The Guantanamo reading list

AN AWFUL lot could be written about Guantanamo Bay, and over the years most of it has been.
It may not be quite the wickedest thing ever perpetrated by the American government, but it remains a potent symbol of international wickedness. And it’s rather shocking that eight months into the Obama presidency it’s still operating, even if the worst excesses of treatment there have ended.
Presumably, like other messes Obama inherited from Bush (and, incidentally, Brown from Blair), it’s simply not that easy to close down, move out. Think Iraq. Think Afghanistan.
Still, it remains a blot on human relations. So much so it seems almost prurient to take an interest in some of the less offensive things that go on there. Like what the prisoners – of whom 229 remain – choose to read.
Recently, however, journalist Besan Sheikh from the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat went to report on conditions in Guantanamo. (That’s one thing you couldn’t imagine happening in the Bush era.)
And one of the people he interviewed was the prison librarian, who has 13,500 books in his care.
Many of those volumes are Arabic books on Muslim themes. But apparently the most requested books are, in order, the Harry Potter novels, Don Quixote, and Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama.
It may be vaguely dispiriting to learn that the ubiquitous Harry Potter has got even there, but it’s not really surprising. No doubt readers wish for a wand-wave of Potter-style magic to whisk them away from their real-world Azkaban.
The Obama book is no real surprise either. Perhaps he’s regarded as a hero even in the jail whose key he holds. Perhaps the inmates simply want to read between the lines for a clue to their own futures.
But Don Quixote? A 400-year-old Spanish novel about a mad, wandering old knight? How on earth did that come to be so popular among those more or less indiscriminately rounded up in Bush’s shameful “war on terror”?
I can offer only one explanation, and I’m not sure it tells us anything significant about Guantanamo – except, perhaps, the kind of people who are still locked up there.
Cervantes’s rambling novel is supposed to be one of the greatest works of “Western” literature. Second, some say, only to Shakespeare.
It’s also very long – over 1,000 pages in the latest Penguin edition.
It’s one of those things I’ve always meant to read, but somehow have never found the time for.
And of course the one thing the Guantanamo detainees have in abundance is time.

**

I STILL can’t make up my mind whether it was right or wrong to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. Or, as we (but not the Libyans) call him, the Lockerbie bomber.
Unlike many Americans, who are apparently incapable of distinguishing moral shades of grey, I can see good arguments on both sides.
But at least one good thing does seem to have come out of it.
That old Special Relationship between Britain and the US is now over. So they tell us.
Which should mean we won’t have to send our boys off to die uselessly the next time they start a pointless war.

**

SURVEYS are barmy. Surveys conducted as marketing stunts are barmier. And newspapers, mags, TV and radio shows that use them to fill up space or time are arguably barmiest of all.
And yet. There can be something irresistibly entertaining in the results, even if (maybe especially if) you know deep down that it’s all a lot of nonsense.
Take biscuits. More specifically, take them and dunk them in your mug during tea-break.
Apparently, more than half the adults in Britain have been injured doing it. An estimated 25million grown-up people. Injured. Dunking biscuits.
You couldn’t, as one unaccountably popular columnist might say, make it up.
Except I have this sneaking suspicion that somebody has. And then all the rest of us have fallen for it. Or not.

**

AND speaking of not being able to make it up…
There are various reasons why you can’t always believe everything you read in the papers. But you might have expected the star writer on a national daily to check just a little more thoroughly before firing off: “Somewhere out there in Shropshire is a single mother called Kate Pong with quins, variously named after an American pop singer, a model and the US President.”
Well, yes. Kate Pong – as revealed by the Shropshire local weekly the Newport Advertiser – has indeed given birth to Beyoncé , Tyra, Bobbi, Barack and Earl.
Kate Pong is a chocolate labrador.

Do we need an 'unsend mail' button?

HAVE you ever walked away from an infuriating encounter thinking of all the clever put-downs you wish you’d had the presence of mind to come out with moments earlier?
I think we all have. But in most cases it’s probably really as well that our witticisms – or our true feelings – don’t emerge in the heat of the moment.
Somehow the restraint that seems to hold us back naturally in face-to-face meetings doesn’t always work to hold back the emailing impulse.
A few years ago I had a colleague, based at another office, with whom I corresponded mostly electronically. To see some of the emails we exchanged you might think we were forever rubbing each other up the wrong way.
In fact, whenever we met we got along fine. But without the benefit of facial expressions, body language or even the tone of voice that can help on the phone we were frequently at loggerheads. Winding each other up by simple misunderstanding.
Which is perhaps not surprising if you consider recent research suggesting that a mere seven per cent of face-to-face communication is conveyed by the actual words we use.
Smily emoticons such as :-) and ;-) or even :-p can help a little, but they’re a pretty inexact tool to convey real speech.
All this might not seem very good news for a writer. And it does suggest that maybe the research was carried out with a particularly inarticulate group of subjects.
Nevertheless, it’s a fact that emails sent in haste or with undue thought can come back to bite their sender.
The angry letter written in the middle of the night is usually best left unsent. When the writing takes place at a computer terminal it’s all too easy to hit the Send button while you’re still in that nocturnal muddle of emotion.
Maybe a good addition to an email program would be a delaying system that asks you in the morning if you still want to send the message you dashed off in the night.
A little dialogue box, perhaps, that asks “Have you slept on this?” before it allows you to commit yourself.
Not that that would have been much help to another ex-colleague of mine who marked his departure for a new job by leaving messages to everyone in the office telling them just what he thought of them. Most weren’t very complimentary.
Six months later, having been sacked by his new employers for another breach of email etiquette, he came asking for his old job back.
The reply to which could have come straight out of one of his own messages.
The other potential social danger with emails is how quickly and easily they can be forwarded by an outraged (or amused) recipient.
One national newspaper columnist is probably best known in the business for the blisteringly rude messages he fires off to any sub-editor who dares to improve his carefully crafted prose by altering a word or comma.
Which wouldn’t be quite so funny if his original work was even half as brilliant as he clearly thinks it is – or as his late lamented father’s often was.
I shall never be able to read his purplish prose again without thinking how I might improve the flow of his words. Or what four-letter blast it might occasion if I were to do so.


TWO shocking news stories:
• A survey reports that a third of teenage girls in Britain suffer sexual abuse and a quarter are violently assaulted by boyfriends.
• Britain has the worst rate of teenage drunkenness in “the industrial world”, particularly among girls.
Setting aside all doubts about the accuracy, or objectivity, of the first survey, could these two things be in any way related?

Clever and cleverer

WHAT a blessed, brilliant country this England is. So much more advanced than when we were young, or our parents were.
Year after year our children get cleverer, their teachers more and more effective. It must be so – every statistic tells us.
Two years from now all those youngsters who picked up their GCSE grades yesterday will be getting their A-level results. And I wouldn’t mind betting now that when they do it will be the 29th successive year of record results.
All those teenagers milling round the bus-stop, all those kids performing amazing feats of balance and momentum at the skate-park, must be harbouring the brains of budding Einsteins and Shakespeares under their hoodies.
Their results just keep getting better. And the exams aren’t getting any easier at all, are they? Course not.
Now, I have nothing whatever against the present generation of successful students.
I’m sure they’re just as nice, just as clever, just as motivated and hard-working as we were at their age.
But I can’t help wondering how those newly awarded their four or five straight A’s would have fared with the A-level papers I sat in 1975 – and the same standard of marking.
Or how I’d do myself in the current climate of educational spoon-feeding.
Do I resent it that my paper qualifications have been devalued by 30 years of gradual dumbing down? Yes, I do a bit.
Do I resent the latest batch of students emerging with more and better grades than me? Not in the least.
It’s not their fault. As footballers are so fond of pointing out, you can only beat what’s put in front of you.
In fact, I feel sorry for those whose efforts deserve more credit than simply to be among a record number of candidates with maximum grades.
And if you’re an employer, or a university admissions tutor, how do you select between a dozen students all with perfect marks? Or between them and my imperfect ones?
Caught up in a mania for targets and for constant "improvement", we seem to have lost track of actual standards.
Were you or I better or worse students than those now emerging blinking into the real world?
There is no way of telling.
The benchmarks have changed so much and so often that they are virtually useless.
Unlike our kids and their teachers, who are not well served by having to function in a culture of glamorous fiction.

Last post for the last Tommy

AS we sped through northern France the place names rang as ever with a particular bitter resonance: Arras, Bethune, Cambrai.
As ever, I pondered the shattered bodies and the tonnage of ordnance buried under those blandly rolling wheatfields – and the blandly rolling motorway beneath our wheels.
Of course, life here goes on, has been going on for more than 90 years since the events with which those names still ring to an English ear. The associations with one particular part of their history cannot be so clear to those who live here. And yet.
Not for nothing is this stretch of the A26 known as the Autoroute des Anglais (motorway of the English). And not just because it's the route so many of us take from Calais to the heart or south of France every summer.
To a whole generation of English men and women, this corner of France near the Belgian border – and only a short sea crossing from England – was the only foreign field they knew. And what a grim field it was.
As we sped along the Vimy ridge I recalled, as ever, the horrific events that scarred this whole landscape 40 years before my birth.
And this time I noted that for the first time those battles, those trenches, that terrifying going-over-the-top were no longer within living memory.
For Harry Patch, the last survivor of the Great War battlefield, was no longer with us.
On September 22, 1917, on a relatively quiet day in what came to be known as the Battle of Passchendaele, Lewis-gunner Patch was struck in the stomach by a hot piece of flying shrapnel.
It came within half an inch of ending his life at just 19. Instead it kept him alive by keeping him out of the rest of the war.
He was about to be sent back to France 14 months later when the Armistice intervened. After that escape he lived to be 111.
And for most of his long life – until he reached 100 – he never spoke of his war experiences. Not even to Ada, his wife of nearly 60 years. A reticence he seems to have shared with most veterans of the Great War trenches.
I remember as a young reporter, 30 years ago, interviewing a couple who were celebrating their golden wedding. Only when his wife was out of the room did the old man share with me a few of his haunting memories of fighting in the trenches.
“He never talks about it, dear,” she had assured me.
A couple of decades later I was interviewed for the editorship of Harry Patch's local paper in Somerset. Had I got that job I would surely have got to know him. And I think I'd have liked him a lot.
Nearly all of those who gathered a week ago to see him off would have been strangers to him. And plumber Harry would have been astonished – and if not embarrassed, then wrily amused – to have a cathedral funeral with thousands of mourners.
He was never much impressed by pomp and ceremony. Brass hats held no awe for him, and he “wasn't that interested” in a speech he once heard King George V give.
I know this from reading The Last Fighting Tommy, a biography put together by Richard Van Emden. The bulk of the book is transcribed directly from hours of taped interviews, and Harry's voice comes through strongly.
In many ways the only unusual thing about his life was its extraordinary length. He was an ordinary man, and happy – if not proud – to be one.
In his last years he accepted with humble dignity the role of representative of the common soldier of the Western Front.
But he would not have been happy for his name or medals to be used in any glorification of war, or nation.
“I didn't want to join up,” he said. “It was a case of having to.
“Why should I go out and kill someone I never knew, and for what reason? I wasn't at all patriotic.”
When, in the heat of battle, it came to a case of him-or-me, he deliberately shot an attacking German in the legs in order to spare his life.
Later, discussing the Second World War, in which both his sons fought and he served as an auxiliary fireman, he said: “I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”
Perhaps if England's king and Germany's kaiser – cousins, as Harry pointed out – had been given guns in 1914 they might have shot each other rather than sending millions of their subjects to do so.
More likely they'd just have shot grouse together.
But in spirit, brave pacifist Harry Patch was absolutely right.

Chilling pics Bush tried to hide

AIR travel, the internet, nuclear power – they’re all spin-offs from essentially military developments. I dare say the first wheel was created for purposes of war.
Frying-pans famously got their non-stick quality from spacecraft development. But then space travel itself got its start from rockets designed by Hitler’s scientists for attacking London.
And you could argue that even before Ronald Reagan’s barmy “Star Wars” scheme the space race was just the coolest part of the Cold War.
A more acceptable face of the superpower posturing that also filled the world with enough nuclear weaponry to destroy us all many times over.
What a tragic comment on humankind that so much of our inventiveness should have been driven by the desire for ever bigger and “better” ways of killing each other.
But military technology can have its uses.
It was spy satellites launched and operated by the US military that showed in greatest detail the extent of polar meltdown.
These two photos, taken in July 2006 and 12 months later, bring it home starkly.
Both show the Arctic port of Barrow, Alaska from exactly the same angle. In the earlier shot, the port is almost sealed off by sea ice. A year later all the ice has gone.
And this is, as it were, just the tip of the iceberg. Between those two dates, more than a million square kilometres of sea ice was lost.
The pictures don’t just illustrate global warming. They also show clearly how it gets worse – literally, in black and white.
In the earlier, icier, picture there’s a lot of reflective white – bouncing the sun’s rays back out into space.
The later image is dominated by dark, almost black sea. And we all know how much more of the sun’s warmth is absorbed by dark surfaces.
So it’s a vicious circle. The warmer the planet, the more ice melts. The more ice melts, the darker the surface. The darker the surface, the warmer the planet.
And here’s another scary thing: Under George W Bush’s presidency, these pictures and all others like them were kept secret.
They have just been released by Barack Obama’s administration.
The difference?
For political reasons – mainly business reasons – Bush didn’t want to take action against global warming. So it suited him to deny it. And that meant the evidence had to be covered up.
Obama believes the truth is too important to hide. And, incidentally, that politics is about more important things than mere business.
Melting ice-caps are not just bad for polar bears – though it’s pretty devastating for them.
When all the ice melts, an awful lot of the places humans live now will be under water.
Which may be harder to grasp than mere economics. Partly because it’s a whole lot bigger.




A NEWS story caught my eye the other day that sickened me more than the latest stats on knife crime or fat-cat bankers’ bonuses.
A story at least as telling about the twisted times we live in.
Two zoos in Boston, USA, were reported to be facing closure after cuts in their subsidy from the state of Massachusetts.
In the words of local TV station The Boston Channel: “The zoos would be forced to lay off most of their 165 employees and attempt to find new homes for more than 1,000 animals.
“Zoo officials estimated 20 percent of the animals would not find homes and could be euthanized.”
It was that last word, as much as the fate of the poor animals, that sent a chill through me.
Euthanasia ought to imply an act of mercy. In this case it was used the way the Nazis employed it – as a euphemism, an evasion of the correct word, ‘killed’.
Creatures that have been raised by man, kept in captivity, with no option but to rely on man for food and life, were to die for man’s convenience. For mere economic reasons.
Money, once again, the motive for murder.
It may be only a couple of hundred individual animals. And that may be small beer indeed alongside the whole species that are being struck down around the world by our rapacity and greed.
By over-fishing – and negligent fishing that kills far more than the haul it brings in. By pollution. By industrialised farming. By destruction of habitats on an unprecedented scale.
It may be insignificant alongside such devastation.
But the fate of those unwanted zoo animals in Boston was a savage symbol of the callous way one species wields its power over all others.
Or so it appeared. Now it seems the strength of public reaction to the story could change things.
Startled by the bad press it received, Massachusetts may not swing its axe quite so hard – or find other things on the budget to cut instead.
That, and a wave of public subscriptions, may yet save the zoos. Let’s wait and see.
And meantime let’s wish all the other creatures around the world that are endangered by human activity could be so easily saved.

Is your old PC killing children?

HAVE you bought a new telly, or a new computer, at any time lately? More to the point, have you scrapped an old one?
If you did, do you know what became of the unwanted carcass?
Last time I upgraded, my old TV was snapped up on Freecycle and as far as I know is still doing service in a teenager’s bedroom.
My last defunct PC was demolished by someone who knows about these things, its valuable parts salvaged to be used again.
But with more and more new machines flooding the market, ever more powerful and ever cheaper, there’s an inevitable limit to how much can be recycled or reused.
So where do old electronic beasts go to die? And what becomes of their rotting corpses?
We know that tipping them into burgeoning landfill sites is no kind of solution.
Responsible folk take them to recycling centres such as the one at Foxhall and place them carefully in the appropriate skip. Then drive away and forget about them, duty done.
Meanwhile, in impoverished African countries such as Nigeria and Somalia, piles of dumped electronic goods heap up in slum areas.
There they cause toxic pollution of a kind that would never be allowed in the countries, such as ours, from which they have been shipped.
And there a very basic form of recycling takes place.
Children as young as five pick over the piles, extract and sort tiny quantities of valuable metals and compounds including:
• Antimony oxide (causes heart and lung problems, diarrhoea, vomiting, eye irritation)
• Beryllium (can cause a fatal lung disease)
• Cadmium (causes lung cancer, damages kidneys and bones)
And that’s just A, B and C on the danger-list. A single CRT computer monitor can contain 3kg of lead – long known here for its dangerous impact on young brains.
For the kids who make a lethal living picking over what is known as e-waste, the easy way to get to the precious metals is to burn off the surrounding plastic. Releasing a fearful cocktail of poisons into the air they breathe. And indirectly into the water they drink.
This is the shocking, Dickensian end of the trade that brings the ever-smarter, ever-cleverer electronic toys into your home.
A number of British companies are now under investigation for their part in this international scandal.
The Environment Agency has taken on a team of 20 detectives to probe illegal waste shipments. And though no one has yet been charged, a series of raids on various sites is expected.
Whether this team is anywhere near large enough, or equipped enough, to really tackle a massive problem is another question.
Of the 900,000 tonnes of electrical items thrown away in Britain last year, more than half is thought to have been either dumped illegally in the UK or sent abroad.
A computer from the UK Ministry of Defence has been found on a deadly dump in Ghana.
So is YOUR old PC killing kids in Africa right now?
That’s the question I wanted an urgent answer to. And the answer I discovered was a resounding ‘no’. As long as you did the right thing and took your junk to a council disposal centre, that is.
In fact, it seems Suffolk is leading the way in showing others – including the MoD – how to turn a problem into an opportunity.
Every old computer taken to Foxhall, Portman’s Walk, Carr Road Felixstowe or any of the county’s other recycling centres ends up at Highpoint Prison, near Newmarket.
There it is checked to see if it works or can be repaired. If it can be, it’s put back into use.
If not, it’s dismantled, safely and carefully, and its components sold for re-use.
The best part is that the skilled work is carried out by inmates as part of an electronic engineering course. So not only is it done safely and responsibly, but it helps in the vital re-skilling of offenders.
And all within Suffolk.


WHAT about computers that haven’t been scrapped, but confiscated?
Suffolk Trading Standards recently gave a lot of PCs, seized during investigations, to the registered charity Computer Aid International.
The computers were wiped of all information and refurbished before being sent to schools, weather stations, hospitals and community organisations in developing countries including Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Anja ffrench from Computer Aid International said: “The most effective way to maximise the number of people with access to ICT in developing countries is by re-using existing equipment all the way through to the end of its life.
“Less than half of PCs are re-used. Donors like Suffolk Trading Standards are addressing this balance and ensuring a sustainable outcome for their old equipment.”
So it seems, one way or another, your old PC could well end up in Africa.
Whether it ruins children’s lives there, or enhances them, is at least partly up to you.

Can Tony's faith save the planet?

GLIB. Smug. Blue-eyed, vapid, slightly open-mouthed stare, almost life-size, from the Sunday supplements.
Yes, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is back among us. Hard to believe it’s two years since he went away.
Hard to believe such a light-weight was so record-breakingly successful as leader of the party that had been Labour.
That he ever had the political clout to take Britain to war against the wishes of so many of its electorate – and its elected.
That he should have become the world’s most highly-paid after-dinner speaker (one speech roughly equivalent to a week’s work for the world’s best footballer).
That having been seen (rightly, in my view) as one of the villains of the Iraq war, he could then see himself as a potential saviour of the Middle East.
That he could ever be so self-deluding as to see himself as a world statesman. And, more astonishingly, be taken at that face value by other world leaders.
Maybe that’s the thing about leaders. Look at them closely and you see how ordinary, how essentially second-rate, most of them are.
Adolf Hitler was a failed sign-painter with an insignificant background, mediocre school report and paltry war record.
Josef Stalin was a provincial thug, gang-leader and bank-robber.
Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who once co-starred with a chimp.
And Tony Blair was a pushy kid from a minor public (i.e. private) school where, according to his biographer John Rentoul: “All the teachers I spoke to said he was a complete pain in the backside and they were very glad to see the back of him.”
As we all were in 2007 after enduring ten years of his patronising, Tony-knows-best leadership.
The thing is, I think Tony really does believe he knows best.
Changing the rules of the Labour Party to strengthen his position as leader? For the best.
Deleting the party’s defining commitment to public ownership in order to flog off or give away more of the country’s assets than even Maggie Thatcher countenanced? For the best, obviously (well, it was probably obvious to Tony).
Lying about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction? Not really a lie, ladies and gentlemen, because we had to get rid of that nasty Mr Hussein anyway, didn’t we? So it was all for the best.
And now here he is back, after two years of being conspicuous by his invisibility in his role as Middle East envoy.
Back in the old messianic mode. Back to save the world again. Back to tell us, once again, what must be done.
And you know what? He’s right. Sort of.
The trouble is, as he starts lecturing us about climate change and the need to do something about it, can we forget his past record for self-aggrandisement? For glib untruths?
When he says that, recession or no recession, “we will just have to find a way” to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions he’s absolutely right.
But of course with Blair you can never get away from the self-preening personal pronoun.
“I first put climate change on the G8 agenda in 2005,” he says.
True – up to a point. It was hardly a new issue in 2005. It had been on the agenda of serious science for at least 40 years by then and could hardly have been news even to politicians.
Now he says: “For years, the emphasis has rightly been on persuading people that there must be sufficient will to tackle climate change. But leaders, struggling to cope with this challenge even amid economic crisis, need to know that there is also a way.”
Again, this is true – up to a point.
And the point is that Blair – the man who had faith in the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq, faith enough to convert to Catholicism, faith above all in himself – is again relying on faith.
Faith in science, and the application of science, that goes far beyond that of almost all scientists.
For, incredibly, he appears to believe that global warming can be staved off without anyone having to give up their excessive lifestyles. Without greed and consumerism being reined in.
“The answer to climate change is the development of science and technology. Yes, we will get changes in the way we consume but we will be consuming differently, not necessarily less.”
Ah, so that’s OK then. We can leave it all to the scientists. And of course to good old Tony and all those other wonderful world leaders.
Oh no, we can’t.
Not just because their record up to now has been so woeful.
And not just because they’re all as fallible, self-deluding and selfish as the rest of us.
But because while technology does have to play a part in whatever future we may have – so do we. Every last one of us.