EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

              

 

Invasive species: Killer shrimps and English parrots

Striped and suitably vicious-looking, a creature, which likes to kill its prey without eating it, has arrived from the Black Sea

 
Dikerogammarus villosus, a visitor to this country so unpopular that even the Environment Agency calls it the killer shrimp, turned up recently in Cardiff Bay and two freshwater reservoirs. It must be the only shrimp in history to have been given its own "wanted" poster by the government. Striped and suitably vicious-looking, the creature, which likes to kill its prey without eating it, has arrived from the Black Sea intent on wiping out northern Europe's rather meeker amphipods. And it is not alone.

Yesterday, it was reported, monk parakeets became the latest invasive species to be targeted by the government. The grey and green birds stand accused of building huge communal nests and causing power blackouts, and the 150 or so that have established themselves in Britain are to be shot (or, if you can offer a secure cage, perhaps rehoused). The much larger population of ring-necked parakeets – a familiar sight in south-west London and found as far north as the Clyde – is harder to control, since it is so well-established, though the GB non-native species secretariat (a sort of biological border patrol) advocates limiting its numbers and is investigating chemical sterilisation.

Is this ecological xenophobia? Take evolutionary theory to its limit and you might think Britain is well-placed to encourage a free for all, with the fittest plants and birds free to survive while others perish. Advocates of open borders and open economies should perhaps not blanch when nature applies the principle of globalisation, too. Homo sapiens arrived in Britain as a migrant about 12,000 years ago and has been bringing new land animals and plants to the country ever since. A diet of purely native species would be unhealthy and limited.

Scientists agree, up to a point. "We must not think that all non-native species are bad," they say. But they also point out that some migrants are far worse than others. There is an official blacklist of invasive non-native species, defined as ones able to damage the "environment, the economy, our health and the way we live". Many thrive here because they lack natural regulation or predators (rather like the global banks that did so much harm in the City). They include such creatures as the African clawed-toad, the leathery sea squirt and the edible dormouse (best served with honey and poppy seeds, according to an ancient Roman recipe). Some, such as the notorious Japanese knotweed, do immense harm. The best response is to limit the arrival and spread of new species. But sometimes eradication is necessary. That's tough for the ruddy duck – an American import culled to 120 birds from 4,400 – but good news, perhaps, for the white-headed duck, otherwise facing extinction.

The Guantánamo files: Tale of two prisons

Guantánamo embodies the failure of the Afghan war, which began amid bombast in 2001, but which collapsed long ago

As a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with the Afghan war, the story of two prisons is hard to beat. In one prison, they can't get the remaining inmates out. In the other, they can't keep them in. Either way, the military coalition has been left looking like a fool.

In southern Afghanistan yesterday morning, 475 prisoners, almost all said to be Taliban insurgents, escaped through a tunnel that seems to have been dug under the eyes of their captors. And just as the Taliban were digging their way out, the Guardian and the New York Times were putting online leaked documents describing the management of inmates in that other, more famous prison in Guantánamo Bay. President Obama was elected on a promise to close the latter within a year of taking office. Instead he has abandoned the task with 172 inmates still inside. Some of these, as the Guantánamo files show, are seriously unpleasant and dangerous but others are lesser figures who have become lost in the system after years of abuse and misinformation made them impossible to prosecute or simply homeless, like the Chinese Uighur Muslims, who have nowhere to go.

Either way, Guantánamo embodies the failure of America and Britain's Afghan war, which began amid bombast in 2001, but which collapsed long ago into confusion. The thing that stands out from the newly published Guantánamo files is not the disgraceful self-exempted off-shoring of the rule of law, or even the torture and sustained abuse of inmates – grotesque though these things are, we have long known about them – but the random ineffectiveness of the system. The defence put forward by the people who set Guantánamo up – it was an efficient way of keeping the world safe – is shown to be wrong.

Click through the records of the 779 prisoners who have passed through the Guantánamo system, on the Guardian's interactive guide, and you find an unpredictable mix of the evil, the criminal and the accidental. Some of them fought the west, some of them are doing so again and indeed some may be among the prisoners who escaped yesterday in Kandahar. But as we report today, Guantánamo turned out to be a bad way of gathering intelligence and even worse as a system of justice. The files show that a large amount of the information supposedly collected from prisoners has in fact come from a handful of informants among the inmates. Some of the things they have passed on may be true. Other things are surely false. After nine years of operation, it is impossible to know which.

Guantánamo was and still is a dumping ground for all sorts of people, not (as America once claimed) the distillation of its most extreme enemies. Among the leaked files is a guide for interrogators, telling them what to look out for in order to identify terrorists. It reveals a desperate lack of precision, and a system in which it was almost impossible for inmates to convince anyone of their innocence. One supposed sign of terrorist links was a particular kind of Casio watch. Another was the fact that someone had gone to Afghanistan after 2001. Yet among the original detainees was a 14-year-old boy and an 89-year-old man, neither of whom had anything to do with the Taliban. Imprisoned beyond the rule of law, as enemy combatants, they found themselves part of a cruel and surreal system which sustained itself through its own illegitimacy.

As President Obama has found, once someone has entered the Guantánamo system it has proved very difficult to get them out. The nature of their imprisonment and questioning makes prosecution in a federal court all but impossible. The innocent or insignificant were trapped, or only gradually released. The more that is revealed about Guantánamo, the worse it looks as a way of responding to terrorism. It was a symbol of vengeance, not a system of justice. Read the files and find out why.

In praise of … hazy imprecision

Life is imperfect and its rounded edges and knocks from experience have an appeal

We are often exhorted to define our terms and there is merit in that. Ian Richards and Charles Ogden were not indulging in some donnish jeu d'esprit when they wrote their book The Meaning of Meaning, published in 1923 and never out of print since. But at the same time, there are arguments for imprecision and deliberate vagueness too, and perhaps in the end they are more convincing. Life is imperfect and its rounded edges and knocks from experience have an appeal, a humanity lacking in the absolutely upright and austere. There are virtues in the word "maybe". Instead of a sharp No, "later" is kinder to an impatient child. Haziness also reigns over that other kind and gentle world, the English landscape: mist veiling the fells or dusk gathering around lamps in a dusty street. In this strange late April of warm summer weather and few showers, dusty haze has become the predominant feature of the English landscape, city skylines imprecise and rural scenes as soft as Housman's blue remembered hills. There's often merit in a lack of clarity, not least in politics where the demand for absolute answers in no way reflects the reality of life, where equivocation and uncertainty are usually much closer to the truth. Our greatest artists reflect this in paintings such as Turner's composition of 1844, Rain, Steam and Speed. Royal Academicians complained that the master had lost all form in a haze of light. But it is his images which last and inspire new generations. Not theirs.