Moazzam Begg - Guantanamo Bay Survivor

Full transcript: Moazzam Begg on London Real

4:56 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who was featured in the BBC documentary The Confession, Living the War on Terror. The US authorities held you as an enemy combatant and claimed you were an Al-Qaeda member, yet you’ve never been convicted of any crime. Today, you’re an advocate for the rights of those held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and serve as the director of Outreach for CAGE, a London-based advocacy organization which aims to empower communities impacted by the war on terror. Moaz, welcome to London Real.

5:28 Thank you for having me. It’s great having you on here. People would probably be surprised that we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about Ice-T, a rapper from America. And it’s kind of strange that a kid that grew up in San Diego and someone that grew up in Birmingham were listening to the same hip-hop music. And I figured we might as well start there. Why were you listening to that music back then, and what did Ice-T tell you?

5:55 Well, I’m quite fascinated by the very fact that we’re talking about somebody who impacted, I guess, both of our lives in different ways. For me, at that time in the 90s, in 1990 in particular, listening to the album OG, Original Gangster, it was about coming out of my teens, it was about learning who I was, it was about my own experience of fighting neo-Nazi skinheads here in the UK, being beaten up by them, told often, Pagi, go home, see Nazi neo-Nazi salutes, see Kyle’s Nazi-style salutes, and in the face of that, trying to figure out, am I British, am I Pakistani, am I Asian, am I Muslim, what am I, where do I fit in? And so Ice-T, listening to him around the same time when I started reading the autobiography with Malcolm X, helped to kind of direct me in a particular way. Part of that was to do with, I guess, some sort of rebellion, but more of it was about, if I don’t feel like I can fit in, in society here, there are other places that I can look.

7:05 And I think Ice-T was part of that journey for me. And it continued to develop, for me it took a journey then afterwards, where I found and believed that my identity that I felt most comfortable with was my Islamic identity, my Muslim identity, that I’d already inherited from my parents. And that was interspersed with different aspects of being British, being Pakistani and so forth, but what I believed transcended, for me at least, my national identities was my faith and my Islamic identity.

7:38 Okay, so you’re a young man searching for who he is. You’re in your teens in Birmingham, and you’re trying a few different things, listening to this music. Now you’re reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read one time actually on a road trip when I was about 19 years old. Probably I was maybe drawn to similar things of rebellion, of anger against the system, trying to figure out who I was. And I was kind of attracted to these historical figures, and Malcolm X is a fascinating one to say the least, but he’s a black guy, and neither one of us are black.

8:10 How do you understand that? I think the experience, or at least the concept of seeing oppression, or even perceived oppression and injustice versus justice, or somebody who stums up for it, is somebody that is something that all of us, regardless of background, colour, ethnic, ethnicity, or race or religion, can see, even if we don’t agree with them completely. For me, Malcolm X clearly had that transition from being a street gangster, somebody who sold dope, put women on the streets and so forth, going to prison, having that transformation.

8:50 That transformation for me was very, very important in reading his autobiography, because it linked to something. He joined the Nation of Islam, which essentially is exclusive to black people, so I couldn’t relate to that. But what I could relate to is that when he has his journey to Mecca and the Hajj, and then he embraces orthodox Islam, where white and black are equal. And in that moment, for me, that’s when Malcolm X really penetrated my heart. I was listening, of course, to, as I said, IST, and IST would make reference to Islam, but he’d be talking about the Nation of Islam, Farrakhan and his movement and so forth.

9:29 Whilst there are aspects of Islam that any Muslim could relate to in relation to that, they know it’s exclusive for, essentially, for black people in America. And so mainstream Islam will never be part of that. And so, for me, it was more of a, it cemented the idea, for me, that the direction I’m going to take is orthodox Islam and adhere to it and try to adhere to its principles. And not based upon my readings of old books and so forth, but something more contemporary, Malcolm X, a person who lived, at least in my father’s generation.

10:03 And the interesting thing is that by Malcolm seeing, when he went to Hajj, and by seeing all these different races of people, he was like blown away. And that, you could argue, got him killed, because he came back and rejected the Nation of Islam and started kind of on his own path, made a lot of enemies, political things, things that were happening inside there. He died. I remember, I queued up for several hours in the rain in 1992, outside of bookshop here in Birmingham, to buy a book that was about the life of Muhammad Ali.

10:38 And eventually, I got through amongst all these hundreds of people, got him to sign my book, and I said to him, you’re the champ. And he replied, he had Parkinson’s at the time, and he replied, turn around and said, you call me a tramp? And I was mortified, and then he just started laughing. But what that meant for me was, and looking and reading in his book, he says, I only embraced Orthodox Islam in 1982, meaning that one of the opponents of Malcolm, at some point, even though he introduced him to Islam himself, was Muhammad Ali.

11:09 Because of this attachment to the Nation, whereas Malcolm, as you said correctly, once he took the path of Orthodox normative Islam, he became a threat to some people, because now he started talking the message of universality and accepting people based not upon a color, which is supposed to be relevant, but upon a belief. And a belief is slightly different to something you have no choice with. A belief is a matter of choice. Color and race are not. And I think that was what sealed Malcolm’s fate.

11:45 Yeah, because we got into a feud with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, I believe, and of course he had recruited Muhammad Ali in a lot of the original ones, and then it got ugly. And we don’t know all the details, but I think something kind of went wrong there. So that’s kind of fascinating that you saw in that book that aspect of it. Yeah, certainly. And even throughout my incarceration in Bagram, in Guantanamo, I came across the autobiography of Malcolm X by soldiers.

12:13 Soldiers who were reading the book. And some soldiers who hadn’t, I’d recommend to them, please read the book to form your own view, not just of your own American experience, but how that links to us, the prisoners here, because we are Muslims. And for some of the soldiers, it was the first ever interaction with Muslim prisoners. So I tried to explain to them that this is also part of the American experience, a journey to Islam. And it may be one that you might be interested in at least learning about and educating yourself. And some of them did.

12:46 Why were they reading that book? Again, mostly it was the black soldiers that I came across who had the book. And I saw various reactions. Some soldiers say from, I don’t know, Kentucky or from South North Carolina would say, oh, that’s a racist book. He was a terrorist.

13:03 Whereas the soldier would say, no, he wasn’t. He was somebody who fought for our liberation and for our rights and so forth. So I think everybody, whether it was us prisoners, we’re having our own hard time. But the soldiers were having a hard time struggling, not only with being out on a deployment in a country where they don’t speak the language and they don’t understand the culture or the customs, but also about where do they fit in all of this. I came across one American soldier who told me he grew up on a reservation. He’s a white Caucasian soldier.

13:33 But he said that what was done to my people, meaning the Native Americans, even though he’s white Caucasian, he said, is like what we’re doing to you right now. And he felt a massive conflict within himself about the abuses that we face, that he was witnessing and in some cases part of. And what he knew had happened to the Native Americans, he saw some parallels about the way in which other people are treated. We were called enemy combatants, but prior to that, we were called enemy aliens. That was the official designation.

14:08 So you are an enemy of the United States, but you’re also an alien, meaning you’re something different. You’re something out of this world. And that language and that terminology, that attitude, stems back from a dark page, I think, in the United States history of otherization of people. Whether it’s Native Americans or the black people in America. It’s a lot of this kind of constant kind of revolution and transition and then looking at ourselves.

14:34 I know you famously have a friendship with one of your prison guards from Guantanamo. He came to the UK for your movie premiere. And it’s a fascinating relationship because obviously it goes to what you’re talking about now. He was struggling with the fact that he had to do this job, which was to maybe terrorize you to a certain extent. I do want to get back to Birmingham, but can you talk about that briefly?

15:00 Well, I had relationships or friendships with several of the American soldiers, and at least two of them have visited me in my home. One in particular, Al, I remember him very well because I got to know these guys. I got to go and know these guys because of solitary confinement. Had I been in general population most of my time, I don’t think those relations would have ever built up because it always would be a hostile situation, us and them. Them in military combat gear, the US soldiers, us and the Orange.

15:30 But in the uniqueness of being in solitary confinement, in an enclosed room, there’s nobody else. There’s just you two, whoever it happens to be that’s on duty at that time. So I got to know East Coasters, West Coasters, people from the Midwest, Black, White, Hispanic and everything in between. I have never been to America in my life, but America has been to me and it showed me a face of it that I didn’t know existed in a place that most Americans don’t know exists in that way.

15:59 I was born in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And therein, speaking to some of these soldiers, sometimes being a mentor to them or an advisor or a guide about relationships, about history, about culture, about politics, it was absolutely unique. It cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world. And those friendships, understandings and interactions developed to a point at which I knew that some of these guys will be friends for life. No matter what happens, I would always think about them and vice versa.

16:31 And there are a number of people I’ve spoken to phoned, talked to on Facebook. I mean, with the wonders of Facebook, there’s so many former soldiers on there I’m talking to. And then from there, it developed into, I want to come over and visit you. And in the relation to this particular guy, Al, he’s a guy from the West Coast and he always tries to get a message. He treated me like a human being.

16:58 He bought me things that I think would have got him thrown out the army, just little things, maybe a little piece of chocolate, maybe a little movie that he brings up on a portable DVD player. The first time I ever saw the film Snatch was in Guantanamo Bay because Al showed it to me. And these little acts of humanity, which, as I said, they cannot be replicated. So when Al eventually came over here, he stayed at my house. He met my wife. He met my child who was born when I was in Guantanamo.

17:26 And I said to him, Al, you are my guest here. And my wife cooked for him. He’s just like a brother. And I just said to him, this time, Al, I’m going to warn you. I got the keys.

17:38 And we laughed. He met my dad. He went into the community with me. People gave a standing ovation when they saw him and me hug and embrace. And these sorts of things, people make films about many, many years later how the American soldiers go and meet the Vietcong that they had fought or soldiers, GIs who fought in World War II and met the Japanese.

18:00 This is happening right now. So whilst people may say that quote unquote radical Islam and America and everybody else cannot meet, cannot talk, cannot come to an understanding, I say that’s already happening. But people don’t want to hear about it. And yet there’s not a lot of these incidents. This probably comes down to a certain amount of your personality here.

18:23 Yes, except for the fact that there was about 800 prisoners in Guantanamo. And each of them has their story. The difference is that because you and I are speaking English and we are, by definition, by necessity, only speaking to the English-speaking world, the rest of the world speaks Arabic and Pashto and Farsi and Turkish and Uyghur and Swahili. And the list goes on and on. And each has their own experience. And I was only in Guantanamo and Bagram for three years. There are people that have been there for 14, 15 years.

18:55 So their experience is a multitude of more times than my own. And we’re just not hearing about it, that’s all. Right. I want to get back there at some point. But I also kind of want to go back to Birmingham. And can you tell us a bit what it was like back then?

19:10 I guess it would have been in the 70s and even 80s in Birmingham. I think even recently, you know, when Trump was elected, he made some comments about Birmingham, right? And it was some divided state or something. What is Birmingham like today? Because I know you live there. And what was it like back when you were listening to Iced Tea?

19:29 What was it like growing up from, you know, an identity standpoint and everything else? Birmingham today believes it is the second city. There’s a dispute between Birmingham and Manchester. We believe Birmingham is after London, the second city of the United Kingdom. Very proud to be from there. It’s a very diverse city. There’s a large Muslim population there. That’s what I think one of Trump’s advisers said that there are no go zones.

19:51 He’d gone to the extreme and said there are no go zones where there are only Muslims and Sharia law is applied and so forth. I think people ridiculed that and made fun of it. I live in an area called Hall Green and we joke that it’s called Hall Al Green now after this place. But the truth is that it is a very mixed, diverse place. And that’s quite different to how it used to be when I grew up. I grew up, as I said, at a time where people from section generation immigrant families were facing aspects of racism.

20:21 There was the National Front, which still exists today. It’s a racist party in Britain. There was the British movement that used to exist back then. There was something called the Anti-Pakhi League, which was essentially against Pakistanis or anybody deemed to be a Pakistani, which included Indians and Bangladeshis and so forth. It didn’t matter as long as you’re brown, you fit the bill. And I got beaten up by some of these skinheads. And that’s one of the reasons why I ended up joining a street gang called the Lynx.

20:46 And this street gang modeled itself on, I guess, gangs that existed in America in one way or the other. And that’s also part of the connection, I guess, when I talk about Iced Tea or others. We were connected to that kind of genre. Did you have your own vests and colours? We did. We did. We had the ex-Italian army.

21:10 Like the warriors. We were very influenced by the warriors. Very influenced by the idea of colours, by the idea of gangs, of regional gangs. That had a huge influence on us, in fact. We’d talk about it. We’d verbatim quote.

21:24 You know, I’ll stick that back up your ass and turn you into a popsicle. Those kind of things we’d verbatim quote it just amongst ourselves. And that was part of growing up, listening to Beat It, Michael Jackson, which came a little bit later on the scene. But it was all part of that video was gangs fighting. It was, yeah, the real gangs. Yeah. And we knew that we knew and we were model on that kind of thing. So we had our ex-Italian army combat jackets.

21:50 We had some kind of patch I don’t know from which army it was, but we wore them as our kind of localised identity. And our raison d’etre was to fight the skinheads. And we did that. But as all gangs do get involved in some kind of criminality or the other, that happened. So I knew lots of people who ended up going to prison for one thing or the other.

22:12 I generally stayed out of it, but I was just only involved in the fighting part of it with the skinheads. But again, it’s a very important journey. My dad came from Pakistan in the sixties. He was a banker. He was a very respectable kind of guy.

22:28 He didn’t face the kind of things that I faced. He wanted to work and make a life for his family and so forth. But I, growing up, going to school, getting picked on sometimes or sometimes just trying to find out where I fit. I was going to have a totally different experience. And for the Americans that are listening that don’t understand the dynamic between Indians, Pakistanis, Britain. I mean, obviously America had our waves of immigrants. And back in the day, the Italians were the wops and the Irish were the this, the mix.

22:58 And then the Mexican immigrants came in. But then as each generation assimilates, things change. So how would you describe, and obviously the West Indians came here, I think in the fifties and sixties. So if you had to kind of break it down, how do the Pakistanis Indians fit in, even in the Midlands, which is not like the big city here? So there’s a very strong link between the British and India. And India, when I say India, that would have included Pakistan was made into a country owned in 1947. Prior to that, it was all India. There was no Bangladesh.

23:29 And so all of those, Britain had colonised India for at least 250 odd years. And my father was essentially a product of that. My father’s father had been a soldier in the British Indian Army. He’d fought in the Second World War in the Western Front. His father had fought in the First World War and in the Boer War. And the history goes back hundreds of years to when they were part of the Mughal Army that was the Mughals or the Great Mughals.

23:56 My father studied as a child in an English convent school. So he was very affected by the effects of colonisation. He spoke English perfectly well before he came to the UK. And that was one experience of many people from the Indian subcontinent. So essentially one of the reasons why we say there’s so many here is because Britain was there. Therefore we are here. This is kind of a reciprocation.

24:20 And I know in America when they talk about Asians, they mean East Asia. But here in Britain when we talk about Asia, we talk about South Asians, people from the Indian subcontinent. And I guess that’s part of our, you know, it’s always going to be part of my identity. But at the same time, you mentioned West India as I was growing up alongside West Indians. I used to speak with a patois accent and talk like that, you know.

24:44 And the only reason why that was the case is because so many of my friends had come from that background. And again, rebellion was part of part of their culture of some of the guys that I was growing up with. The Rastafarian movement, the reggae music and localised responses to what they felt was police brutality, the targeting of black people. It was kind of, I wouldn’t say to the extent of what was happening in America, but it was happening. The institutionalised racism was clearly happening here in the UK.

25:17 And it was the black community then. It wasn’t us. Asians were known for working hard, for keeping their heads down and so forth. And then that eventually after 9, 11 and so forth, things started to change. Okay, and I want to talk on that. Talk to me about as you get into your teens and early 20s, what’s the transformation that’s happening with you? What’s going on in your head? And how do you start either reconnecting to Islam and start getting involved in other things?

25:43 I think there was a couple of things that happened. This was probably later in my late 20s and sorry, early 20s and late teens. There was the war in Bosnia, which was the former Yugoslavia. I learnt first for the first time I’d ever known that there’s an indigenous population of Muslims in the heart of Europe, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Slavic people who are getting killed essentially because they are Muslims. And to me that was shocking, fascinating and all of those things, but I felt some kind of connection. It was a loose, I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t understand the culture, I didn’t know their history, but I wanted to learn more.

26:17 There was that happening, there was also the first Gulf War, the first Gulf War in 1991 against Saddam Hussein. It had the coalition, which included Britain essentially bombing Iraq after they had invaded and occupied Kuwait. I was confused and I found myself, I guess, feeling defensive of what was happening to the Iraqis, not because I understood anything about Iraq, but because I felt that this is what Britain and America and everybody ganging up onto this country for what’s this really all about.

26:54 But it’s a secular state, it wasn’t necessarily a Muslim country. No, that was irrelevant to me, it was just simply Muslim people getting attacked by it. But of course it was more detailed than that. And other things like, well I knew that Palestine had been occupied, I knew that South Lebanon had been occupied, I knew Kashmir had been occupied, but there was no movement to liberate those peoples there. So I felt that there’s something else going on here. And as I learnt later on this, a lot of this was about interest, it wasn’t necessarily about what’s right and what’s wrong at that particular time.

27:25 So that was all, I started to get a little bit disillusioned with what Britain, the direction it was going, there was a time when I was going to join the British Army and following the tradition of my forefathers. I didn’t do so because of racism and because of the first Gulf War, which I felt for me as a Muslim, I can’t see myself being in an army where I have to fight or be involved in something that would harm my co-religionists or people I’m talking about. I’m trying to at least feel some connection too.

27:57 So that’s how you felt about the UK. How did you feel about America? Especially you’re growing up with a lot of Americana. To be honest with you, America seemed like a distant place, an extension of Britain. We speak English, the Americans speak English.

28:14 And there was clearly lots of culture, music, film and so forth, fashion coming over from America. So it was entering our lives without us even knowing. It was so plain, but as I said, I’ve never been to America. So I had no sense of America at all, in real terms, intangible terms. Will you go? Can you go?

28:43 I don’t think America would let me in even if it wanted to. The time when it might have happened was Obama’s time. I can’t see Trump letting me in, I think. What do you mean by even if it wanted to? I think there are too many uncomfortable questions. Too many. My name now is synonymous with Guantanamo. It’s almost Mozambé Guantanamo. That’s like, or Mozambé Guantanamo beg.

29:12 And it forces the Americans to look at why they did that. It will have to. And it won’t be some Afghan villager who’s unable to articulate himself. It’s going to be me saying it as it is. Without exaggeration, but America is going to have to listen to one of the people that it tortured, that it abused, that it falsely imprisoned.

29:33 And I’ve never harmed any American in any way in my life. But America can’t say the same about me. So there will be some uncomfortable questions that will have to be answered. And I think, to my knowledge, not a single former Guantanamo prisoner has ever walked free on US soil. But you have a British passport, so technically you can fly there without…

29:56 Technically, but I can’t see that happening. And you wouldn’t. You would be concerned for your safety. I would, very much. I don’t mean the American people. I think American people are as good as bad as anywhere else.

30:07 But I think administration, whichever administration that would be, I think that I would be at best detained and at worst detained for a very long time. Back to Bosnia. And have you opened the bookstore yet? Because the bookstore, if we look back at your whole story, seems to be where you first get on people’s radar. Maybe talk about that in Bosnia.

30:29 I took the first trips to Bosnia in 93, 94, and I think 95 as well. So I went several times. I went with aid organizations initially to take food and aid, and I had been terribly affected by some survivors that I’d met in Birmingham. A woman, for example, a Bosnian lady who… It’s harrowing just to even mention it, but she’d been raped multiple times.

30:54 She’d been gang raped by Serb soldiers, and they chopped off the head of her child, and she nearly lost her mind. She cooked for us. I remember that then. I felt so ashamed sitting there that this woman’s cooking for us. And we know this story from her. She’s relating part of the story to us.

31:13 Things were bad back then, and I just don’t think they were… The internet wasn’t up and running. They weren’t that well-documented. So we heard these stories either firsthand from people or from one or two individuals who’d gone over and recorded the stories, come back and made the video. There’s one called Masochist in Bosnia and Croatia, which was horrific to watch. It wasn’t for public consumption, but it was just horrific.

31:35 Masch graves, all that. Absolutely terrible. And of course, reports coming from there. So again, what connected me was my search for my identity, that I feel that I want to be connected more to the Muslim world and hear right on the doorstep of Europe. Something’s happening, and it needs your help, if you can.

31:54 Were you angry? I was shocked. I was in tears. I’d cry at night, and of course I was angry. I was angry beyond…

32:01 Because when you hear something like this, you think of a member of your family. You think, what would you do if it was a member of your family? So of course I went, and I went with multiple intentions. One is to help and aid convoy, and possibly, if I can, join some military force. And I did both. After several convoys, I went on one, and when I joined the Armia Bosanska, which was the third corps of the Bosnian army, and it was the volunteer unit, which was essentially the foreign volunteers.

32:31 They were from all over the world, from the Muslim world. What kind of people were there? What nationalities? From Saudi Arabia, from Tunisia, from France, from Gambia, from Indonesia, Philippines. In fact, it was one of the first times when I’d seen that, wow, the Muslim world is massively diverse.

32:52 Like Malcolm X is trying. It’s massively diverse, and it’s people from everywhere you can imagine. I mean, guys from Namibia. I don’t know who those Muslims are in Namibia. So people from Mongolia, so what I’d realized here is that they all come for the same reason.

33:11 And of course, at the time, the concept of radical or terrorism, radicalism or terrorism, wasn’t really associated with the Muslim world the way it is today. We were essentially on the same side as NATO, but NATO or the United Nations weren’t doing anything. That was the point I met. I met Brits out there, I met Pakistanis out there. They’re all from the United Nations, Bangladeshis, Canadians.

33:37 Everybody was there watching it happen, watching the massacres, the largest genocide on European soil since World War II was happening. And everybody sat and watched, except for this unit of fighters who fought back. Right, and you were on the same mission as NATO, because NATO was saying they were trying to prevent these things. Were they bombing them or not? Well, credit to the Americans, and I know one American soldier said something to me that shocked me when I was in custody.

34:06 He said, listen, we came to Bosnia, and we helped the Muslims there. And until we came, nobody did anything. I said, you’re wrong. We were there before you. You made the difference. Of course you did, because you had all the ill power.

34:22 But he was trying to say that we helped the Muslim world, and look what you guys did to us. I said, I didn’t do anything to you. But that was the kind of sense that some of the American soldiers felt. And so that’s how it started for you. How come things weren’t being done there, do you think?

34:43 Interests? There was one thing that… So Bosnia is a country that is made up of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Muslims. You can see the obvious one that stands out. Bosnian Serbs have Serbia to fall back on. Bosnian Croats has Croatia to fall back on.

35:01 The Muslims have nobody to fall back on. So when there was an arms embargo, it affected the Muslims more than anybody else, the Bosnian Muslims, more than anybody else. It was a no-fly zone, that’s fine, but everybody else’s arm to the teeth. The Muslim groups there suffered the most, of course, and the history bears witness to it. And still to this day, we hear just now recently, Radko, Miladich, Radova, and Karadich, and all these people being prosecuted for war crimes 22 years after the fact.

35:31 So the price that was paid, it was the hemorrhage of Europe. And to this day, we talk about Islamophobia and the Muslim threat, but the biggest threat that’s ever happened in Europe since World War II has been against Muslims. It’s a genocide. And I think that has to be remembered for the context of what happens next. Okay, and you’re talking about what happened there. What was it like fighting? What did you see? How did it change you?

35:55 I mean, I have to admit that though I had this, I wanted to fight. I was there in the winter period in particular, where fighting had just become… There was no fighting taking place. And it just happened that I was there for about a month or so, and nothing happened. And eventually, I didn’t take part in any military operations. I was there in the training camp. I was there in the back lines, met with several wounded people, heard the stories of numerous people fought, some who’d got killed, and so forth.

36:27 So of course, I was affected by it. But I didn’t see the frontline action that I thought I might see. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I felt that these people and what they were doing to me was very exemplary and something that I wish could have been replicated around the country. Okay, so you come back to Britain. What happens next?

36:50 So a couple of years later, so part of my journey then, of course, now I’ve met all of these Muslims from different parts of the world. I am… What’s the right word? Networked. No, I’m taken by what I’ve seen they’re like. I am affected, in a sense. I want to learn more about… I meet people from the Arab world, and the Islam they talk about, and how they talk about it is different to the British Islam that I’ve heard of.

37:17 And so I try to research more and learn more, and try to engulf myself in learning about Islam and teaching about Islam in the way I think is the correct way, not the traditionalist way of what we learned from our forefathers, from our parents, and so forth. The stuff that’s kind of based on scriptural texts and stuff like that. And in that context, of course, the idea and the concept of jihad becomes very important. So in my bookshop, we have a bookshop that sells books about creed and belief and jurisprudence and law and so forth. And one of the subjects that we focus on is jihad, the concept of it, the historical concept and what it means.

37:53 And of course, emotional word these days, jihad. It is, other than the fact that a lot of the books that we read at the time had all connected. I mean, the most… I think that revived the concept of jihad in recent times was Afghanistan, when the Soviets occupied. That had complete, and I mean complete, American and British support and funding. Now, the jihadi world won’t talk about that too much because it’s kind of, hold on, Britain and America funding us to do jihad.

38:22 But that’s exactly what was going on. The Americans supplied Mujahideen in Afghanistan with the Stinger anti-aircraft missile system, which helped to knock out those Russian helicopters. In the 80s, right? Yeah, in the 80s. So, and it was the funneling of funds and weapons…

38:36 It was a game changer. It was a puppet star. The Stinger’s were a game changer. Charlie Walsons war and all of that stuff. So, clearly there was interests. Jihad served an interest for the West. Jihad was something that was celebrated. You watch Rambo 3, Sylvester Stallone is with the Mujahideen.

38:53 And the film is dedicated to the brave people of Afghanistan. Right. You’re laughing now because these days that film wouldn’t be made. No, it wouldn’t. I mean, I heard a rumor. I don’t know if it’s true, but that Sylvester Stallone was told to come back in Rambo 4 and fight against the Taliban, which wouldn’t have made sense because these were the same guys that he was fighting along with in Rambo 3.

39:17 And so you obviously see all of these patterns of friends and foe and friends again and foe again. And yeah, but people forget easily. I do. Yeah, I do. And this is again part of my journey, part of trying to learn. And in the midst of this, I have to admit that I come across people that are extreme.

39:34 I come across people who I think are dangerous. I come across people who I don’t want to be like them. But that is not going to form my view what I think is right. Just because there’s a person that amongst Bosnian Mujahideen, whatever you want to call them, is an extremist that wants to wage war on everybody, that wants to kill everybody or wants to blow people up. Because he’s there amongst them, it doesn’t mean that that is the focus. And it’s not the focus for the majority of people. But as time goes on, of course, these people do appear and they start to appear more and more.

40:09 Right. What happens when you meet people like that? Because when I listen to all of your adventures, well, by definition, whether you’re in a groups or fighting or whatever, you’re going to bump into these people that later become ISIS leaders that you know. How do you deal with them? Do you argue with them? Do you listen? Do you say I’m on this path or what do you do?

40:30 Of course, hindsight is a great teacher, but at the time you don’t know. I mean, there are people who always say that such people existed. They existed in Egypt, in Algeria, in the localized battles that were taking place against the governments and so forth. Only now, which I can say clearly, I have seen the effects of what they can and have done, especially in Syria, especially with ISIS. It’s a breed that has recurred throughout history and Islamic history, but it’s a breed that is the most dangerous I have ever seen.

41:10 Primarily because the West feels that it’s a target of ISIS, which is true. The way that ISIS has targeted the Muslim world has no precedent in recent times. I know from when I was in Syria in 2012, 2013, there were people I lived with, stayed with, stayed with their families for several months, were butchered by ISIS, literally beheaded and killed. It’s not just a condemn for the sake of condemning, which I won’t do, but it’s a personal experience I’ve had.

41:45 When I talk about people who’ve come across the scene, they’re in the context of something bigger, an invasion, an occupation, people being imprisoned, people being tortured. The majority of, I mean, even the leaders of ISIS, I’ve studied this to say it’s some degree, and the leaders of ISIS, 17 of ISIS’s 25 leaders were imprisoned by the Americans in Kabbuco and tortured and abused at a time when torture and abuse was not done. Abuse was rampant in Abu Ghraib and other places. So the effects of torture and the effects of abuse and occupation and colonization and all of those things will for a surety produce that kind of response.

42:27 Can you definitively say that the torture caused ISIS in the years to 2012? No, no, I can’t. I can’t say it’s only the torture. No, there are a series of things that made that happen. There is the international warfare between the Shiites and the Sunnis. There’s the hatred. If you look at the hatred that exists between the Sunnis or some of the Sunnis, the ISIS Sunnis in Iraq against the Shiites, there’s a history, whether it goes back to Saddam’s torture of the Shiites and their retribution after they come in power or vice versa.

42:58 And it’s still going on now. There’s retribution from the Shiites against the Sunnis and it’s nonstop. And the torture, the level of torture is horrific from both sides. People being skewered like kebabs and skinned alive. Why so horrific?

43:11 It’s hard to put a finger on it, but what I can say is that torture and abuse and these sorts of violations breed the same thing. And it takes a very, very brave man to come along and say that he’s prepared to forgive for the stage next. I don’t think anybody’s prepared to give, not the Americans, not the British, not the Iraqis, not the Saudis. I’ve yet to come across a nation that says, okay, I’m prepared to forgive to move forward. Is it also something endemic in Islam itself with the Sunni and the Shia divide and the different versions of history?

43:47 I mean, this is going to be hard to get away from in the next hundred years, thousand years. Well, look, let’s just compare, right? In Europe, we’ve had the Protestants, the Church of England and the Catholics fighting each other for hundreds of years, literally at each other’s throats. And only in recent, I mean, even the First World War was some kind of result of that. The Second World War, some kind of result of a schism between European powers.

44:15 So for that to be replicated in the Arab and Muslim world, it’s going to happen. Despite the fact there’s more that reunites the Arab and Muslim world than does Europe. In Britain, and just look in Britain, we’ve got four countries in Britain that have all histories of being occupied by England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and Ireland. And yet we’ve managed the union. Europe, now it has the union, it’s going to fall apart.

44:37 Now the Britain’s pulled out. But it has a union despite its history, its culture, its customs and its languages. The Arab world you take from Morocco to Iraq and everything in between speaks one language, has one faith generally. I mean, there are Christians and etc. So, but generally the, and yet the divisions have been based upon in recent times, colonisation.

44:58 Somebody came across with a ruler, drew up the borders of Libya and Algeria and so forth. To a certain extent, but the Sunni and Shia divide is different. Yes, that’s true. You’re right. It goes back deep and it is right.

45:10 And you’re right in the sense of these repercussions are happening all over the world. So what’s happening in Yemen is a result of that Shia-Sunni divide right now, right? What’s happening in Lebanon, what it happens in Pakistan every now and then, there were bombings between the various communities of Shia and Sunni. So yeah, and Iraq and Syria are probably the worst manifestations of that. And I don’t think we’re going to get away from that for a long time. It’s going to continue.

45:34 Any solution for that? Do you ever think about it? Do you ever talk to people? Yeah, all the time. Yeah, all the time. I’ve been to Iran. I’ve met with people there.

45:41 I’ve met with senior people there and talked about this, this proposal, which many people, much more powerful and more knowledgeable than we have done before in the past. And we cooperate with Shia groups over here in the UK when we talk about issues of Islamophobia and so forth. But what do you do when people are at each of his throats, literally killing each other, skinning each other alive? It’s gone too far. It’s going to be a tit for tat and it doesn’t stop until somebody puts his hand up and says, I’m prepared to forgive you for butchering my family. And I don’t know who’s going to do that.

46:17 Okay, you need like a Martin Luther King figure to walk in. I don’t think even Martin Luther King came across anybody butchering his family. You’re right. Yeah. So you think at the west, we’re quick to point the finger at what’s going on over there.

46:27 But if we looked in the mirror, we would see a lot of our own divided countries, bloodshed, history, etc. And one thing that Al Jazeera always does a great job of, as opposed to NRT, is covering America and showing how much that we’re killing each other there as well. Well, look, the United States of America, I came across an American soldier in Guantanamo. I swear he said to me, he’s a really lovely, nice Southern gentleman, but he said, the South will rise again. He actually said those words. I said, what do you mean?

46:56 Do you realize in that war there’s a million Americans were killed fighting each other over one thing or the concept of the South and the North and what those ideals and values were. America has a history of blood. It has a history of war and killing. There’s just no escaping from that, from the Native Americans to the black people, to Mexico, to internally, and then beyond across the world. There’s only one country that’s ever used nuclear weapons in the history of mankind.

47:26 There has to be some kind of, I think for America, an introspection. America is a fantastic country. It’s a wonderful country, and it’s hard for me to admit that, as somebody that’s only tasted the worst of what it can give. But the more I see of what America is capable of and try to look at it with an unbiased view, which I do from time to time, it’s a wonderful country. It’s got a lot to offer if it recognized what its potential are and that potential for danger was mitigated.

48:02 Yeah, it’s a young country, and it was a country built literally on slavery and racism economically. It’s endemic, and it’s been there for a few hundred years, and it’s got a lot of issues to work out. That’s a different show. I was going to ask you, there was a movie called Hell on Earth that was narrated by Sebastian Junger about ISIS, and it came out, I think, recently or six months or a year ago. But he kind of dove into everything that was happening in there.

48:30 I just wondered if you saw it. It was just interesting to me to see what was happening in Syria, because from the West and from the media, sometimes it’s really hard to try to understand. Maybe we can get into that later, because I know you spent some time there a few years ago. The bookshop you mentioned, you had a section on jihad. Is this how you first got on the radar of MI5 and other people?

48:50 Do you think or can you tell us about also your thoughts on jihad? We didn’t really finish there. Yeah. No, that wasn’t the reason why the Security Services came. When the Security Services came to my house the first time, 1998, they came to my bookshop.

49:04 They came simultaneously to my house. They seized some copies of various books. But what they were interested in was that somebody had contacted me from the Emirates, who said that he’d been torched into signing a confession, that he was part of a terrorist group. Now, he wrote to me and asked me to find him a lawyer who knew I had connections with lawyers, which one of them was Gareth Pierce, which is Britain’s most celebrated human rights lawyer. And I contacted her and explained to her that this person’s been tortured.

49:33 It’s my first interaction on any case to do with torture and British Security Services being involved. So they came about his case. But of course, simultaneously, they searched my house, they searched my bookshop, and they took some of the books. Some of the books were about jihad, about various concepts of jihad and so forth. And they weren’t interested.

49:57 Long story short, they wanted to see what they were about, and they returned everything, and there were no charges, and charges were dropped. But it did give me a bit of a shake-up in the sense of prior to that, I’d been visited by MI5. And prior to that, my view of MI5 was, these guys are like James Bond’s. So when my first visit by MI5, five o’clock in the morning one day, I was a bit tired. But almost at the end of that visit, when they asked me about my views on jihad, they asked me about this particular individual I’d written about and sorts of legal advice.

50:30 I thought, wow, I’ve just been visited by James Bond’s organization. Isn’t it really cool? And that’s what I told my friends. But I didn’t realize that this was the beginning. This was the first step in literally the haunting of Mars and Beg by MI5, because then they turned up at various junctures in my journey in some horrific places where I was tortured.

50:52 Okay, and I want to talk about some of those things. What is jihad in your view? Well, let’s start with the pinnacle of jihad. The hadith or the prophet it’s saying is that the best jihad, the best jihad, is speaking a word of truth in front of an oppressive ruler. Now, I think why? Because speaking against an oppressive ruler, I mean this particularly in places where there is real oppression, where you can’t speak and you can get thrown in prison and tortured.

51:22 Speaking out in a place like that is going to be much more difficult than, say, taking up a gun and fighting in a battle, because you’re definitely going to be targeted if you speak out. So, of course, that’s one aspect of jihad, which I believe in and I try to believe that I want to practice now. In the past, jihad meant to me a physical jihad. It meant taking part in military action, military operations, fighting an enemy. Jihad meant, according to all the books that I’ve ever read on Islamic jurisprudence and understanding, looking at the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets, of whom I met many in the UK.

52:04 And they would talk about jihad in the way that they had practiced it, i.e. fighting the Soviets, defeating the Soviets, kicking them out of Afghanistan. Jihad in Bosnia, to me, was a pristine jihad fighting against people who involved in genocide. So it meant that to me, and it always will mean that to me. What it won’t mean is walking in the streets of Britain or any other country, whether it’s in the Middle East or in the West, and blowing up innocent people, or targeting them, or driving cars against them, or chopping them up, or anything.

52:38 That will never be jihad. That, to me, will be murder. I don’t like to use the word terrorism because it has all sorts of connotations, but what it will be is cold-blooded murder. Which is what the world equates with that world lately. And right down the road, London Bridge, and all these places in Europe, and it’s happening all the time now, with that word thrown in.

53:01 It is, but the problem is that if you go to the Muslim world, the word jihad is part of the language of every ordinary Muslim. And some people will say that jihad is the internal struggle to fight evil. And that is also true. But the books of Islamic law don’t talk about that. The Islamic law very specifically talks about the rules of engagement, about battlefield operations, about the virtues of jihad and so forth.

53:28 Some people, because of the fear that they’re facing, that if you talk about jihad, if you support jihad, you’re a terrorist. I refuse for anybody to hijack what I believe is my language, my faith, my understanding, the Quranic verses. Either the extremists or the terrorists, as we want to call them, ISIS guys, or anybody else that wants to hammer us and accuse us of the community, jihad will always mean something to me that’s pristine. And for Westerns, I simply say, you all supported jihad in Afghanistan when it suited your purpose.

54:01 Let’s talk about Afghanistan and your travels over there, your experiences with the Taliban, and then what led you to Pakistan. Tell me about this chapter of your life. So in 2001, I went with my wife and children, who were all young at the time, all under five, to Afghanistan. Why I went? I’d been already working on a project to build schools in Kabul, in the capital city.

54:28 And these schools were for boys and separate for girls. It was said of the Taliban they didn’t allow female education. I wanted to challenge that view. I wanted to challenge that notion. And I wanted to be part of something that did help to bring in education for females.

54:43 But I wanted to do it as a Muslim and not as a white Westerner or somebody that is deemed to be, by the Taliban, somebody that opposes their views or their faith, their understanding of faith. And part of what we wanted to do was to help to open, expand their understanding through being British Western Muslims, bringing in a curriculum that involves English, that involves computer studies, sciences, languages and so forth, in addition to the Islamic teaching that they wanted to give. And essentially they allowed us to run our schools.

55:17 We had buses and picking up the children. We had a curriculum. We had school equipment and so forth. We had teachers. I even visited a school, often took the kids to displays of this game called Buskashi, which is, you may have seen it in Rambo 3 actually.

55:32 They ride around on a horse and carry the dead carcass of this goat and try to get it on one side or the other. That actually happens. Yeah, it happens. It’s a game. It’s called Buskashi.

55:43 And so there was all of these experiences that I had then. I have to say some of them were wonderful and some of them not so. I had experiences, run-ins with the Taliban. Did you know people there? You must have had some local contacts.

55:54 Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, the Taliban are kind of at their height, right? They’re kind of blowing up some historic things. They’re very powerful, dangerous.

56:06 But you said that the Taliban at one point were a good force in Afghanistan. Well, to understand Afghanistan, you’ve got to look before, during and after the Taliban. So before the Taliban was going on, after the Russians pulled out and essentially defeated the warlords that had essentially been fighting against the Soviets, started fighting each other and they destroyed more of Kabul than the Soviets did. That’s just a fact that’s well known amongst everybody.

56:33 And just human greed and power. Yeah, it is. And factionalism. And then people, young kids were taken as sex slaves by some of the warlords. The story, the famous story of the Taliban, Mullah Ummah and so forth, were approached as people who were students of Islamic knowledge to come and save these children as students of knowledge who were not part of the warlord system.

56:59 So they literally did this, went into a particular region, helped, and they saved these kids after putting an ultimatum. They went from there to strength to strength to strength and took the south of Afghanistan without much of a fight until they came to Kabul, where it’s very cosmopolitan, and they ended up fighting with other groups, Shiites, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Tajiks and so forth. So that part of at least the Taliban I came across and met with, they were very stern, very strict. The understanding of Islam was limited, but there was a raw sense of justice, of security, at least for people, that allowed them to come into power.

57:33 And that’s what I wanted to help to open up at least, to open up the concept of simple, localised politics. Okay, was it dangerous? One of the Taliban guys once smashed my car, and I was not in the car, I was parked, and he reversed into it and completely totaled the car up. He took me to his commander and so forth. It seemed a little bit intimidating then at the same time, but when one of them refused to accept that he’d hit the car, I said, I’m going to take this to the Taliban, Ministry of Transport, and report you.

58:11 And his fear of that got him to admit that he’d committed the crash, he’d got him to admit that he’d done it all wrong and that he’s sorry and so forth, and I left it at that. A more shocking incident I saw when, one night I was asleep, I heard this massive explosion. I thought maybe somebody’s bombing them, but it wasn’t, it was a bomb that went off, it was a terrorist bomb that went off. A few weeks later I was driving along a road and I saw four cranes at the end of this roundabout, four exits at this roundabout, as I got closer, I realized there’s people hanging off each crane.

58:45 There are bodies hanging off the cranes. Closer and closer, people are standing mesmerized, looking at these bodies, walking around them like there’s some kind of display. And these four individuals had been hanged by the Taliban for that supposed terrorist bombing. So, yeah, shocking things were happening. And this is a place you take your wife and children.

59:07 Well, I didn’t know that they were doing that when I took them there, but of course it’s the reality. I mean, America has the death penalty. People can go if they want to and see, you know, the execution take place. The difference here was they just opened it up to everybody else. Did I agree with it? Did I like what I saw? No, I didn’t.

59:28 Country had the death penalty. Shocking. I don’t even agree with… I remember thinking what sort of legal process must these guys have gone through? Not much.

59:39 I don’t think so, no. You sound like a man who likes adventure, or at least you did. I still do. All right. So you’re there.

59:47 This whole process or this abducting of boys and children, it was kind of documented in the book, The Kite Runner. You know, that book was written by an Afghanist author. Is there a history of that, or is that just something that they came up with? I think there’s a history of it. I think there is a history of it, sadly.

1:00:03 There’s something, I think, and I don’t claim to be an expert on this at all, something called Bachabazi, which essentially means getting young boys and using them as sex slaves and so forth. Now, the Taliban would say that they put an end to this with some very brutal tactics of their own. But nonetheless, they put an end to this. There is a history of this. There’s no doubt.

1:00:27 I think it still goes on, to be honest with you. I’ve got to tell you this little story. I was in Bagram prison, which was in Afghanistan, and there was this American soldier, and she looked. I mean, unless you know what Americans are like in this Afghan village, you had no idea. This woman, she had her hair shaved off, which is not a big deal, I guess, in the military.

1:00:51 To him, this was a good-looking young boy. The rest of us tried to tell him, no, this is a woman. So he tried to stroke her arm once when she was handing her a bottle of water, and she went absolutely crazy and pulled in the team, took him away, got him beaten up, brought him back. And he came back just dazed, not dazed that they’d roughed him up a little bit, but dazed that he wouldn’t believe that that was a woman. And for him, it was kind of, you know, I thought, I cringed.

1:01:22 I thought, I wonder what he must think in terms of, you know, the story of young boys being targeted by certain people in Afghanistan, but it exists. It exists in all societies and cultures. Right, and later ISIS used kind of that threat of kind of rape and all that as their own weapon as well. They did. And to reward the troops and these kinds of things.

1:01:44 They did, and they tried to justify it by all sorts of evidences that they’ve misconstrued from the Koran and so forth, and they tried to say that it is okay to take people, girls, as sex slaves because it was practiced in 7th century Arabia and beyond. But of course, that was a period of time when rape was common, even amongst the Roman army or amongst any of the Persians and so forth. Islam came along and put rules and regulations around what happens with women at the time of war, that they must be treated in a particular way.

1:02:17 They must be encouraged to be freed. If you commit some sexual act with them, then you are responsible as a father, as somebody who takes care of them. It was a period of time. That has stopped happening a long time ago, and the Muslim world has agreed on the fact that that doesn’t happen anymore, and it’s not practiced. It wasn’t even practiced by the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or in Bosnia.

1:02:40 So when ISIS comes along, they set the clock back and try to justify it by this way. You’re in Afghanistan at this point when 9-11 happens, is that correct? Yes. And I happen to be on Houston Street in Lower Manhattan, flagging a taxi. The first plane goes in, I’m on my way to work.

1:03:00 You’re in Kabul, I guess. What’s that day like for you? We didn’t have a television in our house, so I didn’t get to see anything on the screen about 9-11. Everything I heard was on the Voice of America, BBC World Service and so forth, and it was pretty vivid. But the way I learned was a friend of mine who later ended up in Guantanamo himself for about 14 years.

1:03:22 He’s a British resident called Shakurama, a great friend of mine. He knocked on the door, and he was shocked, visibly shocked. He said, America’s been attacked. So what does that mean? What Pearl Harbor has happened? What do you mean America’s been attacked?

1:03:41 Who could attack America? China? America’s… So he essentially was saying that there’s a world war that’s about to take place. That’s what it felt like.

1:03:50 I have to admit, I didn’t know what the Twin Towers were. As I said, I’ve never been to America, so I didn’t know what they were. I knew what the Pentagon was, I knew what the White House was, but not the Twin Towers. So when they said the Twin Towers, I couldn’t visualize the size and the height of the towers. It was only after I got to Pakistan later that I saw the images and so forth.

1:04:10 So there was some commotion and so forth, but really ordinary Afghans didn’t make much difference to them. It was just another big day, but another day. And it was not until we started getting wind that the Americans who start to bomb Afghanistan, that we thought about leaving. Which happened a month later, or a couple of months later. Because those same war loads that started fighting with each other after the Soviets left were the ones that started getting kind of bought off, I think, by the CIA to kind of go in.

1:04:44 Exactly. That happened fairly quickly. There’s a key thing that happened before 9-11, two days before Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, he was killed by al-Qaeda in some kind of a terrorist attack. And so I believe that he had been aligned with the CIA at that point. They were trying to infiltrate or get into Taliban territory.

1:05:09 So they now had more reason as well in addition to what the Americans wanted, is to take vengeance on the Taliban. So that started to develop more and more. And eventually, I remember the first cruise missile strikes that came, I think, some time in October. That’s when I evacuated. I felt the shock waves.

1:05:34 Did they hit Kabul or other flights? They hit Kabul and were close to us. But you’re a smart guy. You’ve been around. You must have seen that that was going to happen.

1:05:43 I only based my decisions upon what everybody else was doing. Everybody else, the shops were open. People were getting married. We’re going to weddings. Stuff as normal.

1:05:52 Because Bin Laden was supposed to be based in Kandahar, which is like a 24-hour drive from Kabul. So the talk was all that Bin Laden’s done this and Bin Laden’s going to get hit. So that’s in Kandahar. We will make a contingency plan to leave, and we did start making some preparations. But when the cruise missile strikes hit, I remember the night when it happened because I started seeing Afghan Taliban tracearounds going up in the air, firing at something that they couldn’t hit.

1:06:24 And it was anti-aircraft weapons they were using on these Tomahawk missiles that landed around the area we were in. They landed a distance away, but it was enough to crack the windows of my house. And simultaneously, you can hear all the windows cracking on the street. Scary stuff. It was.

1:06:40 I had people in my house, a basement, and I took kids and women and children from local areas, and I looked from the road and put them all downstairs. And I remember being terrified that this could save us all, and it could all be our communal grave. Right. And so the Americans were trying to take out al-Qaeda and Taliban’s getting taken out in the process. Yeah.

1:07:04 Taliban’s being hit all over the place. They’re being hit. So in the beginning, they were just hitting at night, and then after that, we saw the planes, the aircraft, and the aircraft were… I think before they started dropping bombs, they started dropping leaflets. Leaflets, I think…

1:07:20 Did you read one? Yeah, I have read them. I’ve read them since. And it was offering bounties of $5,000 for each person. It showed like a guy with a beard, free, and a guy with a beard in prison.

1:07:32 And it was essentially saying, any Taliban al-Qaeda people that you hand over will give you $5,000. That became crucial because that was one of the reasons why many people ended up in Guantanamo. Okay. Yeah, the U.S. started cutting some big checks and sending them right into Afghanistan, much more checks than troops at that point.

1:07:48 Yeah. It was missiles, limited troops, or special forces, and a lot of checks. Donald Rumsfeld famously said that these leaflets are falling like snowflakes in December in Chicago. Almost poetic. All right.

1:08:01 What happens next for you? You get the family back to Pakistan. Yeah, there was a bit of a long… I ended up getting cut off from them for a little while, well, quite some while, for a couple of weeks, actually. And they were evacuated by another family that I’d left them with.

1:08:15 I had to walk over the mountains and eventually get to Pakistan, get united with them. I did eventually. It was a very difficult, very, very difficult time, I think, one of the most difficult times of my life, because there was a point I didn’t know whether we were alive or dead. Eventually, I reunited with them, and we stayed in Pakistan. As I said, I have relatives in Pakistan.

1:08:35 My parents come from there. Okay. And you’re walking over the same mountains that it’s possible that… It was a big mountain range. It’s a big mountain range.

1:08:44 But you’re… It’s reported that Bin Laden and his people, and Al-Qaeda and many others, Taliban, walked over these mountains, the Tora Bora Mountains. I wasn’t in Tora Bora that I know of. I was in a place called Malawa. I actually don’t know for sure where I was.

1:08:59 I know that I was walking in sandals over these mountains, trying to get over to where my family was. But if you had worn a GPS device for the previous, say, 10 years, and MI5 was watching, they would watch you in all of these locations, doing all of these things. Oh, MI5 know where I’ve been because I’ve told them. But, you know, in the end of it, for me, I’m somebody that’s trying to find my family at that point. And it was, you know, they can say you were here or you were there.

1:09:32 Nothing meant anything to me other than finding where they were. And I did, eventually, thank God. But it didn’t last very long. Okay. What happened next?

1:09:43 So you get back to Pakistan, you’re with your family there. What are your plans now? Because you can no longer teach, you know, a girl’s school. Yes. So the school that we had, it was called Madras Khadija Bint Khawelit.

1:09:56 It was hit by a rocket, an American rocket, I believe. It was destroyed. The angry at this point, with these rockets. Yeah, well, there was nobody in the place that had been evacuated, so nobody got killed. But the general feeling is anger, stop bombing as people are dying.

1:10:12 It’s all of these things, anger, fear, sorrow, hopelessness, everything that you can imagine, and also regret. I would be lying if I didn’t say that there’s some aspects of regret that I have about some of the decisions I made, but I didn’t make them in the knowledge that this was going to happen. What decisions you made as in putting your family in jeopardy? Myself, my family, yes, of course, and of course, what happened afterwards, because they were left then for three years.

1:10:43 But it’s hard for me to… Yeah, I took those decisions. But was I responsible for what happened? It’s like, you know, a woman walks down the street, somebody attacks her, mugs her, and rapes her. She asks herself, why did I walk down that street?

1:11:04 She shouldn’t be asking herself that question. What happened in Pakistan that night? It was the night of 31st January, almost 16 years to the date now. In my house, knock on the door, open the door, a group of people all unidentified, civil, civilian uniform, Pakistanis. One of them puts a gun to my head, walks in, no words are said, no questions are asked, families in the back are asleep inside the house.

1:11:37 It’s just pure fear and shock and terror. I’m pushed onto my knees. I see a stun gun, a taser crackling in the background, somebody just cracks it, I think, just to let me know what kind of weaponry they have. And someone shackles my hand behind my back, put in my legs, put into a prone position, hood over my head, and that’s it, everything’s darkened. I can’t describe all of the emotions that happen simultaneously, but the biggest one you have, the biggest fear you have is your family.

1:12:12 Who are these people? I don’t know who these people are. I thought that they are some kind of kidnappers. I’m a Western guy, they probably heard he’s a Western guy from Pakistan. In Pakistan, they’re going to take him and…

1:12:24 Yeah, he’s got money. That’s what I thought. Were you talking to them? Asking the question? I only said, please don’t go and wear my families, leave them alone.

1:12:32 Before they hooded my head, I saw them walking inside. So even now, when I think of it, I think, why didn’t I resist? Why didn’t I do more? Why didn’t I fight them all? How can you let somebody go in your household like that?

1:12:46 I should have fought them. But I have to say, I was terrified. I was in a state of fear, terror. They picked me up, physically put me in the back of the vehicle, and then I realised this is something else. Somebody lifts my head over my head and it’s two Americans.

1:13:04 I know they’re Americans from the accent, how they look, and they dress as Pakistanis, and they’re not doing a very good job of looking Pakistani. But they say you can answer our questions here or in Guantanamo. And I already knew what Guantanamo was about because it had been opened just a couple of weeks before that, so the images were fresh in everybody’s mind. And then one of them produced a pair of handcuffs, and he said these cuffs were given to me by one of the wives of the 9-11 victims.

1:13:32 And then he coughed, I already coughed hands. And… Was he angry? He was animated, I think, passionate. I don’t think he was angry, but it was as if to say, gotcha.

1:13:47 Gotcha. And I said to him, wouldn’t you think you’re stupid for keeping the wrong person? You said that to him. Yeah, I did say that to him. Yeah.

1:13:55 It’s a pretty strong thing to say. And I said it to him while I was lying in the prone position with my hands tied behind my back. Okay, so you have fight in you, maybe not physical fight. Yeah. You have your own jihad in you, saying the thing that has to be said.

1:14:11 I don’t think I said it out of any bravery. I think I said it because I really meant it. This is just a really silly thing. I haven’t harmed any of you people. Let me be anywhere near your country.

1:14:24 What happens next? They took me off to some secret location, hooded, Pakistani guest house or some kind of place like that. A holding facility, I didn’t think it was, an ISI. ISI meaning the Inter-Service Intelligence is Pakistan. Intelligence Services.

1:14:42 The Pakistanis were very apologetic. They said you haven’t done anything to harm us. We don’t know why you’re here, but the Americans are running the show. One of them said, Son, if we don’t do this, America will strike us so hard, we will not be able to recover. That’s the term he used to essentially say, I’ve got no choice.

1:15:04 I was taken periodically for interrogations, again, always hooded, shackled by the Pakistanis to a place where, a really nice place, that’s really well decorated and so forth, whether it be Americans, either FBI or CIA or both, asking me questions about people I knew, people I knew back in the UK, people I knew in Afghanistan. That was really it. It was about people you know. It wasn’t about that you did this or you did that. They’ve never accused me of committing a crime in that sense.

1:15:34 But the worst for me was when the British Intelligence Services were there physically. When they were there, and I sat through one of the questioning with them, and they said, the only way you can get out of this, if you cooperate with the Americans, there’s nothing we can do to help you. The word packy came back into my head, then, of course they’re not going to help you, just the packy. So you were angry because your own country wasn’t helping you? I didn’t even know that if it was right to call this my own country at this point.

1:16:05 Because I asked for consular access, I asked for lawyers, I asked for some legal process, I’d been kidnapped, there’s no other way to describe it. I mean, this was a kidnap. And I was being held in false imprisonment. I was not being charged with anything. So the fact that officials of my country involved in this made me feel that, how can I call this my country?

1:16:27 Did you get angry with them? No, I was too afraid to be angry at that point. Afraid for my family, I kept on asking, please, can you just at least assure me my family’s okay? We’re not social workers, that’s a response. And at the same time, you’re going to be going to Guantanamo Bay at some point.

1:16:43 And we are involved. So that didn’t make me feel British in any way at all. And they’re asking you about these people, what’s this guy doing, what did he do? Did he ever talk about bin Laden? Did he ever talk about this?

1:16:56 Well, no, what they wanted, what they specifically wanted from me, especially the Americans, give us anything. We want to know about a plot, anything. That’s the only way you’re going to get out of this situation. Otherwise, you are going to Guantanamo. So I’m racking my brains to make up something, to tell them anything.

1:17:12 Tell us where there’s a stash of weapons. Tell us where there’s somebody doing a plot, named names of people who are involved in committing plots against the Americans. And so they’re telling me and asking me things that I don’t know the answer to. But at some point, later, I did make one up, and I’ll tell you about that later. And people forget, and I remember being there, is that we were waiting for the next thing to happen.

1:17:36 I mean, really, it was like, wow, this happened, they did this. What’s next, what’s next? And also, I can understand the urgency of the Americans, because every day, Bin Laden’s moving, and for them, time is, I guess, so crucial, because they’re looking for anything so they can be on it as fast as possible. Yeah, to me, it was a mixture of both, as I learned over a period of time, where I was an arc and cross-sayed it elsewhere, but there are conflicting, competing factors here.

1:18:03 There’s the CIA, there’s the FBI, there’s military intelligence. All of them are vying with each other to try to get some information, to ingratiate themselves with the administration, to say, look, we’ve got results. We’ve got somebody who’s confessed. We’ve got somebody who’s prepared to be a witness. We’ve got evidence.

1:18:20 We’ve uncovered a plot. All of that was going on. But you’re right. In the early days, I think there was a sense of something else that could happen. We’ve got to stop it.

1:18:30 Yeah. How did this proceed? How did this continue? A few weeks later, they handed me over to the… So I was in Pakistani custody, and now I was handed over to US military custody.

1:18:42 And this was my real first experience of America. And I thought, when I heard American voices, I took us to this airport. When I asked those other prisoners, I couldn’t see where they were, but I was hooded. And I heard American voices. And I made out by looking through the bottom of my hood US military gear, the people wearing the boots, the combat boots, desert boots, and car keys, and so forth.

1:19:10 And I started talking to some of them. And I think they were surprised that one of these foreigners, these aliens, actually speaks English pretty well. And so I started having a conversation with one of them, and I said, you’re not going to torture us, are you? I said, no, son, we don’t do that. It was reassuring.

1:19:25 But he was lying. Lying to his teeth. Because the next thing that happened was that I was dragged on to this airplane in a bowing position, literally with my hands tied behind my back, one soldier with his arm hooked around my shoulder and the other one from the other side. And it was excruciatingly painful. It’s like being in a jujitsu lock with your arms behind your back, a double lock, two people, and I’m a small person.

1:19:53 And then taken onto this plane and punched and kicked. I think I must have been spat on and photographed. I saw that I can make out the camouflage, despite the hood, because it was a cloth hood. Scream of the engine, scream of the other prisoners, and then put onto the floor of this cargo plane. Somebody strapped a strap across my legs.

1:20:20 My legs were already shackled, hands behind my back. And then as the plane was about to take off, I noticed there’s somebody on the left-hand side of me. I noticed by hearing his voice. And he spoke to me as a Libyan prisoner. We spoke in Arabic.

1:20:38 And he said, have you prayed? I was a practicing Muslim at the time, so the sunset prayer had passed. And I said, no, I haven’t. And he said, I think we should pray, brother. So he began praying.

1:20:50 He said, Allahu Akbar, and started reciting the Lord’s prayer, the equivalent of. And an American soldier came and put a knife to my neck. And he said, if you speak again, I’ll slit your throat. He didn’t slit my throat, and I continued to pray. And I arrived then in Kandahar.

1:21:05 You continued to pray? I continued to pray, yeah. Okay, why? Because nothing’s going to stop me from praying. Once a Muslim is in the midst of his prayer, nothing, unless he is literally being killed, is supposed to stop him.

1:21:20 And I think, to me, no better way to die than in the middle of my prayer. How did you feel at that point? Because you had never been in this situation where you’ve been isolated and, you know, interrogated, and now all this was happening to you. I mean, you’re not a soldier at this point. How did you deal with this?

1:21:38 I think had it not been for that Libyan guy, I probably wouldn’t have prayed. The fact that he said it, the fact that to him, that was the most important thing at that point, gave me some encouragement. Probably otherwise, I would have just sat silently and not said a word. You know, try to disappear as much as is possible. And whatever strikes and punches and kicks come, despair them, because these guys are livid.

1:22:08 They think you did 9-11. Yeah, you could feel that, right? Absolutely. Because the next thing that happened when they took me into Kandahar and all the other prisoners, it was freezing cold. I mean, people think Afghanistan’s a really hot place, but it was the winter, and it was freezing cold, biting cold.

1:22:24 I didn’t even have a jacket. I wasn’t even wearing shoes or socks. And they dragged me through the mud with my hands behind my back. A soldier sat on top of me, one knee in my back and one on my head, and he sliced off my clothes with a knife. And I could feel that steel on my skin, the cold steel.

1:22:45 And I could hear them cursing. I could hear them cursing in Arabic, in Urdu. And I knew the words weren’t being pronounced properly because they just learned these swear words. And it sounded so bizarre that these Americans are in the middle of Kandahar in Afghanistan. What are they doing here?

1:23:05 And then naked, I was taken, paraded, photographed. I think that was probably the most humiliating thing, watching it happen to other prisoners, being impotent, not able to do anything to help them. You wipe the hoods off now because you can see all this. The hoods are, I can see everything. And then they shaved off my beard, shaved off everybody else’s beard, shaved off their hair.

1:23:27 I saw grown men crying, not because they were afraid. I mean, some of these guys had fought the Soviets, but because to them their beard was the sign of their identity, their manhood, and all sorts of things like that. It’s important for religious reasons too. Yeah, yeah. They sprayed us with this kind of lime, I think lime or delousing or something like that, punching and kicking, standard spitting.

1:23:50 The hatred was palpable. You could feel the hatred. Again, I couldn’t say anything. What are you going to say to a bunch of guys armed and punching and kicking with huge boots on and you’re naked and shackled? How many of you are there?

1:24:06 I can’t remember the number. There must be at least eight or nine of us, but we’re all naked as the day we were born and then taken off into this interrogation room. And there’s a guy, two guys with FBI hats on. FBI is there. On the one hand, I’m amazed.

1:24:24 The FBI, I only have ever seen these guys in Hollywood. Wow, the other hand, I’m thinking, oh my God, I cannot believe that this is happening. I mean, even now when I talk about it, it’s just unbelievable that such a thing was happening at that time to me, and yet it was. So they all start asking all sorts of questions and rudimentary questions about, oh, I’ve been to, one of them had been to Stratford-Ponavon, which is just up the road from Birmingham. I go there regularly.

1:24:53 It’s the birthplace of Shakespeare. And I’m talking about Shakespeare in naked with these FBI guys in this makeshift tent in Kandahar. Then they take me off, put on these clothes, the signature jumpsuit of Guantanamo, and into this barn and left there for a few weeks. They let you sit. Yeah, yeah.

1:25:21 There’s always a guard, or several guards, in fact, patrolling up and down. M16s pointed at us from watchtowers 24 hours a day, screaming of other soldiers, can’t go to sleep because we’re in this metal barn that’s been converted into holding cells, divided by coils of razor wire, so I can see through to the other prisoners. Soldiers always throwing stones on the metal to keep us awake. It’s shocking. But in the midst of this, there’s always funny things happening that I think, you know, I have to thank that I know Western culture.

1:25:54 So one of the first guys I come across, he’s a huge guy. And he reminds me of Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazzard. And the reason why he reminds me of Boss Hog is because he’s got this child’s voice, and he’s barking out orders in this child’s voice with this southern drawl, which is just making me laugh. The Arabs don’t know about Boss Hog or the Dukes of Hazzard, but they know this guy’s got a child’s voice. So they give him a title, give him a name.

1:26:25 They call him a Tifilah Majjis, when Arabic means the miracle child, which had me laughing every time. What does that mean, the miracle child? It means like there’s a child inside this guy, but he’s huge. I thought, wow, this is some of the wonders of the Arabic language. And so you’re finding humor somewhere in all of this, I guess to help you survive.

1:26:49 All the time. Okay. All the time. Okay. And what’s the next step in their playbook now?

1:26:54 Where are they going with this? So in one of the interrogations, again, I’m taken hooded, shackled, gun pointed at my head, standard procedure into this tent. And there I’m put on my knees and the lift of the hood from my head. And I see Andrew, who’s this MI5 guy who came to my house back in 1990 AD. He’s the same individual.

1:27:17 I offered him T in my front room in my house, and he’s here now part of this horrific experience. And then he begins his interrogation process and starts asking me questions about everything, everything. And he tells me, reiterates once again, that we can’t do anything to help you. You’ve got to come out. The only way out is cooperate with the Americans.

1:27:40 And that’s the theme all the way through. I mean, I meet him several times again over the next several years, but they say the same thing again and again. So you really blame the British government for this, even though the American government are doing the dirty work. Yeah, completely. The Americans, I don’t think the Americans wanted me at all.

1:28:02 I don’t think the Americans were after me. I think that the British made it so. They gave them a dossier based upon what they think were their perceptions of me were and passed it on. And then the Americans did the dirty work, and Britain took full part in it. They participated in the way that one participates in a gang rape.

1:28:21 They participated in what was taking place of a citizen that they were duty bound to protect, and they didn’t. And this all comes down to the special relationship with America, and they were trying to give them something. Do you think that’s what this was about? Yes, I think that was part of it. I think it was very clearly.

1:28:41 The Americans felt very confident in what they were doing. They knew, as time went on, the various tortures that I endured and witnessed, including two murders by American soldiers in Bagram, they knew that this is a British citizen, and that there is a relationship with him, with his country, that is unique, that is special, that is an intelligence corporation and so forth. They knew all of that, and despite that, they felt confident that if he witnesses or experiences abuses, they’ll never see the light of day.

1:29:19 Explain that. I think, as far as the Americans were concerned, nobody is going to interfere him. You know, clearly, no interference was effective at least till three years when the first prisoners from Guantanamo, the British prisoners, were released. Up until that point, everything was justified and justifiable. And if you’re in a place where accountability doesn’t happen, Kandahar, Bagram, Guantanamo, and there is no legal process for you to seek justice in, you can do what you like.

1:29:55 And that’s exactly what happened. That’s why the Americans would say that we do not apply the Geneva Conventions here, because these are enemy combatants or enemy aliens. Geneva Conventions do not apply. We will treat them as enemy aliens and give them a set of rules that is in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, but it’s not the Geneva Conventions. And part of that means if you were under a Geneva Convention situation, you’d have to have an early hearing to determine whether you are or not a combatant.

1:30:29 That never happened. And does that logic make any sense to you? Only in the sense that America was traumatized after 9-11 and that it was acting in that way. I could understand that in the first days, even the first year, but not 16 years later. No.

1:30:52 Then it’s no longer, it’s not about justice at all. It’s about vengeance and some warped notion of preemptive actions, but it’s nothing to do with justice. They’re taking a line from Malcolm X by any means necessary. Clearly. What did you see there?

1:31:11 You said they beat to death to prisoners. Yeah, so after Kandahar, I was sent after Kandahar to Bagram where I remained. Bagram was a strange place because it was a warehouse built by the Soviets. So two superpowers occupied this poorest of countries and you can still see writing in Russian. And in this place, we weren’t allowed to talk, we weren’t allowed to walk, we weren’t allowed to look at soldiers, we weren’t allowed to do anything.

1:31:37 If we were taken to the front of the cell, hands tied at the top of our heads, to the top of the door, and a hood placed over there for hours, sometimes days on end. In this case, in one case, I saw one prisoner. He tried to escape from the back where there was kind of a toilet area. Guards caught him, beat the living daylights out of him and killed him. And I saw his body carried off in front of me.

1:32:04 The next one was a taxi driver. His case became very famous in Taxi to the Dark Side, which is a film that was made a few years ago. I saw them beating him when his body had become limp. And instead of giving him medical attention, they gave him punches and kicks. And he died that night.

1:32:23 And the irony of it is this. A year and a half to two years later, American agents from the Criminal Investigation Department came to me and asked me if I would be willing to identify the corpse of this guy who had died through photographs. So I looked at the pictures and identified the taxi driver, Afghan taxi driver. Then they showed me the photographs of the soldiers who were on duty that day and involved in his interrogation and asked me to point them out.

1:32:52 I did. Then they asked me the most shocking thing. Would you be willing to take part as a witness for the prosecution in a case against these soldiers? And here I had been held for almost two and a half years without charge or trial in solitary confinement. And they’re asking me to appear in court.

1:33:09 So I said, yeah, I sure would. But I’d like to go to my own court hearing first, which never happened, of course. And they asked you this when you were in Guantanamo. Yeah. What happens next?

1:33:24 So all of this happens. There’s other aspects of torture. I’m interrogated by the CIA and the FBI. They threaten me if I don’t cooperate. They’re going to send me to Syria or to Egypt for torture that even the Americans won’t do.

1:33:37 I heard the sounds of a woman screaming in one of the rooms next door that I’m led to believe is my wife being tortured and waving pictures of my children in front of me while I’m on the floor being punched and kicked. Did they imply that was your wife? Yeah, very clearly. I mean, they’re asking what do you think happened to your wife and then simultaneously there’s a scream of a woman next door. I don’t know what my wife sounds like when she screams not like that anyway.

1:33:57 So I had no idea if it was her or not. How do you survive this psychological warfare? You can’t. You can’t. And that’s why I agreed to sign a confession.

1:34:07 I have to tell you through the same, at the same time, the thoughts are going through my head. Grab this guy. He may be CIA, but grab him around his neck and strangle him with your shackled hands. That’s what my thoughts are telling me on the one hand, the other hand, and that’s the one that’s prevalent. Just do anything they want you to do.

1:34:26 That’s it. It’s over. It’s finished. If they’ve got your family here, what else is there worth living for? What else is there?

1:34:32 Just do whatever it is that you can to save them. And what did they want you to say? To sign a confession that I’m a member of Al-Qaeda and to be a witness for the prosecution in any case that they present. Which is what happened in… It’s like Amnesty, but the other way.

1:34:47 Yeah. Yeah. They wanted me. They wanted me bad. They wanted you as the poster boy, as the Western guy that speaks English.

1:34:57 Yep. Got it. Exactly. And so you signed? Eventually.

1:35:03 Eventually, in February 2003, I was transported to Guantanamo. A very painful journey it was. But you said at one point you were looking forward to going to Guantanamo. Yeah. Because it was so bad.

1:35:18 I’d say it again. I’d say it again in a heartbeat. After Bagram, I had not seen natural light, natural day, or darkness for a year. I’d not eaten a hot meal for a year. I hadn’t washed properly for a year.

1:35:32 I had minimal communication. My child was born while I was in Bagram, my youngest son. I didn’t even know what he looked like. I didn’t even know what his name was. And I saw two people beaten to death.

1:35:45 It was a terrible experience. Having said that, I know that there are worse prisons than this. I’m not saying it’s the worst. There are worse prisons than this. And some of the prisons that had been to them told me about them, and I was shocked.

1:35:57 And I said, I’m not going to complain. Except that when they told me, you’re going to Guantanamo, I said, thank God. Thank God. Because you knew it would be better. It had to be. It had to be.

1:36:10 I knew the Americans would do things, but there’s certain things they wouldn’t do. They wouldn’t do the stuff that the Syrians or the Egyptians would do. They would outsource it there, but they wouldn’t do it themselves, I thought. And Guantanamo was a scary place to go to. Because you had heard about it, and you’d seen the orange uniforms, and it was where they took all the big ones.

1:36:31 Yeah, but also it was close to America. And by definition, that means more connection to America. And whatever the good side of America that exists must also get to see what’s going on. I know America’s not all bad. It cannot be.

1:36:50 And there will be people that see what’s going on. I know that when I studied law, America has Magna Carta as part of its constitution. And so people are going to see this. And also, it’s close to, they told me, if you sign this confession, you get to go to court. And I said, in court, I’ll get to expose this stuff.

1:37:11 OK. So you signed it in Afghanistan, and they ship you a point? No, I signed it in Guantanamo. So the same guys would come to interrogations, the FBI CIA, who’d interrogated me in Bagram with the threats against my wife, and then turned up in the… These guys get around.

1:37:27 Yeah, big budget. Did the MI5 guy there as well? Not at that point. He came later, but the same ones did come later. What’s it like to be in Guantanamo, to arrive there?

1:37:37 I arrived sedated because they had shackled my arms, my hands to my waist, and my waist to my legs. They called it a three-piece suit, and then they put a mask over my mouth, huge, very tight ear defenders, and blacked out goggles. So I was like, I think I must have looked like an extra-terrestrial being. And I was tied to a chair, which was a little bit more comfortable than the first journey I had. And then I pleaded one of the guards to kind of sedate me, so he injected me with something I woke up 36 hours later in Guantanamo in a daze.

1:38:09 And I remember being hosed down, and a stick with a sponge at the end of it cleaning me. And then the next thing I remember walking across this desert, kind of this gravel, hot gravel, humid area into this room that was… In which was a small little cell, 8 foot by 6 foot or something like that, 8 foot by 4 foot. And newly painted, and that became my home in one way or another for the next two years. And you were isolated?

1:38:44 Completely. A decision they made with all the prisoners or with you? No, not with all the prisoners, no. They made it with me, and I think one other at that point. In Camp Echo, there was only two of us, both of us were British.

1:38:55 I think there’s several reasons. One is they wanted me to be a cooperating witness. Two, I witnessed the murders, and I promised, in writing to the Americans, I said that I will not let this go, I will not forget what I’ve seen, and I will make sure that whoever I see will get to know about this. So I told all the soldiers, I told everybody that I could, and I didn’t stop until I was released, and then beyond. And the other thing is, I’m multilingual, I speak Arabic, Urdu, and English obviously.

1:39:22 And whatever I have seen could have been a way to communicate with other prisoners and let them know what’s going on from my assessment. And little did they know that they were engineering in these great friendships that you would later have with all these guards. Some of those, despite all of the horror of the other places, the friendships began right in Kandahar. Strangely enough, it wasn’t every single day of Kandahar, there was no communicability or friendships that developed later.

1:39:56 With the fellow prisoners or with the guards? No, with the guards. Is this some tactic on your part? At some point, one of the soldiers told me in Guantanamo that we’d been warned about you. She described, she said, you’re like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and we have to see ourselves as ancient starlings, this guy trying to get into our minds and stuff.

1:40:18 By the end of it, she said, it’s just a load of BS. You are very affable. Two years in Guantanamo, what do you remember? What were some of the transitions in you? I don’t know if it was you that said this, but maybe someone said if you don’t go in a terrorist, you come out one.

1:40:36 Yeah, this was a soldier, he was of Haitian origin. He knows because in 1994, Guantanamo was filled with Haitians, Camp X-ray, that was the first place where a lot of the Haitians, after one of the disasters that happened, came over there and then tried to get into America via Miami. So anyway, he would look at my situation, talk, he said that if I was in your situation, if I wasn’t a terrorist at the point which I came in, I would be one by the time I leave because of what we’ve done to you.

1:41:10 So I told some of these guys my story of what had happened, the treatment in Kandar Bagram and so forth, and when they hear all of this stuff, they’re shocked. And again, soldiers from varying backgrounds, sergeants, one sergeant from Texas, I think he was, Alabama, Alabama, he’d serve two tours of duty in Vietnam as a volunteer, an old guy, I think, would be brought back out of retirement. He was shocked at the way we were treated. And he’d tell me, I was always been fascinated by the Vietnam experience, so for me, meeting my first ever veteran was just amazing.

1:41:45 And he’d tell me stories about how they had been involved in fighting and so forth, and if you treat people well, then they will help you achieve your objectives as a military man. If you don’t, they will hate you even if you’re forced to do what it is that they want you to do. And he told me that was his lesson that he took out from Vietnam after having buried a lot of his friends who’d been killed by all sorts of weaponry and booby traps by the Viet Cong.

1:42:14 Now, Bagram, you remember from its physical violence, Guantanamo was known for its mental game. Yeah. Was that intentional or was that a byproduct? It was both, very intentional, I think very intentional in many ways. I think it was the first time I ever came across psychological, what do they call them, psychiatrists.

1:42:34 I think they were from psychological ops, PsyOps units, whatever it is, designed to help to break us. One of them, he came and talked to me about the experience of Nelson Mandela versus the ANC and how I should take hope in that. And I thought, thinking, you know, do you see yourselves as the apartheid regime and me as an embodiment of Mandela? He’d say, have you taken the story of Job from the Bible and looked at what happened to him and taken that as some kind of solace that you’re tested with?

1:43:13 And I thought, my wife has named my son that I haven’t seen a Yube, which is the Arabic of Job, precisely because of this. And so there was all of this sort of stuff going on, but then the most sinister was when I had a panic attack and a US psychiatrist came in her military clothing and sat on the opposite side of the cell and she said, have you ever considered taking your trousers off, threading your trousers and, I guess she’d say pants and wrapping them around your neck and threading it with a sheet and then using that as a noose to kill yourself. Have you ever thought about doing that?

1:43:54 Of course I haven’t thought about doing that, not until you put the thought in my head. And, you know, several people have died in Guantanamo. That year, that very year, 2005, when I was released later, three people allegedly committed suicide in the… Allegedly. Do you think people were killed in Guantanamo by…?

1:44:11 I think so. This is what other prisoners have said to me. In whatever we want to say, whether it was by design or whether it was by accident, whatever it is, Guantanamo killed them and whoever was responsible for Guantanamo was responsible for their deaths. Why would they want you dead? I don’t think they wanted me dead.

1:44:29 They just wanted you to get in your head. I think they wanted to experiment. I think that was going on. What did this do to the relationship between you and your faith when you’re there? Tested. Tested. Greatly.

1:44:40 Why? Solidary confinement. We’re human beings. We’re social animals. Not being able to contract with other people, I think, is very debilitating. It’s destructive.

1:44:51 Just try locking yourself in your own room for a couple of days and see what that does to you with your own… knowing that you’re free to live whenever you want. And then transpose that into a place where you’re not for years and you can see what that would do to you. Solidary confinement, to my knowledge, was brought in, you know, during the Victorian periods as a mode of punishment to make a person reflect upon what it is that they’ve done. Which is understandable even if you don’t agree with it.

1:45:22 What was it doing in our case? What was it doing to me? What had I done? I kept on saying, what have I done to you that you’re punishing me like this? And soldiers, you know, couldn’t answer that.

1:45:35 They could only empathize. Soldiers, in fact, they were the key, to be honest with you. The soldiers were the key. They were the key to keeping my sanity. Those decent, good-hearted soldiers who sat and couldn’t watch another human being being destroyed, they made the difference.

1:45:53 And you were right in your theory that being so close to America meant you had soldiers that were fresh from America and their humanity leaked out as much as Guantanamo didn’t want it to. Yeah, the soldiers were national guardsmen, reservists, full-time, and all had varying opinions of what we were and what we weren’t. Some wouldn’t look at us, some wouldn’t talk to us, some hated our guts. But there were several who didn’t. Several who were just college kids, literally college kids, who joined up to get their school fees paid up or whatever.

1:46:27 And I learned about them a lot. I learned a lot about America and the experience. Even if I’d never been to America, I did learn from Americans, real ordinary Americans. And I felt a sympathy towards them, a connection towards some of them. Which was hard to explain to any prisoner, because language is a key barrier, experience is another, and culture is another, and the hatred, when I was eventually moved onto the blocks, was powerful.

1:46:56 Every day there’s a raid, soldiers storming, wearing armor, inter-cells spraying prisoners with pepper spray in their eyes, punching them, kicking them, slamming their heads against the bathroom, against the toilet and so forth, taking them off into isolation, stripping them semi-naked, swearing. It was, in some cases, a war zone. But that hadn’t been my experience in camp I call. You signed another confession when you were there. No, just one.

1:47:27 Just one? Okay. At this point, did you think you were going to be there the rest of your life? The difference with Solid 2 Confinement was designed to make you pliable and compliant, and I did kind of start to feel that way. And that’s why I had a couple of panic attacks.

1:47:42 Soldiers made the difference. Some soldiers told me that there’s a massive campaign taking place for you. I wasn’t supposed to know that. They weren’t supposed to tell me that, right? But I learned from them because they’re decent human beings.

1:47:55 And there was a little bit of hope there. More hope came when the first lawyers came to Guantanamo and were eventually given access to me and other prisoners, and they gave us hope that your case has become huge. I wrote a letter, and that letter I said very clearly that I’ve witnessed murders, that I’m innocent, I’ve not even been accused of a crime. And that letter eventually got through. I gave it to several people, soldiers and lawyers and whatever, and I don’t know who got it, but it was eventually read in the British media, in the British parliament, and it shook things.

1:48:35 So you manifested your own release to a certain extent. If you hadn’t written that letter, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. I think it probably would have happened. But not that soon. Yeah, it made some difference.

1:48:44 My father also mounted a huge high-profile campaign, and he was the voice of all the prisoners from Britain, and he was very articulate in that way. Okay, so two years later, you’re released. What’s that like? The day of the release, I remember, a female sergeant, she’s of East Asian origin, whatever, and she comes along and she said, prisoner 558, you will now be released to the custody of the British, there are no charges against you, and that’s it. You know, very stoic in the way she said it, hands behind her back, military reposition, or whatever it is, and that’s it.

1:49:26 After three years, that’s it. They eventually took me and three other British prisoners onto this coach, had the windows blacked out. I’m sitting on the, there’s about ten soldiers for each prisoner. We’re entirely shackled up in the three-piece suit, and I laugh and say to one of the prisoners, I say, listen guys, these idiots think we’re going to escape on our way to freedom. Wouldn’t that be a first?

1:49:51 They don’t see the comedy in this. Still the humour from you. Yeah, I mean the humour will never stop. And it never did. Once I was taken off to some interrogation, this sergeant, SOG, Sergeant of the Guard, comes along and asks me, detainee 558, time for you to take a walk.

1:50:08 Okay? So, okay. I asked him, Sergeant, where are we going? I had learnt the ranking system over a period of time, knew the difference between first class, private, and sergeant, so forth. He stops and he said, how do you know I was a sergeant?

1:50:28 I said, the colours gave it away. More importantly, how did you know I was a detainee? He didn’t see the comedy in that, but the other guys who were around him, they saw it. And so that just had to happen. Eventually, at the end of that process, when we arrived on the other side of Guantanamo, where the planes, British planes were waiting for us, the soldiers in the haste to get us over to that side, forgot the keys for the padlocks.

1:50:55 So, they had to go around in front of the British, which was, I thought, hilarious, but embarrassing. They had to get huge wire cutters and literally snap off our chains, which I thought was so fitting to my end at Guantanamo. I walked onto the plane with British policemen, uniformed, and it was a totally different experience. Nobody’s screaming, nobody’s shouting. I have to say, some American soldiers came and shook my hand, the ones I got to know before I went, and they said, I knew they were going to be released.

1:51:22 I always had faith you were going to be released. And… It’s just you that didn’t shake the other prisoners hands. I’m sure they did. I’m sure they had…

1:51:30 You were the one they had relationships with. I’m not saying that others didn’t. I just don’t know their experience. Why did they say that to you? I think I got to know some of them.

1:51:36 I got to know them, really. And some of them would say, please, give me some contact so that when you’re free, I want to come and visit you. This guy that visited you for your movie premiere, he said, I could tell by the way you carried yourself, that you were a good guy. Is that possible, or is that just a great Hannibal Lecter? You know, I’ve been…

1:52:02 If people believe that my belief in jihad and struggle and defending against occupation and oppression is terrorism, and that makes me a bad person, then they can come to that conclusion and say, I am a bad guy, because that’s what they’re going to base it upon. They’re going to base it upon this guy believes in the concept of jihad as a military maneuver or tactic to defend against whatever he believes in. But if most people understand that concept isn’t terrorism, I do not believe in killing innocent civilians and never will do so.

1:52:31 In fact, I come to their assistance. Then argument’s done. The only difference will be then, where’s the evidence, back up what you’re saying. And either way, that works by accusers and for myself. So most people know, most people will know at some point, whether they feel you’re truthful or not.

1:52:54 And the rest is, I don’t really care. You get back to Britain, what is that like? What is this first few days? It’s a real, I arrive at RAF Northalt, and I’m arrested on the plane, which I forget I found really strange. You’re arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

1:53:12 You don’t have to say anything or do anything, you say you can or will be used against you in the court of law. They take me off into the back of this police vehicle. They drive the police vehicle onto the plane and then rush through London streets, taken to Paddington Green Police Station. There I walk off and somebody asks me, do you want to make a phone call? And that just, everything just fell on my head.

1:53:40 I can phone dad, I can phone my wife, I can phone… I said, no, I’m not going to call anybody as a prisoner. I’ve not been charged with a crime and I’m not going to act like a prisoner or accept any of it. Anyway, I don’t even remember any telephone numbers. They’re all out of my head.

1:53:57 So I stayed the night in the police station. Next day there were some rudimentary questions. I was asked by a police officer, do you know the whereabouts of this person or that person? And I literally laughed through the interrogation. I said, do you realize where I’ve been all these years?

1:54:08 He said, sorry, we just have to tick these boxes. Off we went to my lawyer’s house and then Gareth Pierce. And there I met my family, met my father. After all these years, he had two or three mobile phones on the go, speaking to the media and God knows who else. My brothers, my wife, eventually came with my kids, including my youngest son who I’d never seen before.

1:54:31 What was that like? He didn’t want to know me. The only one who remembered me, my other kids had been very young, was my eldest daughter, Miriam, and she was in tears. She remembers the night. She witnessed the night.

1:54:43 She was six, seven years old at the time when I was taken. And it affected her the most. So, but I wasn’t a bag of nerves or tears. They were. My mechanism inside Guantanamo had always been, you know, cut them off internally.

1:55:00 Otherwise, if you dwell upon that too much, you won’t be able to survive this. Okay, so you don’t get emotional. That’s handled on the inside. Yeah. And next, your mission is to get retribution with the British government.

1:55:13 No, my next mission is to get home and start the gas fire that’s not working in the front room. And that’s what I did. It’s the first thing I did when I go home. The gas fire’s not working. As time went on, I made a statement and started getting…

1:55:26 I knew I’d made a plan in my head. I knew prior to this, I was Bosnia and Afghanistan, bookshop, all that stuff. You know, haphazard a little bit. I knew exactly what I was going to do now. I knew they had formulated my direction in life.

1:55:42 I’m going to be a campaigner. I’m going to fight against Guantanamo. I’m going to fight against torture. I’m going to fight against racism. I’m going to fight against oppression.

1:55:51 I’m going to fight against injustice. And I will do that with whoever and anyone that will listen. And I started getting involved with amnesty. My father’s own campaigns, with local campaign groups, and then with Cage, eventually. It was Cage Prison at the time and Cage later, which had the most comprehensive listing of Guantanamo prisoners, connections with lawyers, family members, the stories, had an interview with my wife on there, and the effects of Guantanamo.

1:56:24 And I got to learn about Guantanamo prisons there that I’d never even heard of when I was in Guantanamo. Okay. Background on Cage for people to tell you now? Yeah, so Cage was set up as an organization in 2003. Exclusively for Guantanamo prisoners to highlight their case, to document the details, and to involve in campaigns.

1:56:39 As over time, it has evolved into an organization that campaigns on issues that have become necessary as a result of the war on terror. So various laws have been passed in the UK, the secret detention sites, schedule seven stops where people who are Muslims are 42 times more likely to be detained in an airport. The Prevent Program, which has recently been made into law in the UK, whereby every school teacher or nursery attendant or doctor or prison attendant is required by law to report what they think may be a prisoner becoming or a person becoming radical.

1:57:18 So all of this stuff included campaigning against the Glorification of Terrorism Act 2006, whereby people who wrote poetry in this great land of Shakespeare were imprisoned for terrorism. And so this is the place that I’ve come to, as it were, the years. If I thought Guantanamo was bad, even though it’s a distant place at home, things were happening that we just couldn’t recognize anymore. Okay, so now the mistreatment of you has bred now a fighter? An attitude.

1:57:50 I think an attitude. The attitude is this, is that the more you harm me, the stronger I become. And that’s evidenced itself. I didn’t have a platform before Guantanamo. Nobody wanted to hear my story before that.

1:58:08 I had no story to tell, essentially, other than a few experiences here and there. I didn’t… I have to thank the CIA, the FBI, US Military Intelligence, MI5, for making me into the person I am today. I don’t mean I work for them. I mean I have worked against the abuses that they have done against me and others.

1:58:27 And if it wasn’t for them, if it wasn’t my experience with them and through them, I wouldn’t be here. And you said the way they treated you made you stronger? Is that what you said? No, it made you focused. And stronger.

1:58:39 It’s funny, the first thing that came to my mind is that is the same as the Soviets with the Afghanis. Is that the same with the attack on 9-11 that made the Americans now these kind of extreme points? Is it a human cycle that we’re just watching? It is very much. It is by nature. We’re like this.

1:58:58 Yeah, you can crush somebody for a small period of time, but at some point they’re going to stand up. There’s an American soldier. I mean, the American soldiers, the wisdom I learned from American soldiers, amazingly, one of them said to me, he said, you know, when you put a man down, you have to stay with him. And I thought about jujitsu or about any martial art, wrestling, judo. You want to stay, you want to pin somebody down, you’ve got to be down with them.

1:59:23 The moment you get up, they stand up and face you again. And I thought to myself, yeah, that’s right. There’s only so long they can keep people subdued and we’re going to stand up too. Because when they hold you down, they compromise their own values, their own morals, their own beliefs, and it eats away at them. Sooner or later they have to let you up to get up themselves.

1:59:47 You know, the first time I ever heard about the Naked Prisoner Pyramids in Abu Ghraib prison was in Guantanamo. And that wasn’t because we had any access to news. We didn’t. There was no radio, newspapers or TV there. The reason why I learned it was from a soldier who was disgusted.

2:00:03 He said, I joined the military out of principle. He was an active duty unit soldier. He said, I heard about this stuff and he told me about the Naked Prisoner Pyramids. And he was disgusted to what was going on there. And that’s how I learned about it.

2:00:17 Yeah. What happens next? You did find you did have a settlement with the British government. Yeah. You and the other British members that were at Guantanamo.

2:00:27 I’m sure you can’t speak too much in detail on that. But can you tell us kind of what happened there? It had been a long fight. We had been fighting for essentially saying that the British government, the military, the MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Attorney General essentially had all been complicit in our torture and false imprisonment. They denied it, fought it, tooth and nail, spent millions of pounds in fighting, which was what was inevitable.

2:00:50 And that was disclosures and documents in court showed clearly that the British government had been involved in new or to have known what was happening in our case and about our torture. So imagine that fighting, fighting, fighting, 60 barristers involved at the highest level. They stop and say, OK, we want to talk. Why do you want to talk? Because evidence is coming out.

2:01:12 How do you fight that? How do you fund that? I was funded through various organizations. Others had legal aid. Essentially, it was it was a difficult fight because each person had to retell the story in in painful detail.

2:01:28 But the point at which they wanted to negotiate, we wanted to say that we wanted to follow this through to its natural conclusion. But it couldn’t have happened. Funding was a problem because the legal aid department would only have done it to certain point. And they would have said we’ve offered them a solution, a settlement. They’re not taking it.

2:01:44 And funding would have got pulled away. There was all sorts of other hidden threats. So in the end, we took a settlement. We’re not allowed to discuss the figure, but it was between about 15 prisoners. And in the end of that process, they were to pass new law in this country under the called the Justice and Security Act, in which such cases in future would be held in secret, whereby the lawyers and you will never be able to get to see or challenge the evidence against you.

2:02:19 And that is now law. So that’s a law that was passed as a result of this. So this was it’s really important. The Americans in 2015 published a Senate torture report about the CIA, Senate torture, admitting that they tortured 112 prisoners that were in CIA custody, not the others in military custody. At least the Americans accepted that tortured. Obama said we tortured some folk.

2:02:44 He even said that ISIS was a result of some of that torture. The British have never admitted a thing. I sat with the British police, metropolitan police, for hours, giving them testimony for the first time being on the same side as it were about the MI5 agents, about Andrew describing him, hair color, height, build, like you’re describing a criminal, because they began for the first time in history the first investigation by the police, criminal investigation of MI5.

2:03:16 They convinced us that this was something they were going to see through to its natural conclusion, even if it reads them right to Tony Blair. In the end, they stopped. Nothing happened of it. And it just will whizzled away. But I guess there was all of that happening simultaneously. The prime minister ordered an inquiry, a judge-led inquiry into allegations that the British government had been complicit in.

2:03:37 Again, that whittled away into nothingness. But I have to give at least the Americans credit on one part. They admitted we tortured people, even though they said no one will be prosecuted for these war crimes. And this new law that was enacted on the back of your case means that you could never do this again? No, not in this way. I mean, you could, potentially, but it would be the evidence would not be, you wouldn’t be able to see the evidence.

2:04:05 You’d have to rely on special advocates and people appointed by the government. Okay, so we go more into a totalitarian state. Which is what was happening. When they held it in Guantanamo, we eventually were given the combatant status review tribunals, which after three years almost determined whether we were or whether we weren’t a combatant. But that was based on the determinations of a special advocate, secret evidence that you couldn’t challenge.

2:04:30 Okay. Settlement is big. Tens of millions of pounds? No, not tens of millions of pounds. Okay. All right. And so in the end, do you feel good about that settlement? Or is it just…

2:04:41 Some people said that, well, will this gag you? And I would say simply, see my record since that day, till now. I’ve been gagged on nothing. In fact, I’ve spoken up more. If you commit a crime against somebody, there are a few things that you should have to face.

2:04:58 Either a fine, monetary penalties, imprisonment, or some form of retribution, some form of redress. The government was involved in committing crimes against the serious crimes. And I think in that sense they got off very lightly. Okay. Now I must say, when I heard your story, this is when it probably would naturally conclude if it was a bedtime story.

2:05:25 But with Muslim, it seems like it’s just getting warmed up. Well, some people say I’m the Islamic forest gump. I don’t know if that’s true, but you’re absolutely right. I said again, perhaps, I mean, maybe I don’t know. Had this incident, had Guantanamo not happened, I’d have been in a different direction.

2:05:44 I don’t know where I would be. I can’t say. But I know the direction that took me elsewhere. I went to Libya. I went to Tunisia.

2:05:52 I went to Egypt. I went to South Africa. I went to Kenya. I went all around the world talking about Guantanamo, helping to campaign in local cases, Kenyan rendition cases, speaking to prisoners in various countries as part of the Arab Spring and talking to them about their torture, about the case of Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi, a person who had been captured by the Americans and sent over to be tortured to Egypt, where he gave a confession that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein on weapons of mass destruction, which became the key justification to invade Iraq. All of this was going on.

2:06:29 And I was meeting with people around all these places. Because I already said my direction now had been fixed by my experience. So these experiences took me all to these places, which eventually, in 2014, sorry, 2012, took me into Syria. At the time, the Free Syrian Army was being supported by Britain, supported by America. Again, it was a scenario of Afghanistan, Britain and America supporting jihad when it suits their purpose.

2:06:56 And so my visit to Syria had been based upon the threats made to me. They said, the Americans said to me, if you don’t cooperate, we’re going to send you to Syria. They had sent people to Syria. They just didn’t send me. And I met with people who had been sent to Syria, to the Assad regime. So America was working with the Assad regime.

2:07:17 I have absolutely no doubt about that, just that they’d sent people to Gaddafi. Absolutely no doubt about that. They’d sent people to Egypt. No doubt about it at all. But the Syrians publicly admit that. But you know that they did.

2:07:28 Yeah, I mean, it’s documented cases, well-known documented cases. And the other thing, of course, was that the Syrians now were too busy to be worried about cases of renditions. Some of these rendition victims themselves were now leading the revolutions in their country. Part of the reason why they became leaders is because their torture experience. Prisoners often, Mandela is an example, become leaders.

2:07:52 And so that’s what was going on in Syria. My role there primarily was to document some of those cases, list them and so forth. Are you still married to the same woman? How did she put up with you? She knew who I was when I married her. She married me, yeah. She’s Palestinian. She understands, like, she knows the concepts of justice and injustice, I think, to a degree.

2:08:16 She’s from a family that was thrown out of Palestine in 1948. And her parents still hold on to documents of land, orange tree orchards, like from Jaffa, Jaffa oranges, that they say is our family’s inheritance, but can never go back. So you’re in Syria now, in 2012. And what is now your mission here? So I’m trying to meet with people who are these rendition victims, and I do meet with some of them.

2:08:43 Are you ever worried I’m going back to Guantanamo? Or you’re like, you know what, at this point, I’m on a mission. No, I mean, I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. And there’s many reasons, but one of the things that happened is that before I go, the British intelligence contacted me.

2:09:01 MI5 contacted me, would like to speak to you about your visit. I’d been before to Syria on a small, short visit, come back, written about my visit, and I think they knew about it, or they knew about it through intelligence. Anyway, they wanted to ask me about my assessment of Syria. So I said, look, OK, I don’t mind talking to you, but I have to warn you, MI5, I’m going there to investigate the involvement of security services, the Americans and the British in working with the Assad regime.

2:09:28 So I do have to warn you. And they phoned back again and said, we would like to meet you, but our lawyer will be present. Now, I find that really funny. MI5 feel like it’s necessary to bring a lawyer present. So we brought our lawyers together. I brought my lawyers. They brought theirs. We sat down, made an assessment about how what kind of threat Syria faces.

2:09:48 And of course, they didn’t feel there was. I didn’t feel there was. There was no ISIS at the time. ISIS wasn’t even a twinkle in Al-Qaeda’s eye at that point. And so I went, came back, and it was fine. A year and a half later, they arrest me. A year and a half after that meeting, they arrest me for being involved in terrorism in Syria.

2:10:10 And so what are the allegations that I sent a generator to one of the rebels and that I helped give fitness training? And did you? So I showed some people how to do press ups. And I did send a generator. Yes, I did send a generator. But these were the same people. So I was in prison. I was thrown in prison in Belmarsh Top Security Prison as a cat A prisoner, meaning that I am a top-level terrorist, dangerous prisoner.

2:10:45 Cat A written all over myself. Nobody messes with me in prison. Not because I’m tough. It’s because he’s a cat A prisoner. And I’m in prison with gangland killers, murderers, drug dealers. And they won’t mess with me because this guy is a big fish.

2:11:02 This is the same prison they used to put IRA in. Yeah, yeah, they put everybody in in terms of it’s like the top security prison in the UK, which which which after Guantanamo was was, you know, let’s just say it wasn’t difficult. So you deal with this in a cool manner. Yeah, but you’re upset. I’m rearing for a fight.

2:11:23 Of course, in the beginning, when they raid my house, 150 police officers, they say now that in Britain, we don’t have enough. We have a shortage of police officers because of cuts. But there were plenty that day. 150. 150 offices in your home. Yeah, in my home. Do you still have the bookshop, by the way? No, that was gone like 20 odd years ago. Yeah.

2:11:42 They come to my house, search it, put all the kids in the room. Kids are visibly upset. They’re all teenagers now, so they’re not young anymore. And they themselves see the effects of it. I said to them, don’t worry, I’ll be back home soon. I’m not fazed by these guys at all.

2:11:59 They take me off to a police station. And then after a couple of days of questioning, they take me off to a court. Court denies me bail. I’m too dangerous. And then I’m taken off to prison.

2:12:12 I remained there for seven months. During the seven month period in the beginning, I’m thinking what the hell have I done now? They tell me that they bugged my car. And the transcripts and the recordings come to me eventually. I’m terrified. What the hell have I said?

2:12:26 And I start to realize this is the best evidence that you could have possibly asked for. I’m speaking in here about ISIS before ISIS is born. I’m speaking here about the dangers of extremism before they even recognize that such organizations exist. I’m talking about how they have to be tackled by us, the Muslims in Syria, before they manifest themselves. I’m talking about being involved in the saving of prisoners that I’m involved in in Syria while I’m there helping the people of Syria.

2:12:56 I’m helping to rescue them by guys who go on to lead ISIS. And these idiots haven’t even looked at that. In the midst of all of this, there’s a prisoner that gets taken, a British hostage, an aid worker called Alan Henning. Prior to this, I’m trying to fight for his release because I’ve been in Syria and I have some connections on the ground. And I approach the foreign office. I go there with my, see the shadow secretary for the…

2:13:23 Why do you care? Because somebody has asked me for help, to save a life of a person. Okay. One of his family members. Yeah, relatives, friends that went out with him. So I do. I write a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Arabic and I prepare to send it to him through some intermediaries.

2:13:43 The guy that’s holding him. Yeah, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the caliph, the so-called fake caliph of ISIS, right? And in all of this time, the police, when they raid my house, they seize this computer in which this letter exists. So they know. They know because I’ve already informed them with the lawyers and so forth.

2:14:04 In prison, I start seeing images of the first execution carried by ISIS, James Foley. And I then realized that Alan Henning, the guy I was campaigning for, he must be alive. They kept these guys as bargaining chips for the point at which, if they get involved in hostilities with America and Britain, which they intend to do, then they’re going to use them. So I write, I tell my lawyers, I said, let’s get the foreign office here in prison right now. Let me make an appeal on television in Arabic from the depths of the dungeon of this prison for this guy to be released.

2:14:39 I’ve done it before, not from prison, but I’ve done hostage release videos before and they’ve been saved. They come along, they talk to me, they say, well, we wish we had people like you assisting us and so forth. They give it all the rhetoric, but they say we won’t allow this to happen. Of course they wouldn’t, because it ultimately would make them look pretty bad. But it would help to save a person’s life. And the day after I was released, my trial fell apart and I was looking forward to my day in court, based upon all the evidences I had.

2:15:13 The very next day, the happiness of the trial being aborted is killed with Alan Henning. Alan Henning is executed the next day. And I hold the government responsible. They could have done something. They could have allowed me to make that appeal. It would not have hurt them.

2:15:39 And yet they didn’t, because they wanted you. They had their own priorities. They didn’t, because of hubris. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, unless they happen to be the IRA. I had a guy in here that used to interrogate IRA members, and he went on to actually work on a coup of Equatorial Guinea.

2:16:03 And when he was held there, they said to him, do you think we negotiate with terrorists? And he said, of course you do. We always did with the IRA. I know the Americans do too. The biggest evidence was Bo Burgdahl. I remember when I was in prison, I was watching this happening from my television screen.

2:16:23 The American soldier who’d been taken captive by the Taliban, after five years, was handed over to US custody, to the CIA. And you could see in the video, this Taliban guy standing with a face mask all over the place holding RPGs and machine guns and so forth. And they bring over Bo Burgdahl. In response to this, five prisoners from Guantanamo, five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo were released. So there was a prisoner exchange, and they were released to Qatar as the mediator.

2:16:54 But what was fascinating is that just before they handed him over, they searched the guy, they searched Bo Burgdahl, the Americans did. And then the CIA goes to the Taliban guy and shakes his hand. What does that mean? Shaking hands with terrorists? Or does it mean that there’s always a way to talk? And always have been.

2:17:16 And so what’s happened since, and what is, as far as I’m doing today? What happened with Syria? How did you wrap that up? Syria has descended into something that it’s just so painful to talk about. What I felt was part of the rising against oppression and dictatorship has now become a regional conflict that has hit all of those fault lines.

2:17:45 The Shia, Sunni, the American, Russian, the Turks and so forth. Everybody’s taking a piece of it. I mean, and ISIS is the key. ISIS stabbed the revolution in the back. But ISIS also launched its wars on everybody around. And it has reignited the war on terror in ways we thought, you know, 2011, we thought pretty much it’s over.

2:18:11 Things have changed a lot. Things are dying down now. But it has just moved things to a place that we thought one could not return. And it has made terrorism. Driving cars is terrorism. Literally driving a car, driving a van is terrorism.

2:18:31 I don’t mean that it isn’t terrorism. What they do, I mean that it’s become that simple. What do you make of that? What do you make of the tax in Britain, in France? You know, there’s been occasion in the past where I’ve hit an animal when I’m driving.

2:18:46 And the thought that goes through your heart and your head is what have I done? So you stop, whatever it is, roadkill. So imagine doing that to human beings. Imagine the niece attacker driving over people and not stopping, but going over more and more as many as he can do. What kind of, what goes through your head when you do something like that?

2:19:13 And so maybe in the past I might have been able to help to decipher what makes a person want to go to jihad. I still can understand that. I cannot, cannot explain, cannot understand what makes a person do something like that other than he’s lost his mind or he’s seen something similar to it in a different way. And he has become his oppressor’s best student. What goes through your mind when you hear about, say, London Bridge attack and I keep pointing over my arm because it’s two, two stops away and I worked on that bridge for a long time.

2:19:49 But when you first see the news report and it’s like, okay, this van goes down, you know, a London bridge and it’s running over people. What goes through my head is that if I had been there that day, if I had been there that day, I would have used every tool, every method, everything I’ve ever studied or learnt in my life to defend myself or defend other people to apply it on them.

2:20:13 That’s what goes through my mind. Even if it meant killing someone you might know from the past? I don’t, I’m pretty sure I don’t know any of these guys. And they’re from a different, different generation. Their understanding of Islam is one I do not recognise.

2:20:27 And if it had meant that I know one of these people, so be it, at least he’d get a kick in the face. How do we go from here? What is the way forward with the youth in Britain, with the youth everywhere, with these attacks? Where are we going? I think Britain wanted to really mitigate all of this and stop it happening. It would take some responsibility. Some, at least some.

2:20:52 I’m not laying the entire blame on Britain, but there has to be a recognition. You know that Britain has been, as part of the American coalition, bombing Iraq since 1991 and has not stopped. Can you imagine that? 26, 27 years? Transcontinental bombing campaign, longer than any war in recent history.

2:21:15 What do we think that would do to a population? You know, when I was in prison, I met an Iraqi. You know, he was in prison for 38 years. He had a 38 year sentence on his head. And I said, why, what did you do? He said, I tried to bomb the airport, one of the airports in this country. I said, why did you do that?

2:21:38 He said, because they destroyed my family in Iraq. And it was a moment of madness that I don’t, there’s not one day that I don’t regret it. But it was the height of the war in Iraq and members of my family had been killed and I didn’t know what else to do. He’s serving 38 years for that now. But what did we expect? Our security services said that the likelihood of terrorism in this country will skyrocket if we invade a foreign country.

2:22:07 Iraq. So if you kill people there, is it beyond the scope of possibility that people might want to kill people here, the way human beings are? I guess the government isn’t a big fan of yours. What’s it like being Muslim in Britain these days? It’s still home. It’s not just the government anymore. It’s the media is out of control, completely out of control. The hatred that has been spewed, the lies, the exaggerations, the twisting of the truth. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

2:22:46 Examples? And when you say media, what do you mean? A Sun newspaper, for example, will print a front page story saying one in five British Muslims sympathise with jihadis. To most people, a jihadi is a terrorist. A jihadi isn’t that guy who was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, right? So it’s already the confusion of language.

2:23:07 But to most people, jihadi means terrorist. So we’re saying a fifth of the Muslim population incubates or supports the idea of terrorism in this country. People who drive over vehicles, that’s not true. That’s the biggest lie that you could produce, especially because the biggest sufferers of terrorism are people in the Muslim world. Explain that.

2:23:31 I mean, as a result of the war on terror, terrorism has taken root in Pakistan. The Pakistani army is one of the strongest armies in that region. But it spends all of its time almost fighting in the Northwest region against the Pakistani Taliban and the rise of ISIS. ISIS didn’t exist until, Al-Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq until America invaded. There was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

2:23:58 Al-Qaeda through stages became ISIS. ISIS now is the biggest threat that we’ve faced since the IRA in the UK. And yet we say that knowing that people are killed in their thousands by ISIS and others and their offshoots all around the Muslim world. But it’s not newsworthy in the same way. So we need to look at our news and think about it before we consume it, because it’s reactionary and it’s us versus them and it’s not doing you any favors.

2:24:29 It’s not doing anybody any favors. When our media talks about and puts on the front page, a Muslim did this, a Muslim did that, but it wouldn’t say the same thing about any other racial group or any other religious group to identify them by their religion. We’re in this place now where the Jews were before Nazi Europe began its final solution. I’m not saying we’re in the same place. We’re in 2018.

2:24:53 But the connotations are very, very clear. Muslims are targeted for how they look, for how they dress, how they pray, what they eat, how the women dress, how their places of worship are. Every aspect of our normative life has come under the microscope, being targeted by law in some cases and by the media vilification and others. So it is a free-for-all open season on Muslims. And what are you going to do to change that in the next 10 years? I’m sure you have some ideas.

2:25:22 Yeah, part of what we do at KEG is try to empower Muslims, try to tell them to stand up in the way that we stood up in Guantanamo. Yes, we accept our situation, but it doesn’t mean we have to do it lying down. We try to hold power to account. We carry it out, as I said to you before, the greatest jihad, speaking a word of truth in front of oppression. And ask them to do that, not to be afraid. And at the same time, if you perceive your oppressor, do not let him become your teacher.

2:25:49 So if you feel that you’ve been harmed, the Muslim world has been harmed, it’s been occupied, it’s been tortured, well don’t let that be your guide. And let us, the former prisoners, the victims of torture, be the ones to tell you that. We’ve got the experience to tell you that, maybe the credibility too. And what do they do when they bump into a friend that’s an extremist? What are they supposed to do? I’m asking, Moazzam, what do I do?

2:26:13 Talk to them. I come across many of them in prison. Many. I don’t like the term extremism, but I understand what you’re saying. I come across many of them, many ISIS supporters and so forth, and I explain to them, through my experience, as somebody who’s been in jihad, as somebody who’s been in battlefield, as somebody who’s been on the front line, as somebody who’s experienced torture, as somebody who’s witnessed people being beaten to death.

2:26:34 I come with that, and I have a strong knowledge of Islam, I speak Arabic, as I said, I can quote the Quran very well, and I tell them from that perspective, they can’t argue. At best they’ll say, well that’s just your opinion, but they can’t argue, the experience, they can’t argue, I think the knowledge too. Torture. If you had to explain to someone why torture is or is never justified, what would you say? The case of Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi is the case in point. They tortured this man into giving testimony that Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaeda on obtaining chemical weapons to attack America and the Western world.

2:27:16 That was a false testimony that he gave in Egypt, tortured under the auspices of the Americans, or with American questions coming in. This information was taken by the US intelligence, this confession, and handed over to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State in the United States, 2003. Colin Powell goes to the United Nations Security Council, presents this as credible evidence and a justification to invade Iraq. You invade Iraq, no al-Qaeda there before. Al-Qaeda comes in. No weapons of mass destruction.

2:27:51 And Iraq becomes this destabilized place that is rupturing the rest of the world and every place that’s connected to it. It leads on after years into various manifestations which then become ISIS. That’s what torture’s done. Donald Trump, when he was elected, said he might reconsider torture after President Obama said he was putting it to bed. What did you make of that? And what do you make of him?

2:28:18 Well, Donald Trump is from the administration of Bush and Bush’s administration, people like Alberto Gonzalez and others, Bibi, had those famous torture memos and said that for something to constitute torture unless it’s organ failure or death, it’s not torture. So what you had is the most powerful law enforcement, legal advisors to the American government redefining the meaning of torture. At least they wouldn’t say that we torture. That’s the Bush administration. Obama said the effects of torture brought us to ISIS.

2:28:56 Trump says, I would torture, I believe torture works. I would waterboard and a lot more Guantanamo is good, I’m going to fill it up with some bad dudes. That’s what happens when you don’t set a precedent of prosecutions for anybody who’s involved in torture, which in this context is a war crime. What’s Trump going to do? In some weird way, is he going to be an ally of yours?

2:29:21 No, I don’t think so. I think what Trump has done is given us things to say which perhaps was more difficult under Obama. Obama at least gave the notion, the sense that America has an intelligent leader who at least understands things even if he’s not going to implement them all. He was a constitutional lawyer. He understood the law. He never called the prisoners in Guantanamo innocent, which I accuse him of because as a lawyer that’s what exactly their legal status is.

2:29:50 Trump said it’s straight. I believe in Guantanamo. I believe in torture. I wonder if a leader of some sub-Saharan African country said the same thing with American prisoners in his dungeons and said, I believe torture works for these guys who we suspect. I wonder what the world would say.

2:30:12 So we’re in a dangerous place, I think, with him. I have to say, I laugh often about Trump as most people probably would, but say what you want. The American people elected him. He is the choice of the American people. There’s no getting around that.

2:30:30 And if that’s 2017’s answer to democracy, then we’re f’ed. And yet his secretary of defense, Mad Dog Maddox, says torture is not the way forward. He openly disagrees with him. What do you think of that? The president says one thing. The defensive creature says something else. Who do you believe? Is there a discrepancy here? I don’t know. The proof will be in the pudding. The proof will be in the action.

2:30:59 We’ve documented cases even under Trump where torture is happening, where extrajudicial drone strikes are taking place, killing children. So it’s business as usual, I think, in many ways. Trump spoke in the past about pulling troops out of Iraq and so forth, but I think the reality is that America has entangled itself into a kind of a war that it can’t even extricate itself from. You can’t get out. You’re there for…

2:31:31 Until, as I said, somebody comes along and said, okay, it’s time to put your hands up and turn the page. Future of Guantanamo Bay. I mean, Bush is the one that got a lot of people out of there. Obama said he was going to close it down. Never did. What’s your read on that whole thing?

2:31:49 Trump has spoken about sending ISIS prisoners there. I don’t know if America is ready to send more prisoners to Guantanamo. If it’s a decision of Trump, there will probably be an equal amount of people who support him and an equal amount of people who don’t. Not because they care any more or less about Guantanamo. It’s just how America looks. America is beginning to look like a laughingstock in the rest of the world under Trump.

2:32:15 I remember we used to laugh at Bush and the Bush-isms, but Trump makes Bush look intelligent. And so that’s where we are right now. And if people understand the damage that’s happening because people want to say what they feel and feel what they say, and Trump’s the embodiment of that. Then there’s a price to pay internationally. And I think people are waking up to that.

2:32:41 Do you want to see Guantanamo shut down to just end that whole chapter? Yeah, I think it should have been done a long time ago. There’s no sense in keeping the place open other than symbolically. And for the prisoners of America, it has one of the most robust judicial systems in the world. It prosecuted terrorists left, right, and center. I’m not even saying that the American justice system is the best. I’m simply saying that if America wants to prosecute terrorists, it has plenty of precedent. It has some of the longest prison sentences in the world. It still has the death penalty in some places. So it’s not for lack of process or prisons. So what’s the point of keeping it open?

2:33:21 The biggest goal that America scored is when it was being on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged plotter, mastermind of 9-11. They tortured the guy for several years before they brought him into Guantanamo. They waterboarded him hundreds of times. What was the point of that? How are you going to now take him to court and reasonably prosecute him and enter that testimony that was extracted through torture when torture testimony cannot be used in US courts?

2:33:55 That’s why they’re keeping him in Guantanamo and starting a process and applying a process that is only applicable on Guantanamo. You can’t even apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And that’s why several American prosecutors have resigned from Guantanamo, saying that we didn’t study him. This is law exclusively for Guantanamo. There’s 41 people left there?

2:34:16 41 prisoners. Is the existence of Guantanamo just the open sore of blatant human rights and legal abuses? Is it just showing you, like you said, this is America just with a loophole of their legal system? I said earlier on that I made appeals for hostages to be released and they were. The reason why I made an appeal in 2005, those four hostages had been held by some group in Iraq. And they were Western hostages, white hostages. One American and one from Britain, two from Australia, I think.

2:34:47 I made an appeal because I saw that this group had dressed them in orange jumpsuits. And the language was about, this is what you do to our people in Guantanamo and that’s what we’re going to do to your people. One of them was executed. The American was executed. The others managed to stay alive.

2:35:03 I like to think that my appeal and the appeal of other people in the name of the Guantanamo prisoners helped at least to save some of them. I’ve had contacts from all of them thanking us for those, thanking me for those appeals. But that’s what Guantanamo did. ISIS, when it dressed James Foley and Alan Henning and all of the other prisoners that they executed, dressed them in orange jumpsuits to send a message. It’s Guantanamoized conflict in many places now.

2:35:35 Were you ever worried about being waterboarded? I was worried about being sent to the Syrian government or to the Egyptian government, where I think waterboarding would have been merciful compared to some of the stuff they do. So I was terrified about that. And they had already told me one day that I was going to be sent there. Tell me about just your thoughts on prisoner rights, maybe Geneva Convention.

2:36:01 How do we have to live the next thousand years on this earth as humans? Do we have to set up a protocol that isn’t biased, that doesn’t get to be determined based on emotions on the back of a terrorist attack? How do we do this? I think if you look at the Nazi trials, war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg after World War II, the Allies prided themselves on the fact that they gave these genocidal maniacs a day in court, a full defense, a meaningful trial and prosecution and so forth.

2:36:36 And that they were treated humanely to the point which Goring was able to commit suicide through something that was smuggled into him. So the point was that they weren’t taken to summary trials and held without charge and dealt in a way that people accused of committing far, far less have been dealt with. And I think part of this is an inevitable racism. These aren’t Europeans, no matter what. They’re not white Europeans from a European tradition. They are the other. They’re part of the Islamic world and they are by necessity require other rules.

2:37:14 So if you want to treat prisoners in the way that you treated the Nazis after World War II, you already have the mechanism. You already have the Geneva Protocols and the Conventions and so forth. And just a question of following them. But when you dehumanized your opponent to the level at which they literally are aliens, it’s not going to happen. And so it’s all a question of us recognizing one another’s humanity.

2:37:38 For the Americans that are watching, can you explain what Schedule 7 is and maybe even go a little more detail into the Prevent Program because they’re not aware of this stuff. So Schedule 7 was part of the 2000 Terrorism Act and has been more increasingly used since 2005. And essentially this is a power that the police have at the ports of entry and exit into the country, airports and ports, whereby they can stop anyone without any reasonable suspicion at all, question them, search them, interrogate them, search their property and so forth for up to nine hours.

2:38:19 Primarily it was without any legal representation. Now there is, you can have legal representation, but the police are not bound to wait for your lawyer to turn up, which can be often hours. So you are required to answer these questions. If you don’t answer these questions, you can, and in some cases will be arrested, prosecuted and convicted as a terrorist. So what’s the crime of terrorism? Bearing in mind that terrorism is the use of violence for an ideological religious political act. There isn’t one.

2:38:55 But the nature of this law has now extended beyond its any purpose. Just in last year, I believe about 20,000 people were stopped under it. There were five arrests and I believe just one prosecution, one person successfully. So you’ve got to stop that many people. And it wasn’t anything to do with an act or an active plot. I think it was connected to something that had nothing to do with terrorism at all, but because somebody refused to hand over their password.

2:39:30 This was a colleague of mine from Cage, the organisation Cage. He was travelling from the Middle Eastern country with sensitive information about a torture survivor, somebody who had said he’d been tortured in US custody and that we wanted to seek justice for him through the legal process here. The police stopped him, my colleague, and asked him for his passwords for these documents. He refused. He said, I can’t. This is a trust between a client and me.

2:39:57 And so they arrested him under the Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act and they prosecuted him and had him convicted for refusing to give the password. Police state. It’s certainly one of the signs of a police state. And are your plans with Cage to fight back against these? Yes, we have documented hundreds of cases, thousands of cases. In fact, you are 42 times more likely to be stopped if you are Asian, Muslim, quote unquote.

2:40:23 Almost 90% of those people who stopped under Schedule 7 have been of a Muslim background. And so we say it is disproportionate. Muslims constitute about 4% of the entire population of the UK. Yet this is disproportionately applied upon the community. So it’s one of the things that we’re fighting for and there are several other things that are kind of knock-on effects of various terror legislation in this country.

2:40:52 20 years from now, if you’ve done everything you want to do with Cage, what does Britain look like? If it works out the way that we want it, I think we’d repeal all terrorism laws and bring us back to a point at which people can at least start to recognize the country that we’re in. It also means that terrorism stops because the causes of terrorism are recognized and they stop too. There are several countries in the world that don’t get attacked by terrorists, many of them, even within Europe.

2:41:25 You don’t hear about terrorism attacks in Switzerland. Perhaps that has something to do with their foreign and internal policy that’s based upon it. And if we really want to be a country that wants to expend more time, effort and resources on our education system, on our health system, on our transport system, then by necessity we have to start looking and deciphering what the effects of our foreign wars are brought. These wars aren’t stopping terrorism, they’re causing them.

2:41:54 Britain is now facing a greater terrorism threat than it has in recent history. Seventeen pieces of anti-terror legislation over 18 years, one a year, hasn’t made us any safer. God knows how many invasions, two invasions, continuous drone strikes, militarization of even our police forces, hasn’t made us safer, has made us far less safe. What about the Forrest Gump saga? Will you be imprisoned again?

2:42:23 If I’m imprisoned for speaking up or doing something that I believe to be right, I’m not afraid of prison at all. Let’s bear in mind Martin Luther King, and I don’t liken myself to him in any way, I’m nowhere near his status, was arrested 29 times. And people see the image of I have a dream, they don’t see I have a prison cell, which is what he had 29 times, which he did more than he did, I have a dream. So I’m not afraid of prison if it’s through principle, but if they imprison me for something that I do wrong, and that is a crime, then if it’s proved, then I deserve it.

2:42:56 But I don’t think I’m going to be going to prison for anything like that. What is your obituary, Reed? 40 years from now, what do we remember? Talks too much. What will be your legacy in your life? I’m guessing it’s not going to be this is a guy who spent time in Guantanamo. What do you want to be remembered by?

2:43:17 If there’s any good that I did in this life, then I hope that my God first accepts it, and people recognize it. And if there isn’t, then at least try to recognize I tried. That’s simple. That’s it. If I were to ask some of your friends, what is Moazzam’s superpower? If they had to tell me, what is that one thing that would be his superpower?

2:43:46 What would you say that they say that is about you? Peanut butter. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if I have a superpower.

2:43:55 You have something. Faith. Teachings of my father. What did he teach you? To stand up for the oppressed. Even if it’s in your locality, even if it’s in your school. Stand up against bullies.

2:44:14 Is he still around? He passed last year. Okay. You’re very stoic. I mean, you know, it’s very hard for most people to believe that you could, you know, sit there and host a prison guard from Guantanamo Bay in your home in Birmingham, or not walk around with animosity.

2:44:35 I mean, I’m listening to myself and thinking of Mandela references. This is how he rebuilt the country. But how do you get it? There’s an absolutely beautiful verse in the Quran. It says, oh, you who believe stand up as just witnesses for God and do not allow your animosity or hatred of a people to cause you to do them an injustice.

2:44:57 Be just that is closer to God consciousness. To me, that embodies, as I said before, I don’t believe that you should allow your oppressor to become your teacher. We have other places where we seek our morals and guidelines from. And that’s one of them. What was the best day of your life and the worst day?

2:45:19 The best day, I think, was the birth of my eldest daughter. The worst day was being taken away from her. That night in Pakistan. And when you look back now on this Guantanamo experience 13, 14 years later, do you have a different perspective on it than you did when you got back to the UK? Only in that I feel less qualified to talk about it simply because things have moved on and changed a lot.

2:46:00 And I know many, I’ve spoken to many prisoners who’ve been released over a period of time and their experiences are different to mine. And I have no monopoly on the Guantanamo experience simply because I’m an English speaker. I actually feel very bad for those whose stories haven’t come out in their world, in their world, whether they’re in Pakistan or in Sudan or wherever it is. So only that I don’t feel as qualified to speak about it at all. My experience ended in 2005, which was 13 years ago.

2:46:34 And there are much fresher experiences that need to be heard. Are you surprised that the world doesn’t react more when they hear your story and say, well, wait a second, tell me that again. What happened again? Even the British public or the American public? Because, you know, it’s quite sensational.

2:46:49 And it’s also quite obvious that there was a massive misjustice done here. Are you surprised that the media doesn’t take more of it? Well, the media did take quite a lot of it. It’s just that I think I have to say I think there are worse things happening in the world. And our humanity doesn’t become accentuated just because we’re English speakers or because we’re British.

2:47:12 There are things happening in the world right now that I find myself unable to look at because inhumanity is just too much to take. So when you put it away, it’s out of sight, not necessarily out of mind. But I think a lot of people do that. It’s just some things are just too much to take and interfere with having a good night out. Essentially, it will put you in a bad mood. You plan to go out with your girlfriend or with your wife or with your kids for the night.

2:47:44 You read something, you see something, and now all of a sudden you want to become an activist on this. You say, listen, I ain’t going out tonight. There’s too many injustices for me to be having a night out on the town. I think people will end up doing that, and they just can’t. And it’s very selfish for people. That’s why most people will be happy to donate to something or the other.

2:48:06 But to actually actively fight against something requires personal sacrifice, and I can vouch for that. What do you think of people that write the check as opposed to stand up and use their voice? Everybody’s contribution in this way or the other is, I think, cannot be devalued. But at the same time, change doesn’t come through a bit of change, pocket change, that is. Change comes about through struggle and sacrifice.

2:48:40 In modern times, the people that I look towards and speak of, it’s Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, prison, shot, executed, whatever it is you want to call it, that’s the price they had to pay. And with it came change. What would we be surprised to know about you? What do you do when you’re not on the front lines fighting all of these things? What do I like to do? I like to play chess.

2:49:10 Are you good? I think so. I think so. We might have to find out. I love hiking in Snowdonia and the mountains in general, like kayaking.

2:49:28 I think one of my great loves outside of all of this is wildlife. I completely love wildlife. I’ve been on safari a couple of times. It’s Kenya and South Africa. I just love getting out and away from people in that sense.

2:49:49 If I had a different calling and a different life, I’d like to have done something that would have been outdoors. What scares you? Camel spiders. A camel spider is the only arachnid in the world that has ten legs. We saw them in Afghanistan. An American soldier used to bring them and throw them in our cells.

2:50:16 When it bites, it liquefies your skin and your flesh. It has pound for pound the most powerful bite in the animal kingdom, in the insect kingdom. To look at it is the stuff of nightmares. I’ve seen tarantulas and other things, but I’ve never seen anything as scary as this. When it runs, it’s like a bullet. Camel spiders terrify me.

2:50:37 What keeps you awake at night? Camel spiders. Not having performed what I know I could have done.

2:50:51 I look back at some of the incidents that happened in Bagram and Guantanamo, some of the injustices, some of the torture, some of the things I witnessed in Syria, and always kick myself. I could have done more. I could have said something. I could have saved somebody’s life. I could have stopped an oppression from taking place, and I live with guilt.

2:51:11 I live with the guilt of those two people who died in front of me. Moazzam, I always ask people here a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if I could give you a magic phone and you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Moazzam and give that young man a bit of advice, I’m guessing you’d still be in Birmingham, what would you tell him? Be more resilient. Tough days are coming. Be more resilient.

2:51:40 Prepare yourself. Strengthen yourself. Tough days are ahead. Was he soft? I think my family wouldn’t say so, but I think I was.

2:51:52 On that same note, what’s the best advice you ever received? Could it come from your father? Could it come from a Guantanamo guard? Could it come from an ISIS leader in Syria? What is the best advice?

2:52:08 I’ve always said, amongst the best advice, I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best, but it’s amongst the best advice, was an American soldier, a Southern Baptist from North Carolina. In Bagram, he said to me, people are always asking me, why me? People are always asking, when they’re in a difficult situation, oh, Lord, why me? And he said, I ask, why not me? So that flipped it back in my head, and I thought, yeah, why not me?

2:52:36 So when you’re experiencing that difficulty, and you wanted to go away, look at it as an opportunity, an experience. Yeah, yeah. And an experience, a test, something that puts you through something else, and at the end of it, you come out, if you faced it, and that’s what I said, I wish I was more resilient, because I’d be more resilient.

2:53:04 I would have come out in a different way. I’d probably be even more able to challenge the things that I’ve seen. And to be honest with you, despite all of the stuff that I’ve said to you this evening, I enjoy most being a family man at home, more than anything else. Things drive me, duty drives me, and so forth, but if you ask me what enjoyment I have, it’s time spent at home with, well, they’re not kids anymore, they’re all grown up, but time spent at home.

2:53:37 Last part of that question, to that 20-year-old that’s watching us right now, and this person could be in Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, the United States, Britain, the Houses of Parliament, who knows who’s tuning in, what advice do you give to them as far as a way that they can make a change? So, for example, we don’t see a repetition of the events of the last 20 years, any of those events, what can they do? You’ve told the rest of the world literally, and pride yourself on your civilization of which your law is key.

2:54:16 You said the law applies to everyone equally, without prejudice. Apply it. Hold yourself to account. Hold yourself to account before you are held to account. That’s what I would say.

2:54:34 Muslim, thank you for being here today. It’s been very interesting learning about you, learning about your story. I can guarantee that the people watching this are going to bring all of their baggage to the table when they watch this, and that’s a good thing. I can guarantee that a lot of the people that watch my show aren’t going to like this, or at least they think they won’t like this, and that’s good, that’s why I’m here, to challenge them. I’m here to test them, as in, why not you, is why I’m here.

2:55:03 I appreciate you going through a lot of the details of the story, which I’m sure aren’t always the most pleasant things to relive. I appreciate your honesty, and I’m sure there’s points where I could have drilled down more and questioned you on these things, but it’s great to hear your story. I also hope that you get to go to America one day, because I think you would find it fascinating. And to probably take a road trip, all down to the deep south, go see your friends in Alabama, in Louisiana, all the way out to Texas, maybe say hi to George Bush, and out to California. I’d like to see you be able to go there someday and check it out.

2:55:42 And maybe that’s a bold thing for me to say, and maybe that’s naive, but you are a bit American in some way. My family said that when I come back from Guantanamo, I had an American accent. I said, there’s nothing worse you could have said to me. Well, maybe I’ve just insulted you, or maybe complimented you. But thank you for sharing these things, and I think these human rights issues are just so important.

2:56:10 And when I got to Britain originally 15 years ago, I saw the cameras everywhere, and I thought, even this wouldn’t play in America. Even the citizens there would say, well, wait a second, we can’t be watched. And I’ve kind of watched Britain slide into this state, little by little. And the states is actually following them right behind, little by little, where slowly our civil rights are taken away, and they’re done so to protect us. And I’ve had a lot of people in here where it comes to privacy on the internet and privacy in the monetary system, where they’re trying to implore people to wake up and say, you need to fight tooth and nail for these little rights.

2:56:46 Whereas most of you would rather flip over to Instagram or go out with your misses or just not fight, because it’s not worth it. And yet, little gets taken away and little gets taken away, and pretty soon you become one of those victims, and then we all suffer. And so I think it’s very important to just stay vigilant and just to defend, like you said, the rule of law. And you mentioned Mandela a bunch of times, and the one thing Nelson Mandela always said was, the South African court system was actually reasonable.

2:57:16 It allowed him to go there and present his evidence and all of those things on the politicians and the laws, maybe not, but he actually kind of had a shot in court to put it out there. And I think we need to really defend that. One of the things that people talk about is, many things may have been eroded here in the UK, but one of the things left is the court legal system. And by and large, that is one that dispenses justice. There are caveats to that, however.

2:57:45 In Britain today, cases that are being heard in secret, and that has little precedent in Britain. What it means is that slowly but surely, on the basis of national security, that civil liberties will be eroded. And if we don’t watch out, if we think it’s only going to happen to the Muslims or to the blacks or to the Irish or trade unions, then why should we worry? But eventually, it will encroach on everybody’s civil liberties, because power unchecked means that it’s power that can go from violation to violation without anybody stopping it.

2:58:24 And I think to finally say, when it comes to the media, I think that’s where every single individual has to put their filter on and really start discerning what they’re being received on the media. Do you look at the front page of The Sun? Why do you do that? Do you watch the news? Do you watch the BBC? What blogs do you read?

2:58:43 Because you have to be the front lines of your own system and make sure that you’re not going down one road that someone likes you to go down. So you should be contesting every headline. You should be also controlling the media that goes in your head. And again, before you go and judge someone, hate someone, sit down with them for two hours and get inside their head. I think the more we do that, the more we kind of normalize this and stop with the fake news and the clickbaits and let’s make these vilifications and these decisions.

2:59:12 So that’s my final challenge to people listening. So, Moazem, thank you so much for being here, as we say on London Real.