they, er...

One of them said,

"You can either answer our questions here, in Pakistan,

"or you can answer them in Guantanamo Bay."

And then one of the agents, he had a pair of handcuffs...

..and he said, "I was given these handcuffs

"by one of the wives of the victims of the September 11 attacks."

And then he...

put them on my cuffed hands.

My hands were already cuffed, but he put them on...

..my already cuffed hands.

And I remember I said to him, I said,

"Wouldn't she think you were stupid for catching the wrong person?"

And then he put me on to this aircraft,

a transport plane.

I was seated on the floor.

My hands were shackled behind my back.

I had a hood over the head.

I heard the sounds of these dogs barking...

..the roar of the engines, the jet engines,

the screams of other prisoners.

I was trying my best not to shout or scream.

There I was just sitting there.

I had no idea where we're going or what's happening

but I sensed that there were some people next to me.

So I ended up speaking to this guy,

who turned out to be a Libyan, I think,

and I was shocked by his...

..what was going on in his mind.

We spoke in Arabic. We said, "Alaykum" to each other

and it seemed to be like a mundane conversation.

He said, "Brother, have you prayed? Like, the evening prayer?"

And I said, "No, I haven't."

And he said, "Don't you think we should?"

And I said, "Yeah, I think probably now is a better time than any."

And so...

..he led the prayer, being on the left-hand side,

and recited the prayer.

At that point, an American soldier came over

and he put a knife to my throat and he said,

"If you speak again, I'll cut your throat."

GUARD DOGS BARK AND SNARL

When we landed at the airport in Kandahar,

the Americans dragged us through the mud.

It was freezing cold at the time.

Two of them sat on top of me.

One literally pushed his knee into the small of my back,

the other one pushed his knee onto my head

and then they started slicing off my clothes...

with a knife.

And then, once they'd done that...

..shackled my hands behind my back and shackled my legs.

I'm taken naked, with all these floodlights streaming onto me

and all the other prisoners that they were pushing through

this sort of conveyor belt and...

..first, they shaved off my hair and my beard.

Then they sprayed some, I think, delousing stuff over us.

And then, while there were dogs barking all around,

guards, soldiers were kicking and spitting and punching us,

and taking photographs.

I think they loved the photographs.

And then off into this interrogation tent, one by one...

..where there were two agents of the FBI.

They had FBI caps on

and they were asking each person,

"When was the last time you saw Bin Laden?

"When was the last time you saw Mullah Omar of the Taliban?"

As I was kneeling...

..with this hood over my head

and all these guards standing around.

When they lifted the hood over my head, I see Andrew.

The same Andrew who'd been in my house and had met me in the UK.

I had a simultaneous feeling of...

..relief and shock.

The relief was that, I know this face, I know this person.

He'd been in my house.

The shock was, "How can he be part of this?"

I remember once Andrew brought over a Mars Bar...

..at one of the interrogations.

He dropped this Mars Bar in front of me and said,

"Look, I've brought you this all the way from England."

Which I thought was really funny, because I hate Mars.

I've always maintained that Bagram was far worse than Guantanamo,

because it included seeing two people being killed

by the American soldiers. Two prisoners.

I saw people tied up with chains around their bodies

and connected to huge pipes, unable to move,

and defecating upon themselves.

There were soldiers atop what they called Overwatch,

with an M-16 constantly pointing at us.

We weren't allowed to walk.

If we did talk, they'd take us to the front of the cell

and tie our hands above our heads to the top of the cage

and leave us suspended there for hours on end,

with a hood over our heads.

I hadn't seen natural light for almost a year.

There was a CIA agent there and he had suggested that,

if I cooperate with them, then they can open all sorts of doors

for me and get me released and God knows what.

I simply just didn't trust him.

They'd say we'd stage a break-out for you

and that would launch you into Al-Qaeda

and you could escape into them

and become part of their organisation

and then report back to us.

If you tried to run, or escape,

there's no corner of the Earth where we couldn't find you.

The CIA agent came and told me that, "I've decided to send you to Egypt."

Another soldier then came up afterwards and said, "Moazzam,

"we've sent people to Syria."

They were asking all sorts of questions and they brought

photographs of my children that they'd seized from my house,

waved them in front of me. And, at the same time,

there was the sounds of a woman screaming next door.

Up until this point, many months had passed.

I had no idea what had happened to my family

from the time they had taken me away in Pakistan until now.

I believed that what they were doing was trying to employ some sort of

psychological torture, to make me believe that my wife was in custody,

that she was being tortured next door.

That my children were somehow being held

or that they knew about them and I didn't.

By the end of those weeks of custody, in Bagram, in May 2002,

did you sign a confession to being a member of Al-Qaeda?

Yes, I signed two confessions. Both these confessions were -

one was in Bagram, one was in Guantanamo -

but it was by the same agents.

The same FBI agents who took... made me sign some documents -

I can't even remember what they were.

Then, returned again, in Guantanamo, and they'd produced some documents

and they'd asked me to sign them again.

In the first instance, it was completely out of the threats

they were making about being tortured and sent to Syria

and Egypt. In the second instance, they said, "If you don't sign,

"you will be prosecuted at a summary court,

"where you could face execution."

And my reason for signing, at that time, was

that at least if I sign,

I'll get to go to court and in court, surely,

the media will be present and so will other organisations

and I can expose all of this. So, yes.

I'd learnt from the CIA about the case of one particular individual,

which has been extremely important, in my view,

on the whole war on terror.

It was the case of a man called Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

The CIA agent in Bagram told me that,

"If you don't cooperate with us,

"we will do to you what we did to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi."

He told me that al-Libi had been seated in the very seat I was in...

..and that they had sent him to Egypt.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was sent from Bagram in a coffin...

..to a ship in the Persian Gulf called the USS Patton.

A false confession was produced.

The confession was that he, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,

as a member of Al-Qaeda, a senior member of Al-Qaeda,

which I later learned he wasn't, was working with Saddam Hussein

on obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative

telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al-Qaeda.

EXPLOSION

EXPLOSION

I'd heard that the journey to Guantanamo was about 36 hours,

with a stop-over in Turkey, as well.

I managed to plead with one of the guards, to get his attention,

and asked, "Can you just give me a drug and knock me out?"

I woke up in Guantanamo in a daze.

Two British men are among the first Al-Qaeda terrorist suspects

who will go on trial before American military tribunals.

They are Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham,

who was arrested by the CIA in Pakistan last year,

and is now being held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba...

I always say to my husband, before he leaves the house,

I always make sure that he is happy with me and I am happy with him

and I always ask him to forgive me and he does the same.

I normally see him when I go to sleep.

I talk to him.

I touch him.

I feel him.

But I don't believe that I'm going to see him.

The experience of solitary confinement...

..was, erm, destructive. Internally destructive, initially.

So, I did have a couple of panic attacks

and behaved in a way that I was never accustomed to -

screaming and shouting,

swearing and crying and punching the walls -

just simply because I couldn't take being in that environment.

It was...

..corrosive.

But they brought in a psychiatrist, who sat across on the opposite side

and said, "Have you ever considered harming yourself?"

I said, "No." She said,

"Haven't you ever thought about taking your trousers off

"and using those as a...as a noose?

"And threading the trousers with your sheet, then tying it to

"the corner of the cage and doing that?

"Have you never thought of doing that?"

I said, "No, not until you put that thought in my mind."

What is happening to the human race in this world

is that nobody can hear the truth,

nobody wants to know what Moazzam Begg is in,

for what reason.

Eventually, I was moved from the solitary blocks to the main blocks.

I was held in Camp Papa with five other prisoners.

One of them was Australian and one of them was British.

There were two Yemeni and one Sudanese.

One of the Yemeni guys was a very charismatic man,

who was responsible for some media production

of Al-Qaeda's media wing.

And so, he was a very intelligent man.

Well read, well spoken, but also very influential.

EXPLOSION AND SCREAMING

EXPLOSION

Your story and your position is always about,

"Well, hang on, why are they targeting me?

-"Can't they see the difference between me and them?"

-Mm.

In Camp Papa, you actually find yourself in very close proximity

to someone who is an outspoken supporter of terrorist acts

around the world - a supporter of Bin Laden.

Was that a challenge to your belief system?

His premise was that everybody in the West is not innocent,

because they are part of democratic nations.

Therefore, they all play a part in empowering the government

to carry out its air strikes and occupation in Muslim lands.

But, of course, my response to him was that, actually,

there is an entire anti-war movement in Britain

and the rest of the world. So, would you discriminate

or would you simply see them all as collateral damage?

Of course, he'd hit back and say,

"Well, their bombs don't discriminate.

"They bomb us and they...

"If you look at what took place in Iraq

"and the sanctions against the Iraqi people,

"that led to the deaths of thousands of people every month."

So, he had a response for it, but it still didn't make sense to me,

from what I had understood and what I had always believed in.

I have always believed that the concept of jihad

that these guys were using is a noble one.

It is one in which you are taught, we are taught,

that civilians are not targeted.

That women, children, old people

are not to be targeted.

And this was specifically laid down in the rules of engagement

by early Muslims - by the Prophet and his companions.

So, how you are disregarding this?

And his response would be, "They do this to us,

"therefore, we must be able to do it back to them."

And, again, that is a Koranic verse, which says,

"If you transgressed against,

"then transgress against them

"the way they transgressed against you".

But I reminded him that these verses say,

"But that you are patient is better for you."

And, considering you are doing this in the name of virtue and religion,

surely being patient, in some of these matters, is better.

I'm not saying don't fight back.

I am saying don't strike civilian targets.

He is describing what he sees as legitimate resistance.

So, at some point, do you not have to you either agree with him

or just step off this soapbox?

No, I disagree with him.

I disagree with the targeting of civilians.

I don't disagree with everything else that is being discussed,

in terms of context and the history of what is going on

and what is happening presently, in terms of the occupation -

the right to resist, or the obligation to resist.

But, clearly, the methods...

I would say to him and he would say back, he said,

"Look, we didn't invent car bombing.

"We didn't invent bombing, either.

"We didn't invent nuclear weapons. We didn't invent chemical weapons.

"These are the guys who did it.

"If you want to look at the history of who has been responsible

"for mass killing and torture on a grand scale,

these are the guys who celebrate the First World War

"and the Second World War,

"in which tens of millions of people died,

"so these are the master killers on Earth."

And he'd be right.

You seem quite sympathetic towards this guy in this conversation.

You are not denouncing him.

You are just disagreeing with him politely.

No, I think we are fundamentally disagreeing on the thing

that people recognise that is wrong about Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda is not bad because they resist.

Al-Qaeda is bad because they target civilians.

If they didn't target civilians,

it would be a different matter altogether.

So, what you say is that Al-Qaeda is just as bad as America?

Or Al-Qaeda's behaviour is somehow justified?

Why are you not just saying, straight up,

that this is the worst kind of hypocrisy,

because it is hypocrisy in the name of Islam?

It is not Islamic.

Because I think that there are various layers to all of this.

Al-Qaeda IS a Muslim organisation.

They are not Hindus or Jews or Christians.

They are Muslims, so we have to talk about them in Islamic terms.

And the other... I may disagree with him, in terms of this,

but I cannot say that they are not Muslims.

That is completely false.

And I'm not going to say something false just to please people.

I don't want you to condemn them to please me.

I'm trying to understand this from the point of view of...Islam.

An organisation that uses the history and the traditions

and the legacy of Islam

and targets civilians.

Where...? I don't see the room for discussion and dialogue in that.

No, there is always space for dialogue, Islam or otherwise.

There is always space for understanding.

There is always space for evolvement of thought.

That has to be understood. My discussion,

in relation to 9/11 and what they did,

and the embassy bombings and so forth,

I was very clear about them.

That's why I never accepted Al-Qaeda.

I was never part of the organisation.

I never joined it and never wanted to be part of it.

Never met Bin Laden or any of his lieutenants,

precisely for that reason -

because I didn't agree with the organisation.

I didn't want to be part of it.

But the...

I believe there has to be some kind of an understanding.

There has to be some kind of a recognition of the arguments.

And the arguments of Al-Qaeda... from an Islamic prism,

from an Islamci prism, CAN be dismantled.

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, is expected to announce

that the four remaining Britons

being held without charge at Guantanamo Bay

are to be released.

Feroz Abbasi, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga

have been held at the US naval base for nearly three years

and could now be home within weeks.

I think it was on the 25th January of 2005...

..when, eventually, soldiers came to my cell,

shackled me up once again and took me on to this coach,

where there were three other British prisoners.

And, for each prisoner, I think they had about ten soldiers.

And I remember laughing to the other guys, you know -

we are completely shackled up top to bottom,

with extra padlocks for security - saying,

"Listen, guys, these guys think

"we are going to escape on our way to freedom

"and that's why we've got extra security on us."

Eventually, we arrived at the other side of the island

and the planes were waiting for us.

And the Americans, in their...forgetfulness,

had forgotten the keys for the padlocks.

So, they had to bring in these massive wire cutters

and snap off the handcuffs and the chains,

which I thought was so fitting for our end in Guantanamo.

We walked then onto British military RAF planes.

We were greeted by the police - uniformed officers -

and seated on this aircraft.

And they brought things for us.

They brought crisps and chocolates and newspapers.

The Sun. I could see us on the front page of The Sun,

which was disconcerting,

and...no more shackles.

Just like that.

We arrived in RAF Northolt.

And on the plane, while I was still on the plane,

some woman came along and said,

"You are under arrest, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act."

And they drove a police vehicle on to the aeroplane

and then put me in the back of it

and took me to Paddington Green Police Station,

where I was taken to see, I think, the duty sergeant,

and he offered me something really strange. He said,

"Would you like to make a phone call?"

And it just dawned on me that this is going to be the first opportunity

I could get to speak to my family in three years.

I said, "No, I don't even remember the number."

Then, eventually, we were taken in a police vehicle

to the house of my lawyer and I walked in.

And there was my father and my brothers...

..standing there, with tears in their eyes, crying,

which is not usual for either of them...

They are not, sort of, very emotional people.

..and we embraced.

And...

I wasn't... Now, speaking about it, I can be quite emotional,

but at the time, I wasn't. I think my tears had dried up.

I had cried a lot in the early days.

I had also cut myself off from too much thought of family

and reunification with them.

So I had become quite a solitary figure

and had become used to being alone

and dealing with my problems and issues alone.

So now this was a flood of people and freedom

and walking out of spaces larger than eight foot by six foot,

it was quite a lot to take in.

And then, shortly after that, my wife arrived with the children.

It was hard enough to see the children,

but there was an addition to the family, who I'd never seen before,

and he was three years old now.

My other younger children didn't really remember too much

and they were kind of sleepy, because it was late.

But my daughter, my eldest daughter, she was very emotional.

She cried a lot, cos she remembered everything.

She remembered the night I was taken, she remembered every detail,

and she got really terribly affected by it.

And my wife...

Well, I'll leave that between us.

One minute, minding your own business - bang!

And we thought we were on fire. The smell, the smoke.

You couldn't breathe, you couldn't see anything.

Dead bodies on the tracks. The train blown over...

-TONY BLAIR:

-Time and again, over the past few weeks,

I have been asked to deal firmly

with those prepared to engage in such extremism

and, most particularly, those who incite them.

I did speak out against the bombings,

the July 7th bombings,

and I think somebody from MI5 heard me.

And there was a woman who had visited me in Guantanamo,

as an MI5 agent, and she called me,

and they wanted to know my views about who might be responsible,

who might have been behind the July 7th bombings.

This was now the opportunity for me to ask them a few questions.

"Do you realise that you were part of a process

"that involved torture and abuse and you took full advantage of it?"

They gave me the answer, "We were just doing our jobs."

And I responded by saying, "Well,

"that's what the Nazi concentration camp guards said at Nuremberg."

It wasn't a defence.

I pursued a legal litigation against them

over a period of the next several years.

Do you feel loyal to Britain?

My Britishness isn't determined by this government.

That's a very important point I think that I need to make.

That, as far as me feeling British, I do feel British,

because I can't be anything else. I am also a Muslim

and I can't be anything else,

cos that is what I've chosen as my faith.

The two are not incompatible.

The two are...

One is an identity, as to your nationality,

-and one is a faith.

-Well, you do have a choice, actually.

You can choose, as you did in 2001, to go and live somewhere else.

If you are truly appalled by the nature of the current government

in the United Kingdom, a democratic government, it should be said,

you can go and live somewhere else. You chose to go to Afghanistan...

But that wasn't because

I was appalled at Britain's foreign policy so badly

that I had to go and leave and not live in this country any more.

No, but now, I am saying, if you are...

You just said that you do not feel loyal to this government,

-you could choose to go somewhere else.

-I didn't say

I didn't feel any loyalty. There's many people in this country

that oppose the government's foreign policy.

And millions of people marched against the war.

Are you now insinuating or suggesting

that they should all leave the country?

They had committed a crime.

They had committed a crime and they were getting away with it.

It wasn't just me, it was all these other people.

And there is a bigger question that had to be settled here.

Are the security services that are an arm, an active arm,

of the government,

that are operating under the government's auspices,

are they accountable to ordinary people like me?

To, in fact, vilify people like me?

I wanted to seek an apology.

Let's just remember that all the former Guantanamo detainees

have claimed that they were completely innocent

of any wrongdoing, ever,

and we have to take this as gospel truth.

But tonight, we are looking at allegations of torture, aren't we?

And these people, these same people,

have now managed to manoeuvre themselves into position

where they are making serious allegations

against serving officers,

who are charged with protecting us in very difficult circumstances.

I have always said that MI5 were present

at every leg of the journey during my incarceration,

and that was in Pakistan, in Kandahar,

in Bagram and in Guantanamo Bay.

And in the last instances of me being met by MI5, in fact,

the Foreign Office were present.

So, there is no denying that MI5 were involved in the interrogation,

not just of British residents,

but in fact of British citizens, of whom I am one.

We are saying, "Enough of the regime! This is a corrupt regime!

The Arab Spring opened doors into countries and places

where I never thought I would ever be able to go,

as a former Guantanamo prisoner.

Places where the Americans had threatened to send me

if I didn't cooperate.

I had to fight for the next three years to get my passport back,

to be able to travel.

And this time round,

my travel had been directed by my experience.

To go to countries

seeking the role of the British government, the American government,

and their role in torture.

The first place I went, out of all these places, was Egypt

and tried to make links with those who had been imprisoned

and try to find out who had come across the case

of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Documents had been destroyed.

It was very difficult to find anybody who could link us to that.

But then I went into Tunisia.

And then, into Libya, crucially,

and, in Libya, I went to Abu Salim Prison.

That is where Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi turned up dead.

And I walked into the cell where he supposedly committed suicide -

which was quite evident it's not possible to hang yourself there.

There's nothing to attach a sheet to.

And then I spoke to numerous prisoners,

who had been held with him and alongside him in prison,

and they told me, clearly, that this person had been...

..wilfully killed

and that the story that had come out about him...

..they didn't want anybody ever hearing it.

They wanted to shut him up.

If we take a look at the hill there on the top...

..you can see a Syrian checkpoint.

What he said is that that entire area in front of us

has now been mined by landmines.

That is because over 17,000 refugees came over this way

and the Syrian government didn't like that.

Therefore, they placed these mines so that nobody could come across.

'I was following leads'

of rendition victims

who had been handed over by the Americans to the Syrian government.

And, so I wrote about this when I returned

and I received a call by MI5.

I told them, "I am ready to speak to you,

"but I have to warn you that my work there includes trying to find out

"what you have been up to."

And he called back again and said, "OK, we'd like to speak to you,

"but our lawyer will be present."

So, we did arrange to meet - me and my lawyer present

and MI5 and theirs - and we spoke for a little while.

The last thing they said to me, at the end of that conversation,

after I said, "If I get prevented from entering Turkey,

"I will know it is cos you don't want me to go there."

And they said, "There will be no hindrance from us,"

and that was it. And then I went again,

for a longer period this time, in 2012.

I met with fighters.

Loads of fighters from all over the world had come

and I saw that...

..there was a great deal of zeal from amongst these people

and not a lot of expertise

and they were shooting themselves in the foot sometimes,

shooting each other, sometimes, by accident.

So, I got together some former soldiers,

some doctors and other people

and asked them to make, together,

a programme that can help to make a defence system

where people don't have to suffer these basic...

..mistakes, or to die as a result of them.

Having conquered territory and declared his caliphate,

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is trying

to recruit followers to his cause.

But it is a cause so full of violent excesses that, all over the region,

many Muslims - Shi'ites and Sunnis - are recoiling in horror.

If you were to ask me, do I believe in the right of resistance

and fighting and calling that resistance Jihad?

I will always do.

Until the day I die, I will believe in that.

But that does not mean...

It is very important that it is clear in my mind,

before it is in anybody else's,

that the right to self defence is not the right to offend.

It is not the right to be offensive.

It is not the right to violate. It is not the right to abuse.

Moazzam Begg, there is an old English phrase,

"There's no smoke without fire."

What is jihad, if it is not terrorism?

-It's not...

-I know it's not. What is it?

-It is about rising above,

and sometimes it is a jihad just to be just to your enemy.

There is a verse in the Koran that says, "Oh, you who have believed,

"stand up as just witnesses for God

"and do not allow your animosity of a people

"to cause you to do them an injustice".

So, intrinsically, you are a supporter of jihad

as magnanimous rising - magnanimous - rising above conflict?

That is the aspiration. The aspiration IS to rise above.

-Yes.

-It isn't the reality.

The reality is that jihad has now become synonymous with terrorism.

Yes, and you are trying to fight that?

That will never be my belief or that of the majority of Muslims.

On February 24th, I think it was, 2014,

it was deja vu.

All of these police officers coming into my house.

Again, they didn't storm in. They didn't bash the door down.

They knocked the door and they turned up into my room,

after my wife had opened the door.

They gathered all my children into one room

and allowed me to put some clothes on.

I went and hugged my children and my wife.

My wife was in tears. The children were not so much.

I said, "Don't worry, I'll be back soon."

They raced from Coventry,

where I was held in the police station, with six vehicles,

as if I'm one of the greatest terrorist captures ever.

Sirens blazing, going at about 90mph, straight to the court.

Rushing in, people... The media are all outside.

Denying me bail and then sending me off to Belmarsh.

And not only did they do that, they put me as a Category A prisoner,

like the most dangerous prisoners in Belmarsh.

The charge was providing fitness training

to the Syrian rebels and sending a generator,

an electricity generator,

to one of them. I...I was...

I wanted to laugh, but it was serious,

because it carried a maximum of 15 years in prison.

And then, as time went on, and I spoke with my lawyer,

Gareth Peirce, and others,

and started to see the case bit by bit by bit,

all my anxiety turned into something else.

It turned into defiance.

Not just defiance, not just... "Oh, gosh, I'm scared of court."

I cannot wait to go into court.

Let's bring this fight on, finally. Let's do this in court.

Let Moazzam Begg,

who's been detained in four military detention camps,

in three prison camps,

in Belmarsh, and God knows where,

let him come to court, for God's sake.

"You've been threatening me with court for yours on end.

"Let's go there."

Because I was looking at the evidence and thinking,

"My God, these people just do not know what they are talking about."

You can see here my clear views on Isis, before Isis was born.

And when it was born, you can see

that I'm one of the first voices against it.

Moazzam Begg, free after seven months in prison.

'The case collapsed on its demerits.

'On how weak it was.'

And I think it's important to point out

some of the government's failures in its foreign policy

and its internal policy

and its clear demonising of the Muslim community.

'They presented,'

in the government's case against me,

a document that was handed over by the US State Department.

So, essentially, they were producing evidence

that was obtained through torture in Guantanamo,

without any legal process.

They were going to use it in court, and I thought that was brilliant.

"This is exactly the kind of thing, the kind of stupidity,

"the government is going to try to use."

Investigating terrorism offences in Syria is hard

and we are learning better ways of doing that all of the time.

And those that we suspect of committing those offences,

we will investigate.

The laughable part of it was the Arabic conversations