'Today I can not sleep': Moazzam Begg, tortured in Bagram and Gitmo, talks to RT after 20-year US war in Afghanistan ends

Tortured by the United States in Afghanistan’s Bagram Prison and Guantanamo Bay, British-Pakistani author Moazzam Begg told RT about his trials and the vengeful, futile American ‘War on Terror’, which he also says “destroyed” American soldiers.

Begg spoke to RT about ‘Ghosts of War’, a special project that looked at the fallout from the US invasion and 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, which officially ended on Monday.

I begged to go to Guantanamo because what I had seen and witnessed in Bagram was so devastating that to this day I cannot sleep.

Begg was born in Britain to Pakistani parents and had moved to Taliban-run Afghanistan with his family in July 2001. After the US invasion, they sought refuge in Pakistan. In February 2002, Pakistani authorities arrested him and handed him over to US troops, “Without any legal process at all." The next year he was held in Bagram, a notorious prison camp next to the now abandoned air base.

During his year-long detention in Bagram, Begg says he saw two people “Killed” of American soldiers. A subsequent U.S. military investigation found that the cause of death for the two men, identified as Dilawar and Habibullah, was in fact homicide.

“To me, this place was an expression of what the United States was doing in Afghanistan," he told RT. “They brought people to this place of torture - Afghans, ordinary Afghans - and abused them outside the rule of law, and then let some of them return home. And they would go home and tell people ‘that’s what the Americans did’. ”

In February 2003, Begg was sent to Guantanamo Bay, a US-controlled enclave in Cuba, where a camp for ‘enemy combatants’ had been built in the so-called Global War on Terror.

“We were removed, we were beaten, we were spit on, we were humiliated, photographers of us [were] taken, “ he said to RT. His doctors also played sounds from the next room suggesting his wife was being tortured there, showing him photos of his children. “What they wanted me to do was sign a confession that I was a member of Al-Qaeda, which I was not." he said.

Among his fellow prisoners were several Taliban members, who he says are now leading figures in the new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, proclaimed after the US-backed government collapsed in mid-August. The takeover of the Taliban caused a hectic confusion of Westerners and Afghans working with them to flee the country, which officially ended on Monday when the last US military flight left Kabul.

At one point in his Guantanamo operation, Begg said he stopped thinking of himself as a human being and began calling himself 588, the number he was assigned. He showed RT a handmade calendar he had, and the letters from his children, edited by American censors.

My children grew up without me, and every day without them was a stab in the heart.

Begg was released in January 2005 and sent to the UK. The United States never accused him of any crime. “The war on terror was not a police operation, it was a military operation," he said to RT.

While in Guantanamo, some of the American guards treated him with sympathy, spoke to him, gave him chocolates, and sometimes let him watch movies on a smuggled DVD player. Begg called them “Small human actions that I have never forgotten to this day."

“I left Guantanamo and did not hate America because of these soldiers," he said to RT.

Begg added that some U.S. troops have subsequently written to him saying the war “Destroyed” them and that they can not sleep at night. While about 15,000 U.S. troops and contractors died in ‘War on Terror’, twice as many have committed suicide, according to the Costs of War project.

“This is a defeat, this is a military defeat, but you want to look at it,“Begg is talking about the US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left the Taliban in possession of all the military equipment and infrastructure built for the US - backed regime.

He is thinking “Imperial hubris” does not allow the West to come to terms with this result and move on.

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