Demonstrators recreate detention camp outside US embassy in London
**Hélène Mulholland
Thursday January 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
**The former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg is experiencing a surreal moment. He is watching row upon row of “inmates” in a pen as they kneel on the floor, heads bowed and clad in orange boiler suits, masks and goggles, while US soldiers walk up and down barking orders.
“It makes me feel very strange,” he says, “particularly the orders being shouted. It is almost bizarrely real - yet I know it isn’t.”
Mr Begg is standing in front of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in central London on a grey January day as more than 300 demonstrators play out the mock Guantánamo Bay camp scenario to mark the the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees to the US naval base in Cuba.
Other protests are being held across the globe, from Brisbane to Washington DC and from Hungary to Cuba itself. Mr Begg, a British citizen, was held for four years before finally gaining his freedom after pressure from the US government. In total, 780 detainees have been held at the camp. More than 400 of those there today have had no contact with their families throughout their detention. Many are without access to lawyers, and none has been charged.
Mr Begg disagrees that the camp is a necessary evil in the “war on terror”. He says Guantánamo has created strong anti-US feelings in ordinary Iraqis who until then had no such views, and that it has excited the imaginations of insurgents. “Guantánamo Bay is producing more terrorism. In Iraq, they have dressed people in orange and executed them as a direct response. They have said that.”
Mr Begg accuses the US of perpetrating the very sort of terrorism it purports to be rooting out. Men interviewed after their release from the camp have repeatedly claimed to have been tortured. The only differences between today’s mock camp scene and Mr Begg’s own experiences, he says, are that leg and hand shackles and the ear-muffling contraptions that cut off detainees’ senses are absent here, and no one is “getting a few punches and kicks” as they kneel, sometimes for hours at a time.
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** Guantanamo Bay**…the beacon of Freedom and Justice…for the rest of the world eh. Pray tell, this is what those men are fighting for..?
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