Coming to an Xbox near you: Escape from Gitmo

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee is set to play himself in an Xbox 360 video game about breaking out of the U.S. prison center.

Yes, you read that sentence correctly.

Al Arabiya reports that Moazzam Begg, who spent two years at Gitmo, will star in the game entitled “Rendition: Guantanamo.” In the game, detainees will try to shoot their way out of the prison.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game-maker is facing some pretty serious criticism.

“We have had a lot of hate mail about this, mainly from America, saying things like, ‘Don’t dare put out a game that shows them killing our soldiers,” Zarrar Chishti, director of Scottish software company T-Enterprise, told the U.K.’s Daily Mail. “But no U.S. or British soldiers get killed in it. The only ones being killed are mercenaries.

Here’s my favorite part of the story:

Begg, 40, was taken from his home in Pakistan and turned over to the CIA in Bagrham, Afghanistan for a year before being thrown into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison camp in 2003 where he spent 20 months in solitary confinement.

He said he was tortured by U.S. personnel before being freed without charge in 2005. He has since become a human rights activist.

A former detainee-turned-human rights activist starring in a game where you fire away at soldiers and mercenaries to escape from Gitmo. It doesn’t get much richer than that.

jeremy.jacobs@digital-stage.thehill.com