Talk:Moazzam Begg

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[edit] Daily Telegraph

With reference to the comments about the Daily Telegraph at the end of the article. It is not true to say that the Daily Telegraph lost a court case for slander (presumambly the author means libel) against George Galloway for alleging he received bribes from Saddam Hussein.

Although the paper did allege that Galloway profited from the Oil for Food programme these allegations were never tested in court. Instead the case revolved round the so called Reynolds qualified-privilege defence which the Daily Telegraph did eventually lose.

Furthermore on today's BBC website Moazzam Begg's biography states that he did in fact attend two terrorist training camps in Afghanistan which would seem to confirm the allegations by the US authorities.

(Don't want to strike your text, but of course it does nothing of the kind. US authorities were alleging he had attended Al Qaida training camps. The camps Begg admits to having visited, and which I'm fairly sure the BBC is referring to as well, were those of small Mujahideen group that had fought the Russians before Begg's time, and were eventually driven from the area by the Taliban.)
-- unsigned comment by user 84.177.54.74 -- 06:58, 20 July 2006
I don't know if I've seen that article but I may be reverting your change. Philippe Sands also says Begg visited Chechnya.
On whether those training camps are technically al-Qaeda, that's a moot point. The War on Terror includes al-Qaeda and all its affiliates.
-- Randy2063 20:41, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

That's a synopsis of his book. The story given in the book itself (of which I've only read the opening chapters, up to Baghram) is that he flew to Turkey, travelled to the border with Georgia for which he had a visa, and planned to cross illegally into Chechnya (for a while back this wasn't at all hard to do. Not sure if the time is the relevant same one, though.) However, he was turned back at the Georgian border, and eventually delivered the money he'd been bringing to a member of the exiled Chechen government living in Turkey (he gives the name, but I forget.) As Sands' source would appear to be the book, I would assume he was just simplifying. Lewis (and yeah, different IP, but same person as above.)

Oh, and a group expelled by the Taliban can hardly be considered an "al-Qaeda affiliate", now could it? Unless you want to extend that term to the Northern Alliance as well...

According to Philippe Sands,
Begg ran a Muslim bookshop, which caused the British authorities to put him under surveillance well before 9/11. He provides little illumination as to those aspects of the bookshop that, coupled with his trips to Bosnia and Chechnya to support Muslim causes, raised the interest of the intelligence services. He eventually makes it to Afghanistan with his wife and children during the time of the Taliban regime, for which he is not entirely without empathy.
I can see that not necessarily being the same thing, but are you sure that's not his only trip to Chechnya?
Anyway, it's a good thing if he didn't make it. I'd hate to think he could have made it worse than it was.
Yes, a group expelled by the Taliban can be considered an "al-Qaeda affiliate". It depends on the group.
-- Randy2063 21:37, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
P.S. Begg is not exactly an objective source. -- Randy2063 21:39, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Links provided are good, the Rest of the concerns below have been adressed. This looks OK until the next news breaks.

OK, if the "full text of the letter belongs at wikisource", then where is the link? This letter really is key to understanding why this guy is newsworthy, it's not a good idea to just remove it entirely. If it's not in the main article, then more quotes therefrom are needed.

I have removed both the loaded words "poignant" and "harrowing", and qualified the unsupported allegation from whence it comes. Thanks for the critique.

[edit] Moazzam Begg claims

This article uncritically repeats the claims made by Moazzam Begg and his supporters, which it emotionally describes as "poignant" and "harrowing".

Worse still, the article makes the unsupported allegation of a conspiracy by the United States government to murder detainees.

I have left the offending text intact and added text and links to make the article more informative and balanced. FC 19:10, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Some stuff that looks a little odd

I found this:

"Begg had been part of the british jihadist scene for many years, he was arrsted in 2000 during a raid on the al Ansar bookshop in Birmingham, which he had founded. The bookshop sells Jihadi propaganda videos featuring Osama bin Ladin and other extremists [see their website at www.tibyan.net]"

I've replaced it with the following which I'll explain:

"Moazzam Begg was once arrested in 2000 under British anti-terrorism laws during a raid on the Maktabah Al Ansar bookshop in Birmingham, which he had founded. He was released without charge."

I don't know whether Begg was part of "the British jihadist scene" or if indeed anybody knows what that phrase means. If we know for sure that he was then we should be able to dispel my doubts. Do we? I searched for records of the raid and discovered the full name of the bookstore. I'll assume for now that he did indeed found the bookstore so I didn't remove that. I believe that the grounds on which he was arrested is relevant: it was the old "Prevention of Terrorism" thing. It is almost needless to say that he was not charged. The powers of arrest under the British terrorism acts were (and are) so generous as to make the act of arrest utterly meaningless.

Having spent some years imprisoned in an American oubliette on the island of Cuba, Mr Begg can clearly not be held responsible for the current stock of the shop that he founded. So I removed the reference to the present-day shop. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 00:48, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)


[edit] date

Begg's Combatant Status Review Tribunal was held on November 13, 2005. - surely some mistake, unless he had a time machine? Jooler 00:33, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Inappropriate {accuracy} tag

User:Joaquin Murietta placed an {accuracy} tag on this article. They placed essentially identical tags on half a dozen other articles, without making any serious attmpt to explain why they applied the tag. I believe this is irresponsibile. See the similar tag they applied to the Carolyn Wood article. Wood has nothing to do with Guantanamo Bay. And the documents the article cites are official US military inquiries, not defense attorney press releases. The lack of care with which this tag was applied is typical, I believe, of the lack of respect the contributor who applied this tag, pays the wikipedia community. -- Geo Swan 03:35, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Begg is in the news, and an anonymous contributor...

Begg is in the news, and an anonymous contributor has modified the article to include some scurrilous accusations against Begg, without providing any substantiation. I am going to revert all the edit from that contributor. Some of the earlier edits, from the other side, go a bit beyond NPOV, so I am going to modify them too...

[edit] claiming to be a lawful combatant?

As I suggested in Talk:Combatant Status Review Tribunal, it may be useful to make a list of any prisoners who've asserted their rights under the Geneva Conventions as a lawful combatant.

That brings up a problem with this article on Moazzam Begg. Did he claim to be a lawful combatant or not? If the answer is yes, then this article is incorrect in passing him off as a mere "teacher and charity worker." If the answer is no, then we need to examine his assertion that he should have been classified as a POW. He can't do that without identifying himself.
-- Randy2063 23:25, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I looked at one referenced PDF and can see where Moazzam Begg doesn't even claim POW status. This is even noted in the section Moazzam Begg#The Tribunal President's view of Begg's POW status although not clearly enough IMO, as it's somewhat misleading.
That brings me back to wondering, are there any detainees that do claim POW status?
-- Randy2063 23:52, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A Useful Reference

Found this via the site referenced by the last edit. It's got info I haven't seen before.

I don't know if I'll be able to do anything with it yet but I thought I'd drop it here before its free access expires in another day or two.
-- Randy2063 04:13, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Correction: Both those links are the same. Here's the other one. It's not about Begg but it's an interesting piece of agit-prop by another ex-detainee.
-- Randy2063 15:26, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Known and suspected terrorist associations"?

Re the heading "Known and suspected terrorist associations" above the table - this is extremely vague and not even remotely neutral. "Known" by whom? "Suspected" by whom? Are we talking about associations with suspected terrorists, or suspected associations with terrorists? And is what is a "terrorist association" for that matter? Moreover most of the table entries are just the DoD claiming something and Moazzam Begg denying that claim. This is hardly "knowledge"

Can I suggest we replace this heading with "Allegations of associations to known or suspected terrorists". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.71.91.14 (talk • contribs). 10:44, 2006 June 19

I recognized that was a bad header right after I added it. But I don't think yours works either, as at least two of them were acknowledged by Begg himself. I had something else in mind. I'll fix it after I find my notes.
-- Randy2063 21:00, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
As for those entries of "DoD claiming something," that's just the reverse of what's been happening on this article for a long time. John Sifton's quote claiming that "Moazzam Begg story is consistent" is really just an opinion from an anti-American advocate. The DoD's charges at least make more sense than to presume Begg was some innocent who came to Afghanistan as a humble teacher.
-- Randy2063 21:43, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
Randy 2063 your last sentence above troubles me. I beleive in the presumption of innocence. I think we should "presume Begg was some innocent who came to Afghanistan as a humble teacher" rather than accept unproven allegations against him. After all the DoD have been known to make mistakes and Mr Begg was released without charge.
User:195.93.21.70 23:30, 15 July 2006 (unsigned comment)
Then how do you feel about unproven allegations against the U.S. military? In my comment I was merely holding Begg's claims to the same standards.
More generally, Begg was released without charge because no evidence could be made public that he had committed criminal acts. Presumption of innocence is a matter of criminal law, but what it really means is that the government cannot declare him guilty of a crime without a trial. This isn't criminal law. It's war.
We do not have to declare Begg to be a "humble teacher" and nothing more. He's obviously much more than that. If he hangs out with terrorists, collects military hardware, and visits places where terrorists go, then while those facts may not of themselves technically be crimes, the preponderence of evidence becomes more than merely suggestive clues.
-- Randy2063 23:18, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Randy, can I ask if you think "How do you feel about holding Begg to the same standard as we hold GIs for whom there is strong circumstantial evidence they committed war crimes?" is a fair paraphrase of what you asked 195? I'd like both Guantanamo detainees and rogue GIs held to the same standard.
  • As we both know Damien Corsetti committed, at least, sexual harrassment, and possibly rape, of captives. And his CO did not make him face a court martial. He got the lightest kind of administrative punishment.
  • I think you know that Lewis Welshofer smothered a captive to death, by wrapping him tightly in a sleeping bag, and sitting on his chest, even though he was covered in bruises, and had several broken ribs. I don't understand why that wasn't considered a war crime. And I think you know he was docked some pay, and was confined to his barracks for two months. The guy isn't even sorry. The guy doesn't even think he did anything wrong. If he was an al Qaeda or Taliban member, and had smothered an American captive, I think we both know what kind of sentence Americans would expect him to get. Even if the interrogator who smothered an American was a soldier in Saddam or Ho Chi Minh's army I think we know what kind sentence most Americans would expect him to get.
  • A year ago I read a comment from one of the Guantanamo detainee's lawyers. He said something like, "I am proabably something like the first lawyer in history who was trying to get his client indicted by a grand jury."
  • You and I disagree on how firm the circumstantial evidence against Captain Wood is. But, I think if you agreed with me that the evidence against her was strong, I think you would agree with me that she should be indicted, and she should stand trial. I don't know if you agree with me that if her trial convicted her of a role in the murders of Dilawar and Habibullah that she should get a longer sentence than Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick. They humiliated people. But they didn't kill anyone. Damien Corsetti should have been charged for his sexual crimes, and if he wsa convicted I don't know why he should have gotten comparable sentences to Graner and Frederick.
    • I read an article, a year or so ago, about the (allegedly many) women who had been raped while in US custody. The article claimed that this was an order of magnitude more devastating to an Iraqi woman than it would be to a western woman. The article claimed that a really astouding number of these women were so shamed they committed suicide after their release. Even "copping a feel" would have been humiliating. I've learned, from the Afghani's transcripts, that Afghani's are so uptight about their women that guests don't get to sleep under the same roof as the family. From the transcripts I gather that most rural Afghanis live in extended families in a walled corral, where the buildings lined a 3 or 4 meter adobe wall, and any guests would have to stay in a separate guesthouse.
  • I think we know that the most guilty captives are in CIA custody, and can never be charged, tried, or convicted, because the CIA tortured them.
  • Personally, I believe that the real secrets that the DoD wants to keep, in most of the detainees cases, are not secrets, that if revealed would put US national security at risk, but rather they merely want to hide from the public was a disastrously incompetent job they have done. In retrospect I don't think there is any question that the FBI was correct, that cruel adversarial interrogation are counterproductive -- worse than useless -- worse than no interrogations at all. Unreliable intelligence is, I believe, worse than no intelligence.
    • You and I both know that the secret capture technique used to capture most Guantanamo detainees didn't involve any national security secrets. They didn't capture them through wiretaps, or monitoring wire transfers. They were captured when the CIA paid $5000 bounties for any foreigner that was handed over to them -- no questions asked. This is not a national security secret. It is just an embarrassment.
  • Absolutely nothing prevented President Bush from treating everyone captured in Afghanistan as a POW. If he had done so he wouldn't have to worry about whether he could keep his recent promise to prevent "killer" from walking the street -- at least until hostilities are over. If he was tricky, he could have kept treating them as POWs for most of the war, and then pretended, years down the line that the competent tribunal that stripped them of POW status, and allowed them to be court-martialed, was based on new evidence. I'll grant that some captives may have been captured with the help of techniques that counter-intelligence officials would like to keep secret. But, as these secrets slip out, or are guessed, the value of keeping those national security "secrets" secret fade.
    • For example, the Algerian Six fell under suspicion due to "chatter". One of the men had dozen of phone calls to Afghanistan, during the month following 9-11. Apparently, from their transcripts, at least one of those phone calls was with a phone in Afghanistan that was suspected to have once been used by Abu Zubaydah. Well, Afghanistan is a very backward country. Most areas aren't served by land line phones. Some areas are served by cell phones. And, I know from looking up the model of phone one of the detainees had, that put him under suspicion, that there are about 200,000 phones that are dual use -- cell phones in areas served by cell phones, and satellite phones in areas where there is no cell service.
    • Being captured carrying a satellite phone, or being accused of being seen with a satellite phone, is one of the allegations against some of the Guantanamo detainees. It is one more of the allegations I think lacks credibility. If there were only dozens or hundreds or even thousands of satellite phones in Afghanistan then possession of one, if the US claim that there were used to coordinate ambushes was correct, would be a reason to be suspicious of a captive. But with 200,000 satellite phones, then I think it isn't a very credible allegation.
    • With 200,000 phones, and if the Bosnian/Algerian placed dozens of calls to different phones in Afghanistan, that makes it not unlikely that he was going to hit at least one that was borrowed by a known member of al Qaeda.
    • Anyhow, now that Abu Zubaydah has been captured, the phone number the Bosnian/Algerian was believed to have called has, realistically, long past the date when it needed to be kept a secret.
  • As I am sure you know, the Bush administration has been shamefully doublefaced about leaks. They showed no hesitation about outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. But they went ballistic about the New York Times, and several other newspapers writing about their monitoring international funds transfers. This wasn't even a secret. As, on other occasions they publically announced that they were capturing and monitoring suspects by tracking their funds.
Randy, I want to ask you about something you said about Begg in your last comment. I didn't know about the circumstantial evidence that Begg may have been involved in financial shenanigans back in the UK. And I am grateful to you for drawing it to my attention. But I don't remember you mentioning weapons before. Is this something you can tell me where to read about?
At the risk of being repetitious, if Bush had let those captives for whom there wasn't enough evidence to strip them of POW status before a competent tribunal continue to be treated as POWs, then Begg would still be out of circulation, and could be kept out of circulation until Afghanistan was peaceful -- another decade most likely.
As to risks, and the preponderance of evidence...
Have you ever looked at the [RISKS digest? Risks are funny things. And, in general, we don't manage them well. Just look at the stupid, counter-productive, and, if you don't mind me saying so -- hysterical reaction to 9-11. Making all airline passengers take off their shoes for instance. I am on the safety committee in the building where I live. I am one of the volunteers who respond to fire alarms. Well, the fire plan we had to file with the fire department says that whenever the alarm goes off we have to go on the P.A. and tell everyone to evacuate the building. We have to tell them to evacuate even if we know what triggered the alarm. 99% of the alarms are false alarms, or a cooking pot, left on the stove, and not a real fire. Human nature being what it is we never get more than 20 % of the people leaving. And sometimes less than 5%. We have never had a realistic fire alarm. Human nature being what it is it would not only be more convenient if we told people to stay in their unit, unless we told them specifically to evacuate, but, in general, they would be safer. The current plan trains people not to respond to the many false alarms. If we only told them to evacuate when there was a real risk if we told them to evacuate we would get more than 20% responding. But the naive instruction that everyone should leave on every alarm is safe for the career of the people who wrote it and the fire officials who approved it. And I think it is the same for an alarming number of decisions made in the war on terror.
Guantanamo has been very costly. I estimated Guantanamo cost $100,000,000? I recently read an article by a general who visited there, who said it cost $100,000,000 a year to run -- not counting the construction costs, and IIRC, not counting salaries. You probably came across the recent article where an American newspaper were able to find, with very little effort, the Afghan witnesses that a Tribunal President had ruled were not reasonably available. Think about it. $500,000,000. There was a false economy here. The USA could have saved millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, if they had spent some money to find the external witnesses the Tribunal Presidents ruled "not reasonably available".
I think it might have been that same visiting general who argued that it was safer and cheaper to release the detainees, even those for whom there was some circumstantial evidence that they were friends of Taliban or al Qaeda fighters, and who may have been fighters themselves, except the USA didn't have the evidence, or who, finally may have been radicalized to have become willing to become fighters during their long vacation at Club Gitmo. He argued that it would be cheaper and safety to deal with those who were truly fighters by letting them go, and dispatching them on the battlefield. He didn't say this, but this would be a lot more pleasant for those who were detained through cases of mistaken identity, or who had been pressganged into the Taliban at gunpoint, to serve as last minute cannon fodder, and who would not become fighters if released. -- Geo Swan 09:24, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
There are two different things here. When I said "I was merely holding Begg's claims to the same standards" I was talking about the standard of proof required to add something to an article. We can cite allegations by supposedly responsible sources but that doesn't mean they'd meet the burden of proof required to take someone to trial. Damien Corsetti's CO can't just charge someone because of a suspicion of guilt. There needs to be some evidence and/or testimony to back it up in his article 32 hearing.
Aside from the accused's legal protections, don't forget that the prosecution only gets one shot at this. Imagine if they did charge Corsetti prematurely and lost because the trial was merely a sideshow without ever having a chance at a conviction. Then imagine if some real evidence turns up later. That would be irresponsible.
I agree that Corsetti did far worse than what had happened at Abu Ghraib, but they had pictures at Abu Ghraib with corroborating testimony.
Sabrina Harman is listed in Category:War criminals alongside Adolf Eichmann. Lynndie England is in Category:People convicted of war crimes. That might make sense if Wikipedia listed thousands upon thousands of war criminals of all levels of severity, including pickpockets, but there are presently only 45, and that would be less than 40 if you exclude some of the gang at Abu Ghraib. As presently configured, this is a sick joke.
When a GI is accused of a crime, he or she is due the protections of the UCMJ. A POW gets the same protection. That's not a privilege that any army wants to give to its enemies, but we consent to it as part of a bargain. As such, there's no obligation we should give it to others who are not part of that bargain.
I don't think the distinction between POW and "enemy combatant" would have changed very much. Recall that you noted a lawyer describing himself as "the first lawyer in history who was trying to get his client indicted by a grand jury."
Lawyers opposed to the U.S. had initially been saying that POW status would have required they be released after the fighting ended in Afghanistan (as seen in this stolen NYT article). Of course, the fighting is still going on now but they were thinking otherwise at the time. Or, perhaps they'd have been discounting the severity of that fighting.
If he was an al Qaeda or Taliban member, and had smothered an American captive, I think we both know what kind of sentence Americans would expect him to get. Even if the interrogator who smothered an American was a soldier in Saddam or Ho Chi Minh's army I think we know what kind sentence most Americans would expect him to get.
Where do you get that idea? Wanting and expecting are two different things. Many Americans would expect such an interrogator to get a promotion from his leader. There'd certainly be no Wikipedia entry under the category war criminals.
In fact, I think we both know that if an American soldier had been smothered to death by al Qaeda, that treatment might be considered the mildest that Americans could expect from the enemies we have. And in that sense, maybe the interrogator's command wouldn't give him that promotion after all.
There might be a perfunctory complaint from the ICRC, and Amnesty might quietly issue a report that they bury under everything else, but I doubt that there would be much noise about it outside the U.S. War crimes are committed by the enemy on a daily basis but it's the American ones (like humiliating some thugs) that get the most attention.
There's a big one going on right now. Look real close and you'll see that Hezbollah, like many of our enemies, had placed their assets in civilian neighborhoods, basically using innocent Lebanese as human shields. That's a real war crime that had been in the making for years. If people really cared they should have been complaining about it long before now. Perhaps one day Lynndie England will be recognized as the poster girl for the bizarro nature of the so-called "human rights" movement.
This ties together with what I had said about not giving POW privileges to those who don't merit them. It's one of the few incentives we can offer to get barbarians to respect the laws of war. Give it to them for free and they will be less inclined to moderate their ways. This is why I consider the pre-Hamdan policy as the moral one. It would have been nice if HRW could have transferred some of their anti-U.S. efforts into promoting the rules of war to the likes of Hezbollah.
That said, of course some U.S. troops will commit atrocities. We had several hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq over the years, and some of them will go wrong. But no other military has a better record than we do. Ironically, I've heard that the Iraqis' reaction to the Mahmudiyah incident was attenuated by insurgent propaganda having already made it seem as though this happens all the time.
I don't know that the U.S. government could have classified something in order to shield the government from embarrassment. The family of one of the Abu Ghraib guards had tried to blackmail the military before they released the pictures, and that didn't stop them from prosecuting the case against them. In any case, some detainees may indeed be innocent, but I don't think the Algerian Six are among them.
I don't agree at all about Valerie Plame. Robert Novak describes the administration's attitude differently, calling them disinterested in that aspect, and it was Novak who sought that information. You have to admit, one has to wonder why the CIA would send someone like Wilson to Africa, already a known critic of the Bush administration, and then not even requiring him to sign a common non-disclosure agreement. Someone needed to ask that question. That certainly doesn't jibe with your notion that the U.S. government classifies things to protect itself from embarrassment.
I didn't say Moazzam Begg was carrying weapons, although I do think he could have been an arms smuggler. In the previous post, I said he "collects military hardware" and that's appeared in a couple articles. The NY Times describes the night vision goggles as a "night vision sight". That would make it part of a weapon, but it was military hardware, regardless. He also had a flak jacket.
In principle, I don't disagree with you on the improper assessment of risk, but we as a society aren't capable of making such rational decisions. We have too many opportunistic lawyers, politicians and activists who will take advantage of the next attack just as they had in 9/11 and New Orleans.
That doesn't mean I think closing Guantanamo would now be a good idea. That visiting general you mentioned sounds a lot like what Robp had said, where it would be better to shoot on sight. I take it as a snarky comment that wouldn't really apply to most of the detainees. It might have been better to have kept Bagram open. It certainly would have been cheaper.
-- Randy2063 00:14, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Torture

I deleted the part in the "Detention in Afghanistan" section that said he was tortured and held in solitary confinment because there was nothing supporting it. The article from the Telegram mentioned he was held in a windowless room, but it makes no mention of him being in solitary. Epsoul 04:51, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tribunals WERE NOT courts of law

An anonymouse contributor made an edit with the edit summary Begg's Combatant Status Review Tribunal - reword claima about court. evidence claim contradicted by previous sentence.

The anonymous contributor's justification is refuted Begg's transcript itself. The President of Begg's Tribunal spells out that the Tribunal was not a court of law. Tribunals were not courts of law; the USA never charged Begg with any crimes; Begg was never allowed meaningful access to the evidence against him. -- Geo Swan 04:27, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I never claimed they were courts of anything. Perhaps you should read more carefully. I specificially put in the statement "He was never brought before a US Court of Justice." I was correcting the unencyclopedic scornful wording. And your personal opinion about the meaningfullness of the level of access to the evidence is a far cry from the charge that the US didn't present evidence. 64.163.4.225 22:06, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
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