While it was good news that the British software company T-Enterprise decided to kill “Rendition: Guantanamo”, a video game that would have served as al Qaeda propaganda, the real story was never about the T-Enterprise or even Xbox’s producer, Microsoft. This story is about former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg, the would be star of the video game, and his ability to serve as an effective al Qaeda propagandist in the West. Begg is the former Guantanamo inmate who has been able to convince media outlets that he was nothing more than an innocent when he was shipped to Gitmo. But, as I reported in my initial account, there are good reasons to think that Begg’s story is a complete fabrication. Begg is far from an obvious innocent. According to Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu in Inside Gitmo, all of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement authorities that investigated Begg’s case believed that he was an al Qaeda terrorist. U.S. military intelligence clearly thinks that Begg, who was reportedly released only because of political pressure from the UK (where he is a resident), was involved in al Qaeda’s terror network in important ways. Begg allegedly: trained in al Qaeda camps for years, gave safe haven to the families of al Qaeda terrorists, prepared to fight with the Taliban and al Qaeda in 2001, and fled to Tora Bora with al Qaeda terrorists after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Yet, despite Begg’s allegedly substantial al Qaeda ties, he has become a wildly popular celebrity in the West. In 2006, for example, GQ magazine named Begg one of its top 100 males. Begg appeared in the highly-influential documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” and has been cited repeatedly in the American and British press as a credible source when it comes to Gitmo and American detention policies. Throughout all of the coverage, little was said about the evidence and allegations accumulated by U.S. intelligence authorities. Even the CBS News account of Begg’s video game made no mention of Begg’s troubling dossier. The main argument cited by President Obama and others who push for closing Gitmo is that it damages perceptions of America around the world. What they really mean is that the testimony of people like Begg, who has spun countless news stories, harms America’s image. Gitmo’s critics rarely make any attempt to disentangle truth from fiction, or real American wrongdoing from that invented in the minds of highly questionable sources, including former detainees such as Begg. I cannot stress this enough: Begg and his ilk have played a substantial role in shaping public perceptions of Gitmo. But there are strong reasons to believe that many former inmates, such as Begg, are simply lying.
