Prison quake:
New Guantanamo documentary play rocks TimeLine
By Novid Parsi

Time Out Chicago
Issue 49: Feb 2–Feb 9, 2006

When the Americans bombed Afghanistan, Moazzam Begg and his wife, pregnant with their fourth child, left their aid work there to wait out the attacks in Pakistan. But one night in January 2002, American and Pakistani soldiers abducted Begg, a Briton of Indian descent, and sent him to the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. For two of his three-plus years there, Begg lived in solitary confinement.

Jamal al-Harith, a British-born Web designer, took a backpacking trip to Pakistan in 2001. The Taliban arrested him, accusing him of being a British spy. After the Taliban fell, the U.S. sent al-Harith to Guantánamo. At various times he was shackled so tightly he couldn’t stand, punished by being locked in a freezing-cold room and interrogated for hours on end. Al-Harith would not leave Guantánamo for two years, and while there, he never saw a lawyer.

Begg and al-Harith’s stories are among those being staged in Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, in its Chicago premiere at TimeLine Theatre. It started with Nicolas Kent of London’s Tricycle Theatre, known for its hard-hitting documentary plays. Kent asked novelist Gillian Slovo to compile the massive project. Slovo in turn brought on journalist Victoria Brittain, a former foreign editor for The Guardian.

After Kent spent hours gaining the trust of the detainees’ relatives, the families finally agreed to talk. “Here you have not a group of Muslim fanatics, but ordinary people who are trying to live a good life in Britain,” Slovo says. “A policeman knocks on the door and says, ‘Your son’s in Cuba.’ And the last they heard their son was in Pakistan for a wedding—and then discovering that there’s nothing they can do.”

Five of the nine British citizen detainees were released in 2004. Of those, the only one the authors spoke with directly was al-Harith; the others (some of them in their early twenties) “were in pretty bad shape and didn’t want to talk to anybody,” Slovo says. Since the play’s 2004 premiere, the remaining four British citizens have been let go. Nine British residents are still there.

Mistaken identity had a lot to do with the arrests, the authors claim. The Americans had little knowledge of Middle Eastern regions or languages, so they offered rewards to locals for information. The impoverished people fingered the foreigners among them, then pocketed the cash.

“In the name of democracy, all the democratic safeguards are being annihilated,” Slovo says, such as not holding people without charging and trying them. “My fear is that ordinary Muslims all over the world will look at Guantánamo and see it for what it really is, which is, you get picked up if you’re a Muslim. And because this is being done in the name of democracy, that will turn them against democracy.”

Brittain echoes that sentiment. “I think it’s the most disastrous foreign-policy miscalculation made by a government that has made numerous tremendous errors, including the Iraq War,” she says. “The level of hatred of America that’s been created by this pointless exercise is dramatically terrible for all of us.”

She thinks the American authorities have known of the detainees’ innocence. “They know. Some of the interrogators have said it. These people are totally innocent,” Brittain says. But if that’s the case, why hold the roughly 500 detainees still in Guantánamo?

Brittain says that well-connected Middle Eastern families with detained sons posit this theory: Guantánamo is an American tactic to intimidate Muslims on a global scale. The thinking goes, “The Americans are saying, We know your boys are innocent, but we can hold them anyway.” Brittain points out that the people saying this aren’t European lefties but conservative Middle Easterners who, until this experience, “could not be more pro-American.”

So what does Brittain, a journalist who’s spent a decade covering the Middle East, think about that theory? “I’ve yet to hear anybody who defends what’s happening in Guantánamo give me a better reason for why they’re there.”

Guantánamo begins previews at TimeLine Theatre on Tuesday 7.