Enemy Combatant

Adult Ed.     Marco Cruz
Lucas                     03/05/09
Enemy combatant

As the U.S. was created, our forefathers had visions of a wonderful nation that gave people rights, freedom, and happiness. Today, the U.S. continues to be a great nation to the naked eye. If we look beneath hospitality, we see a nation that, because of its fear of being inferior, is manipulative and very poorly governed. Moazzam Begg is an example of this, as he was a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay and many other prisons until his past release in 2005. His book, Enemy Combatant, has begun to really question the U.S.A.
Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim, was living a normal life when the interrogations began. In 1996 he was visited by MI5, an intelligence unit of the UK. Begg never knew that 6 years later he would be arrested, without knowing for what, in his own home. After 9/11, the U.S. began a mission of capturing and imprisoning any “suspects” that may be responsible for acts of terrorism. Begg was arrested for having been to Bosnia, where there was war going on, to Pakistan, to see what it was like for soldiers, and to Afghanistan, to live with his family there. The U.S. thought he was fleeing from someone or trying to hide something by going to all these places. Yet it was after 9/11 that they decided to act. Why until then? If the U.S. where suspicious of Begg, then why was it that they didn’t do something about it?
It took beg nearly 3 months to find out what he was detained. They told him he was detained for “support and facilitation of terrorism”. The CIA wanted to know everything. They were especially suspicious of 50,000 euros that got Begg the house for his family in Birmingham. Begg told them it was a gift from Zaynabs, his wife, parents wedding gift. The CIA used methods of torture to obtain this information, even though the interrogators were nicer with him because he was fluent in different languages. Begg recalls that at the first prison he stayed in,...