A released terrorist plays the victim card

NY Times:

When President Bush ordered Moazzam Begg's release last year from the Guantánamo prison camp, United States officials say, he did so over objections from the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. � all of which warned that Mr. Begg could still be a dangerous terrorist.

But American officials may not have imagined the sort of adversary Mr. Begg would become in the war of perception that is now a primary front in the American-led campaign against terrorism.

"The issue here is: Apply the law," Mr. Begg told an audience earlier this spring at the Oxford Literary Festival in England, one of many stops on a continuing lecture tour. "If I've committed a crime, we say, take this to court. After all of that, if they can't produce something in court, then shame on them!"

With a new book about his experiences and a small blizzard of media attention, Mr. Begg, a 37-year-old Briton of Pakistani descent, has emerged over the last few months as a minor celebrity in his home country.

Human rights groups have hailed his courage. University students have invited him to speak. Journalists have generally taken at face value his claim that he is an innocent man, unlawfully seized and arbitrarily held. After the three suicides at Guantánamo last Saturday, Mr. Begg instantly became a sought-after commentator for British newspaper and television reporters.

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What he is really doing is playing from the al Qaeda playbook, that suggest that whenever you are caught to immediately claim you have been unlawfully detained and tortured. One of the Islamist central tenants is victimhood. They would also like their war against the world to be moved from the battlefield where they are losing to the lawfare battle space where the ACLU and other useful idiots will help them tie the hands of those who are seeking to defeat them. The President's intervention to help Tony Blair politically has helped neither. It has helped to spread the al Qaeda disinformation campaign about Gitmo. It is probably al Qaeda's most successful propaganda campaign of the war and it has had the assistance of many useful idiots in the US and Europe where the "human rights" wackos have been an aider and abettor of the terrorist thugs.