Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back
by Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain
Free Press £18.99, pp395

The war on terror waged since 9/11 has spawned the creation of a parallel world: planet spook, its rules and language determined by the agencies of what increasingly looks like an oxymoron - Western intelligence. In spookspeak, the brutalities of Guantanamo Bay are known as 'humane treatment', while a man such as Moazzam Begg, a gentle, devoted family man who was detained without trial for more than three years, can never be allowed to lose his label of terrorist fanatic. Hence the planted leak from planet spook last week, on the eve of this book's publication - a claim that Begg confessed to the FBI to having trained with al-Qaeda, notwithstanding the point that this long-retracted admission was the product of coercive torment.

Begg's account, co-written with Victoria Brittain, who also co-wrote the play Guantanamo, is a dispatch from across the spook event horizon. Begg has, it seems, survived, but our only appropriate response is outrage.