The Guardian cartoonist visits a Stoke-on-Trent ceramics factory to see his contribution to the ‘royal junk’ industry being made Steve Bell Alex Healey
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Doesn’t the universities minister know anything about economics? For most of the past week, one question more than any other has been rattling round my head: is David Willetts a bit thick? Please understand my reservations in asking this. As a good Indian boy brought up to respect elders, such intergenerational impertinence doesn’t come readily. And besides, Willetts is about as high-grade an intellect as Westminster has got: he writes books of political theory; he gives lectures on neuroscience; he even understands the benefits system, for heaven’s sake. Put down Two Brains as slow off the mark, and another question soon follows: just what term do you dream up for Nicholas Soames? But as universities minister, Willetts is the man in charge of introducing higher tuition fees. Faced with this delicate task, he has got his predictions, his proclamations and his maths badly wrong. That much was made clear last week, when universities submitted their proposed course levies – and Guardian research showed that almost three-quarters of English universities plan to charge the top whack of £9,000 a year for at least some subjects. Exactly the opposite of what the government promised. Now, this isn’t a general argument about how to fund higher education – we can have that out another time. For the next few minutes let’s just take for granted the fact that tuition fees are going to rise from their current level of just below £3,500. And that the government will slash university funding. Oh, and that it’s going to be really tough for school-leavers to find jobs over the next few years, which will just pile the pressure on degree-course places. Any minister working within those constraints would have struggled. But a result would have been if the 123 English universities had announced a range of fees, giving prospective students and their families some measure of choice: £9,000 a year to don sub-fusc at some grandly quandrangled Oxbridge college, say; £7,500 to study economics at a Victorian redbrick; and £3,800 for an arts degree somewhere relatively new and breeze-blocked. This was pretty much what Willetts promised – a smooth transition from the Soviet economics of higher education to a free-market nirvana. Had the reality conformed to rhetoric he could have boasted of a giant leap towards introducing a proper market in undergraduate education, where prices for degree courses reflect how much it cost to put them on and the income graduates can expect to see in return. You pays your money, and you takes your choice, Willetts could have said at that point. Although, being Willetts, he’d probably have said it in Latin. Instead, we’ve got massive confusion. Oxford has said it will charge the full £9,000 – but so too will the University of East London, for all of its courses. London Met, University of Central Lancashire, Liverpool John Moore’s: all of them will be £9k universities. Had Willetts been a bit smarter and applied just a couple of insights from economics, he could have avoided this – and the costly turmoil that will surely come next. What are they? The first is on something economists called anchoring. Even before the tuition fees vote at the end of last year, government ministers talked of fees of £9,000 a year. That figure is the one that has stuck in people’s minds – which anchors the expectations of university bureaucrats and students’ families alike. You don’t need to be an economist to know about anchoring; you just need to have gone shopping. I’m not asking for £30, a market stallholder will say, holding aloft some Chinese-made electronic good – but that is the figure he wants you to bear in mind. The other basic insight the universities minister ought to have borne in mind is that customers often deduce the quality of a product from its price. Want a machine to make popcorn? Researchers have shown that customers think the costlier poppers must be better – even when objective testers have shown the opposite. As marketing professor Akshay Rao put it in a 2005 paper: “Consumers consciously [choose] to rely on the price cue to make quality judgments, because such a process [is] cognitively efficient.” When you don’t know how to choose between the goods in front of you, going by price is as good a guide as any. Now apply these two insights to a world in which university officials suddenly have to set their own prices for courses. Nine thousand pounds is the figure everyone is talking about and each institution needs to show that it is a competitive choice. So what do they do? Why, cluster around the £9k mark. None of this is to excuse universities from kidding themselves that they’re all the same rank. But it is to hold the government responsible for not having smoothed out the process, or prevented the pandemonium that will come . As Peter Dolton, an education economist at Royal Holloway University of London, puts it: “Don’t underestimate the chaos there’ll be over the next year or two.” He predicts that there will be a slump in demand for the bottom-ranking 20 or 30 institutions, which will lead to them suffering “severe financial difficulties”. So, let’s go back to the original question: is the man in charge of making these changes a bit daft? I would say that anyone who ignored such rudimentary economic insights must be a bit thick. Either that or he’s tried to be too clever by half, which – when you’re dealing with lots of people trying to make tough decisions – usually has the same disastrous effect. University administration Higher education Tuition fees Students Aditya Chakrabortty guardian.co.uk
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Child suffered bite wounds to her legs after attack on Fraser Island in Queensland Two dingoes have been caught and destroyed after they mauled a three-year-old girl on an Australian beach, officials said. The girl suffered bites to her legs when the wild dogs attacked her on Monday after she wandered away from her family and into sand dunes on Fraser Island in north-eastern Queensland state. Two dogs blamed for the attack were trapped on Tuesday and put down humanely, environment department general manager Terry Harper said. More than 200 dingoes live on Fraser Island, a popular tourist spot about 155 miles (250km) north of Brisbane. Fraser Island is thought to be among the last refuges for purebred dingoes, and they are a protected species in the national park that covers the island. Dingoes are also protected in some other parts of Australia, though in many places dingoes that have crossbred with feral dogs are killed as pests because they attack sheep and cattle. The child was lucky to escape with “only” bite wounds, according to the Sydney Morning Herald . Although attacks on humans are relatively rare, visitors to Fraser Island are warned not to feed the dingoes and to leave the animals alone. “This is a very timely reminder for everybody about how important it is to stay very close to your children on Fraser Island,” Harper said. “Adults should always stay very close to their children. We know that [children] do excite dingoes.” A nine-year-old boy was killed by dingoes on Fraser Island in 2001, prompting the culling of more than two dozen dogs and an overhaul of conservation practices, including warnings about human interaction with the animals. The most famous dingo attack in Australia was in 1980, when Lindy Chamberlain reported seeing a dog carry her infant daughter, Azaria, away from a tent during a camping trip to Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock). Chamberlain was tried for murder before a series of appeals and judicial inquiries exonerated her and found the dingo claims to be true . Her child’s body was never found. The story was made into the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, which earned Meryl Streep an Oscar nomination. Animals Australia Wildlife Endangered species Conservation guardian.co.uk
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Actor Gabriel Byrne’s subtle portrayal of a psychotherapist in TV series In Treatment has won him awards and made him a heartthrob again at 59 An interesting irony of Gabriel Byrne’s career is that despite having acted for 30 years and been one half of a celebrity couple for a decade when he was married to actor Ellen Barkin, he has managed, to his relief, to maintain an impressive privacy – yet the parts he chooses are, despite himself, highly personal, and even self-revelatory. What public perception there is of him seems to extend little beyond “Irish”, “handsome” and – to use his least favourite yet the most popular description of him – “brooding”. (“I don’t even know what that means!” he complains, with – unfortunately for him – an expression close to brooding.) Well, after meeting him, I can exclusively reveal that yes, he is Irish, and, yes, very handsome too, if, inevitably, a little more salted and grizzled than he was 20 years ago as the chilling but heartmeltingly beautiful Tom in Miller’s Crossing . But while he is thoughtful, painstakingly at times, and frequently self-deprecating, he is far from “brooding”. He turns what was supposed to be a one-hour interview about a TV show in a cafe near his apartment in New York’s SoHo into a four-hour impassioned conversation, funny at some points, searing at others. I emerge from it faintly dizzy. Yet despite his obvious love of conversation, he does share an instinct common to so many of his characters, from the faintly threatening Keaton in The Usual Suspects , to the brilliant but emotionally battered psychotherapist Paul Weston in the TV series In Treatment: a wariness of self-exposure. He bats away personal questions with rambling anecdotes that often contain everything but the answer – yet little details escape. When asked, apropos of the antique love ring he is wearing, whether he is seeing anyone, he launches into a 15-minute tale about the first time he gave an interview and how the photographer made him pretend to cook an omelette. It’s a funny story with a serious subtext: “I know better now than to give out more than I want.” And fair enough. But in the end, his loquaciousness reveals more than he would perhaps wish: he mentions several times a particular “friend” with a female pronoun, who is presumably the actor Anna George, with whom he allegedly lives. This desire for privacy also partly explains why, although the second series of In Treatment is only just about to air in the UK, the show that has won him a Golden Globe and an Emmy has ended in America after the third series, much to his satisfaction. He absolutely does not want to be the next Hugh Laurie, trapped in the gilded cage of American TV success: “That is definitely not for me,” he says. “We stopped [In Treatment] at just the right time.” Once, Byrne, remembers, a Hollywood agent said to him, after he had been cast for a part he can’t even remember now: “This is it – you’re going to be huge, say goodbye to your anonymity.” This cliched spiel is just what all actors, writers and directors are said to dream of hearing, but Byrne spits it out like a threat. Yet just as his love of conversation occasionally works against his desire for privacy, so the acting projects that he has chosen, and particularly the ones he loves the most, often relate to a subject that is very personal to him: the abuse of power. In the undeservedly little known 2006 film Jindabyne , Byrne and his friends find the body of a teenage girl and decide to abandon it so as not to spoil their fishing trip. Byrne’s rendition of the monstrous father, Cornelius Melody, in the 2005 Broadway production of Touch of the Poet , by Eugene O’Neill, – a playwright particularly close to Byrne’s heart – was another memorable examination of this subject, and one that prompted the New York Times to describe Byrne as “the rare contemporary actor who . . . can turn that air of splendour into a sustained gale-force dramatic wind”. But the abuse of power was most overtly explored in the first series of the excellent In Treatment. Adapted from the highly successful original Israeli version, BeTipul, it stars Byrne as Paul Weston, the therapist who can heal others but not himself. Despite surface similarities with House, it has none of the latter’s cheesy glibness and feels more like a particularly intelligent low-budget play than a TV show, each scene involving nothing more than Byrne sitting in a chair with a patient opposite (or his own therapist, played by the always wonderful Dianne Wiest). The writing is particularly fine but it is Byrne’s ability to act with nothing more than the slightest flicker of his eyes that has really carried the show. And, to his embarrassment, and his teenage daughter’s horror, made him a heartthrob again at the age of 59. The show also plays to the double desire that most of us have to know the secrets of other people’s inner lives and also to have someone who will reassure us about our inner life. The production is so small and quiet that the scenes between Paul and his patients feel like confessionals. “Well, therapy is not so different from confession,” says Byrne, who has never had therapy himself. “It’s that search for reassurance.” One of the main plotlines of the first series was when Paul had inappropriate feelings for a young and vulnerable female patient. Byrne took the story so seriously that he had “huge discussions” on set about whether at one point his character could even sit next to the patient on the couch. In the end, he won and he didn’t: “Of course I couldn’t sit on the couch – it would have been breaking that ethical barrier,” he says, with as much fervour as if he really were a therapist. It’s a subject that continues into the second series when a former patient claims he encouraged her to have an abortion. This issue of responsibility and moral transgression is one Byrne returns to repeatedly over the four hours: “If a person in authority morally transgresses they should be called to the book. Bankers, priests, politicians – people who betrayed trust. They should be punished, and I don’t mean that in a vindictive way, I think it’s important as part of the process of moving on to say there is a system of justice,” he says, his voice quiet but his eyes bright. It is an issue that Byrne himself experienced personally in the most awful way imaginable: between the ages of eight and 11, he was sexually and physically abused by the Christian Brothers in Ireland and then again in
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Gubernatorial vote is final ballot after weeks of violence triggered by President Goodluck Jonathan’s win With hundreds already killed and others scared away from the ballot box, Nigerians are being asked to vote in volatile gubernatorial elections, this time choosing the pivotal politicians who control billions of dollars in oil money. Religious tensions are high in Africa’s most populous nation after riots erupted across the predominantly Muslim north last week when results showed the Christian president, Goodluck Jonathan, had clinched the election. Angry mobs set fire to houses where election workers were staying, and young female poll staff were raped while charred corpses lined highways. Tuesday’s gubernatorial vote is the final ballot in Nigeria, following weeks of legislative and presidential elections that ultimately forced some 40,000 people to flee their homes. Election officials postponed the governors’ races in the two northern states hardest hit by post-election violence, but vowed to press ahead with ballots elsewhere. “Some have paid the ultimate price for democracy and I am sure that I speak the minds of all Nigerians if I say that the nation will be eternally grateful to them,” Attahiru Jega, chief of Nigeria’s Independent Election Commission, said. “One way of immortalising them is to ensure that we complete the remaining elections successfully and not succumb to the designs of people who want to scuttle our collective aspiration for a strong, united and democratic country.” The gubernatorial races carry even more weight because governors represent the closest embodiment of power many ever see in a nation of 150 million people. The positions provide many politicians with personal fiefdoms where oil money sluices into unwatched state coffers that exceed those of neighbouring nations. Meanwhile, hospital shelves remain bare of drugs and deteriorating schools have no teachers. Twenty-nine states will hold their gubernatorial elections on Tuesday, along with some delayed federal legislative polls. Five states will not hold gubernatorial elections after a court decision before the presidential election extended the tenure of those seated there. Questions remain about who will staff the polling stations. Most election workers come from Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps, a mandatory year-long assignment for all Nigerians who graduate from university before the age of 30. Many have fled from the assignments after the violence left colleagues beaten, raped or killed. That violence, apparently started by Muslims supporting the opposition candidate and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, left at least 500 people dead , though government officials have declined to release a toll for fear of inciting more riots. After the first wave of killings, Christians launched reprisal attacks that killed Muslims. In northern states, where Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change remains strong, some worry that more violence could accompany the election as its supporters vote against the ruling People’s Democratic party led by Jonathan. Nigeria’s north-east remains at risk, as an explosion at a hotel killed three people and wounded 14 others in the city of Maiduguri on Sunday, police said. While no one claimed responsibility for that attack, a radical Muslim sect recently vowed to keep fighting there. Violence remains likely in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta, a region of swamplands and mangroves about the size of Portugal. Akwa Ibom state, home to many oilfields operated by the Nigerian subsidiary of US oil giant Exxon Mobil, has seen rioters burn cars and torch a campaign office for Jonathan in recent weeks. The region remains awash in military-grade assault rifles and weapons from a long-running militancy, though attacks on oil companies dropped after a 2009 government-sponsored amnesty programme. Akwa Ibom is a state where open and flagrant rigging took place during Nigeria’s flawed 2007 elections. At one polling station that year, an election official shoved an entire booklet of pre-voted ballots into a ballot box as a European Union observer watched. Maria Owi, the chief official of the Independent National Electoral Commission in Akwa Ibom, said she hoped rigging was reduced with this election. “The major players are the politicians. They should make sure they should not make any attempts to rig the election,” Owi told Associated Press. “They encourage these youths to be violent. I’m sure the youths cannot go out on their own and be violent.” Nigeria guardian.co.uk
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It may not have been Stalag Luft III, but the escape from Sarpoza prison in Kandahar was pretty ingenious Kandahar’s prison may not be Stalag Luft III but in terms of ingenuity, organisation and sheer cunning the successful break-out by at least 480 Taliban prisoners in the early hours of Monday morning rivals anything pulled off by British POWs in the infamous German prison camp. According to people involved in the break-out, the Taliban’s great escape began with a team of 18 insurgents on the outside spending five months burrowing hundreds of metres underground through the brown soil west of Kandahar city and into Sarpoza prison, taking their tunnel right into the prison’s political section where hundreds of Taliban were held. As the great escape was a break-in rather than a break-out, there was no need to surreptitiously get rid of the earth inside the camp; according to one local media report, the Kandahar plotters simply sold lorry loads of the earth in the city’s bazaar from a tunnel stretching a reported 320 metres. The starting point was a compound directly opposite the prison that from the outside looked like any one of hundreds of building companies that have popped up in areas awash with reconstruction dollars. But the metal and concrete beams made there were not for building US-sponsored projects. Instead they were used to support a part of the tunnel that went directly underneath a section of Afghanistan’s most important road: the stretch of Highway One running between the cities of Kandahar and Herat. According to one of the escapees (whose numbers could dramatically tip the odds in favour of the insurgents on the eve of this year’s “fighting season”), the tunnel was of sufficient diameter and high enough for the prisoners to stand upright for most of their walk to freedom. Sections were lit by electric light and ventilated with fans, he said. One official who visited the prison said the tunnel had two exits, and that the second branch led to a wing of the prison housing ordinary criminals. For whatever reason, that equally grand escape did not come off. “I only found out that we were going to escape at midnight,” the 28-year-old insurgent, who did not give his name, said during a phone interview with the Guardian. The man, who had served three years of five-year sentence for fighting foreign forces in Afghanistan, said that a mere 20 minutes later he and his cellmates were taken to the entrance of the tunnel, a hole in the concrete floor that dropped down five feet to the tunnel passage itself. “It was very well organised. They only let a certain number of people go through at one time, because they wanted to make sure there was enough air to breath in the tunnel.” When the escapee prisoners got to the construction company compound at the end of the tunnel, they were met by their commanders and taken off in cars to safe locations. And to compound the humiliation of the Afghan government and its Nato allies, the prison managers appear to have been totally unaware of the escape until long after the prisoners had disappeared into the night. From about 11pm to 3.30am, cell after cell of prisoners trooped through the passageway to freedom. The unfortunate guard who came into the wing first thing on Monday morning was confronted with an entirely empty building, save for prison clothes, shoes and turbans that the inmates had for some reason left behind. Suspicions were immediately roused that the escape plot must have enjoyed support and help from prison guards to suceed, but the Taliban escaper doubted it. “They were just sleeping,” he said amidst extended laughter. “The guards are always drunk. Either they smoke heroin or marijuana, and then they just fall asleep. During the whole process no one checked, there was no patrols, no shooting or anything.” In a country brimming with every conceivable type of surveillance, security was also assured by the fact that the escape plot was kept secret and was known only to a handful of the prisoners held in the large building divided up into individual, unlocked cells. “We knew there were informers in our wing, but they did not know anything until it was time to leave,” he said. President Hamid Karzai’s official spokesman’s description of the mass breakout as a “disaster” seemed entirely accurate. Not only has it handed insurgents a spectacular propaganda coup, it has also highlighted the continued feebleness of the Afghan government and the enduring strength of the militants, undermining a narrative promoted by Nato in recent months that it has been making progress in the nearly 10-year war. That government feebleness comes despite the billions of dollars being spent this year to improve the Afghan army and police, not least in Sarpoza. The prison was given an overhaul after the Taliban succeeded in releasing prisoners in June 2008, when insurgents attacked the compound, blowing up a section of wall and freeing 870 inmates, including 390 insurgents. The display of the Taliban’s strength comes after a conventional troop surge and a winter of intensive battering by special forces. Despite the killing and capturing of huge numbers of Taliban commanders, the movement flaunted its undimmed organisational powers, not least with a sophisticated media campaign which saw a press release in near flawless English being sent out to international media. It crowed: “The most astonishing thing throughout the operation, as reported by Mujahideen informants, was that all the enemy forces inside the prison, which includes foreign invaders, did not notice the results of the operation even four hours later and hence has not released any statements.” It added that a “martyrdom-seeking group” on standby near the prison were left with nothing to do “due to the inaction shown by the enemy”. The prison break also comes just weeks after a Taliban suicide bomber succeeded in blowing up Kandahar’s police chief, and another came close to killing Afghanistan’s defence chief in the heart of his sprawling ministry in Kabul. The bigger question will be how great an effect the break-out will have on the struggle for Kandahar province and the rest of Afghanistan’s turbulent south in the critical months to come, the traditional summer “fighting season”. The aftermath of the 2008 prison break does not augur well. That episode led to an instant deterioration in security in the districts around Kandahar city, with battles erupting within days of the escape between the emboldened insurgents and Nato forces. The tide only seemed to turn against the insurgents in those districts with the coming of the US troop surge last year. The infusion of experienced, but relatively fresh, Taliban fighters could be a boost to the insurgent campaign. However, this time round there is a much larger presence of US soldiers in the south compared with three years ago when an overstretched Canadian force struggled to keep control in the Taliban’s home province. Generally the inmates in the prison are not the senior Taliban members; the most important insurgents are generally sent to Bagram north in Kabul for detention. Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, conceded that security forces had “failed in their duty”. He said that strenuous efforts were underway to recapture prisoners, a task he said would be made easier by the fact that all of their biometric data is on record, including fingerprints and iris scans. “Some of the escaped prisoners have been recaptured by the security forces during search operations, and huge operations have launched inside and on outskirts of Kandahar city for the rest of them,” he said. He also appealed to Kandahar residents to phone in tip-offs about the escaped prisoners to a hotline set up by authorities. But for the Taliban escapee enjoying freedom for the first time in three years, an experience he compared to the Islamic festival of Eid, there was a belief that the government would not recover from its display of ineptitude. “We had the full support of the people of Kandahar, who provided us with clothes and safe places to go,” he said. “We have proved that whatever we want to do in Kandahar or anywhere else in the country, we can do it.” Afghanistan Taliban Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
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BBC presenter says he feels ‘uneasy’ about high court order, which he won to protect his family’s privacy BBC presenter Andrew Marr said on Tuesday he had taken out a superinjunction to protect his family’s privacy. Marr said he felt “uneasy” and “embarrassed” about the use of the high court injunction, which he won in 2008 to suppress reports of an extramarital affair. He said the use of the so-called rich man’s gag “seems to be running out of control” and said he would no longer seek to prevent the story being published. Marr’s decision to go public comes after Private Eye launched a challenge to the injunction last week. “I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes,” Marr told the Daily Mail. But he added: “I also had my own family to think about, and I believed this story was nobody else’s business. “I still believe there was, under those circumstances, no legitimate public interest in it.” Marr, the BBC’s former political editor who now presents a Sunday morning politics show on BBC1, said that the use of injunctions seemed to be “running out of control”. “There is a case for privacy in a limited number of difficult situations, but then you have to move on. They shouldn’t be forever and a proper sense of proportion is required,” he added. His comments come amid a growing disquiet at the use by celebrities of injunctions and so-called superinjunctions to prevent media reporting of their private lives. At least 30 superinjunctions currently appear to be in place, including one relating to allegations of water pollution and another to a right-to-die case. Private Eye editor Ian Hislop said he had challenged the Marr injunction last week. “In a sense he led the pack because he was the most respectable of the people putting super-injunctions in,” Hislop told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme . “But the principle remains wrong, which he knows, articulated once and should still believe.” Hislop said he thought the super-injunction had been “a touch hypocritical” because Mr Marr had written an article saying that Parliament – not judges – should determine privacy law. “As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist,” he added. “I think he knows that and I’m very pleased he’s come forward and said ‘I can no longer do this’.” Hislop said Private Eye did not have the money to challenge all super-injunctions, adding: “Here was a case that was quite important and should be challenged so I wasted the money challenging it.” Last week David Cameron sounded a warning about the way judges are creating a new law of privacy “rather than parliament” . Cameron said: “The judges are creating a sort of privacy law whereas what ought to happen in a parliamentary democracy is parliament, which you elect and put there, should decide how much protection do we want for individuals and how much freedom of the press and the rest of it. “So I am a little uneasy about what is happening.” The prime minister’s remarks came after high court judge Mr Justice Eady issued what was thought to be the first order permanently blocking publication of material relating to an individual’s private life. In another high court hearing, a married Premier League footballer who reportedly had an affair with Big Brother star Imogen Thomas won the right to maintain his anonymity. •
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• Leaked Guantánamo papers link UK to Algerian militant • At least 123 prisoners incriminated by one informer An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence, according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US military’s Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili , an Algerian citizen described as a “facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida”, was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay. But according to Hamlili’s Guantánamo “assessment” file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the Guardian, US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence. After his capture in June 2003 Hamlili was transferred to Bagram detention centre, north of Kabul, where he underwent numerous “custodial interviews” with CIA personnel. They found him “to have withheld important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service and British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to US and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. The Guardian and the New York Times published a series of reports based on the leaked cache of documents which exposed the flimsy grounds on which many detainees were transferred to the camp and portrayed a system focused overwhelmingly on extracting intelligence from prisoners. A further series of reports based on the files reveal: • A single star informer at the base won his freedom by incriminating at least 123 other prisoners there. The US military source described Mohammed Basardah as an “invaluable” source who had shown “exceptional co-operation”, but lawyers for other inmates claim his evidence is unreliable. • US interrogators frequently clashed over the handling of detainees, with members of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO) in several cases overruling recommendations by the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) that prisoners should be released. CITF investigators also disapproved of methods adopted by the JTF’s military interrogators. • New light on how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora as American and British special forces closed in on his mountain refuge in December 2001, including intelligence claiming that a local Pakistani warlord provided fighters to guide him to safety in the north-east of Afghanistan. The Obama administration on Monday condemned the release of documents which it claimed had been “obtained illegally by WikiLeaks”. The Pentagon’s press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said in many cases the documents, so-called Detainee Assessment Briefs, had been superseded by the decisions of a taskforce established by President Barack Obama in 2009. “Any given DAB illegally obtained and released by WikiLeaks may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee,” he said. According to the files, Hamlili told his American interrogators at Bagram that he had been running a carpet business from Peshawar, exporting as far afield as Dubai following the 9/11 attacks. But his CIA captors knew the Algerian had been an informant for MI6 and Canada’s Secret Intelligence Service for over three years – and suspected he had been double-crossing handlers. According to US intelligence the two spy agencies recruited Hamlili as a “humint” – human intelligence – source in December 2000 “because of his connections to members of various al-Qaida linked terrorist groups that operated in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. The files do not specify what information Hamlili withheld. But they do contain intelligence reports, albeit flawed ones, that link the Algerian to three major terrorist attacks in Pakistan during this time. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the 9/11 attacks, told interrogators an “Abu Adil” – an alias allegedly used by Hamlili – had orchestrated the March 2002 grenade attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave that killed five people, including a US diplomat and his daughter. He said Abu Adil was also responsible for an attack that killed three girls in a rural Punjabi church the following December, and that he had given him 300,000 rupees (about $3,540) to fund the attacks. The church attacks have previously been blamed on Lashkar I Jhangvi, a Pakistani sectarian outfit that has developed ties with al-Qaida in recent years. Separately, US intelligence reports said that Hamlili was “possibly involved” in a bombing outside Karachi’s Sheraton hotel in May 2002 that killed 11 French submarine engineers and two Pakistanis. But the intelligence against the 35-year-old Algerian, who was sent home last January, appears deeply flawed, like many of the accusations in the Guantánamo files. Some of the information may have been obtained through torture. US officials waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times at a CIA “black site” in Thailand during his first month of captivity. And little evidence is presented to link Hamlili to the Karachi hotel bombing, other than that he ran a carpet business – the same cover that was used by the alleged assassins to escape. What is clear, however, is that Hamlili was a decades-long veteran of the violent jihadi underground that extends from northern Pakistan and Afghanistan into north Africa. From the Algerian town of Oran, he left with his father in 1986, at the age of 11, to join the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Later he fell into extremist “takfir” groups, recruited militants to fight in the Algerian civil war, and gained a reputation for violence. Under the Taliban the Algerian worked as a translator for the foreign ministry and later for the Taliban intelligence services, shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the runup to 9/11. Last January Hamlili and another inmate, Hasan Zemiri, were transferred to Algerian government custody. It was not clear whether they would be freed or made to stand trial. Clive Stafford Smith, whose legal charity, Reprieve, represents many current and former inmates, said the files revealed the “sheer bureaucratic incompetence” of the US military’s intelligence gathering. “When you gather intelligence in such an unintelligent way; if for example you sweep people up who you know are innocent, and it is in these documents; and then mistreat them horribly, you are not going to get reliable intelligence. You are going to make yourself a lot of enemies.” The Guantánamo files are one of a series of secret US government databases allegedly leaked by US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks. The New York Times, which shared the files with the Guardian and US National Public Radio, said it did not obtain them from WikiLeaks. A number of other news organisations yesterday published reports based on files they had received from WikiLeaks. The Guantánamo files Guantánamo Bay United States Ian Cobain Declan Walsh Jason Burke David Leigh guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …On Letterman, Maher Charges Racist ‘Tea-Baggers’ Are ‘Corporate America’s Useful Idiots,’ CBS Expunges Vile Term
April 26, 2011 No Comment
Regurgitating the same kind of derogatory comments he regularly spews on his Friday night HBO show, Bill Maher showed up Monday night on the Late Show with David Letterman where CBS, unlike HBO, excised his vile terminology for Tea Party activists. Maher denounced Tea Party followers as “sad, unfortunate people” because they are “corporate America's useful idiots” who don’t allow “facts” to “get in that tin foil helmet.” Then he employed his usual “tea-baggers” phrase, but CBS silenced the “baggers” so viewers heard dead air when Maher spoke that foul term: I don't have any respect, no, I don't have any respect for the tea-(baggers) [word silenced] and I do call them the tea-(baggers) [word silenced again] — even though they hate it. I will stop calling them Tea-(baggers) [word silenced for a third time] when they stop calling it Obamacare, that's my deal. He proceeded to allege opposition to President Barack Obama is motivated by racism. Maher maintained the debt “was mostly ran up under Bush,” yet “where were the Tea Party then?” He offered some mock speculation: “So there’s just something about him that they don't like. I can't put my finger on what it is. (audience laughter) But there's some way that he’s just not like them. I don't know what. He's skinny that must be it. He's skinny, they're fat and he's skinny.” Audio: MP3 clip that matches the video From the Monday, April 25 Late Show with David Letterman on CBS: DAVID LETTERMAN: What about your Tea Party pals, what do you hear there? BILL MAHER: Well, the Tea Party, you know, they are sad, unfortunate people because — well, they are, because they are, you know, corporate America's useful idiots. (Applause) They are they — I would have more respect for them if they knew a thing, if any fact could get in that tin foil helmet. If they would get out of their chat rooms and have their house tested for lead for just a minute. (Laughter) LETTERMAN: Is this part of your friendship campaign, Bill? Is this- MAHER: No, I don't have any respect, no, I don't have any respect for the tea-(baggers) [word silenced] and I do call them the tea-(baggers) [word silenced again] — even though they hate it. I will stop calling them Tea-(baggers) [word silenced] when they stop calling it Obamacare, that's my deal. (Applause) But here's the thing. Their whole campaign is based on money. It's all about we have too much debt, the deficit is too high. They are, after all, named after a tax revolt. But you know, there's these things called facts. Where did all this debt come from. Well, the facts will tell us it was mostly ran up under Bush. Two wars that we put on the credit card. (Applause) Prescription drug program that was unpaid for. Tax cuts for the richest one percent, that was unpaid for. Where were the Tea Party then? Crickets. But suddenly, when President Nosferatu took office — suddenly debt became intolerable. So there’s just something about him that they don't like. I can't put my finger on what it is. (audience laughter) But there's some way that he’s just not like them. I don't know what. He's skinny that must be it. He's skinny, they're fat and he's skinny. — Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.
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John James Audubon, the French-American naturalist and artist born on 26 April 1785, is the subject of a Google doodle John James Audubon was born on this day 226 years ago. Unlike previous Google doodles, such as the interactive submarine which celebrated the birth of Jules Verne, this time Google has kept things simple. But while the specially designed logo on the search engine’s home page boasts no moving parts or any other type of animation, its latest graphic might just go down as one of the more beautiful of recent times. The letters of the internet giant’s name are barely recognisable amid the branches and colourful plumes of the birds which adorn the logo, created in the style of the French-American painter and ornithologist’s creations. Born on April 26, 1785, John James Audubon developed a deep appreciation of nature from early childhood and moved to America from France at the age of 18 in order to avoid joining Napoleon’s army. He was to go on to make name for himself by painting birds in a signature life-like manner that was to overshadow contemporaries and predecessors. “I felt an intimacy with them … bordering on frenzy must accompany my steps through life”, recalled the painter of his relationship with his feathered subjects. His far reaching influence on ornithology and natural history extended to being quoted by Charles Darwin in ‘On the Origin of Species’ while Audubon’s field notes are regarded as having made a significant contribution to the understanding of bird anatomy and behavior. As recently as December, 2010, a copy of Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for £7,321,250, a record price for a single printed book. Google doodle Internet Search engines Google Wildlife Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk
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