This is a guest article by author Andy Worthington
Back in March last year, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, as “the culmination of a three-year project to record the stories of all the prisoners held at the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
The first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.
ISLAMIC EXTREMISM AND NATIONAL SECURITY
The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.
It's a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.
Henrietta Moore discusses her views on how anthropologists can best understand different cultures. What are the potential benefits and limitations of cultural relativism? And what is the impact of culture and technology on individual identity?
During the Cold War, Estonians living on the northern Baltic coast close to Helsinki were able to receive Finnish television broadcasts. With this, their eyes were opened to western cultural exports such as Dallas. Suddenly large television aeriels appeared all over the Tallinn cityscape as people flocked from the south of the country to be with their families to watch American soap operas. With the Estonian Soviet authorities having cottoned on to this, something urgent had to be done to stop Estonians being brainwashed by western propaganda, therefore they attempted to develop technology to jam television broadcasts.
Film maker Jaak Kilmi tells this story through the context of his own youth, having been hooked on these very episodes of Dallas beamed from southern Finland.
In our ever shrinking global village, it is easy to forget the immense privileges that global communications and transport bring us. We can eat Japanese food, listen to Bulgarian folk jazz, watch Senegalese art house cinema or engage in any other cultural activity to our hearts content. More to the point we have the opportunity to indulge and expand our cultural awareness in any direction we desire, yet such benefits are not enjoyed by all the world's population.
North Korea is arguably the last stronghold of totalitarian socialism in our ever shrinking world. A few years ago Vice magazine travelled there to film a documentary providing a profile of this 'hermit kingdom'. Throughout their stay they were closely monitored to ensure they never got too close to the locals or see any undesirabe section of North Korean society.
Religious extremism
The anti-terrorism thinktank Quilliam Foundation today sent out an alert warning about upcoming visits to the UK by Saudi clerics. Next week the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham will reportedly host two Wahhabi clerics that have said highly objectionable things in the past.
Benjamin Barber, Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Director of CivWorld and Senior Fellow at Demos US spoke to Catherine Fieschi of Counterpoint in this two part interview. In this section he talk about the significance of the election of Barack Obama and his impact so far on US politics.
Alain de Botton speaks to Counterpoint about the connection between cultural context and individual identity. How do people define themselves in different societies? In an increasingly globalised world, do we feel the same need to belong? And why is elite culture so adverse to the idea of individual self-improvement?
