THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.98 - MAYA FOA

Episode Date: June 29, 2019

Adam talks with Maya Foa, the director of Human rights charity Reprieve, about the questionable efficacy of the death penalty, torture, Jack Bauer, drone strikes, why Obama should have watched 'Dave' starring Kevin Kline, and whether I could get out of Guantanamo.Reprieve is a nonprofit organisation of international lawyers and investigators whose stated goal is to "fight for the victims of extreme human rights abuses with legal action and public education".Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Matt Lamont for additional editing.RELATED LINKSREPRIEVE WEBSITEhttps://reprieve.org.uk/CAN YOU PASS THE GUANTANAMO PRB?https://reprieve.org.uk/update/why-theres-no-way-out-of-guantanamo-especially-if-youre-innocent/FOURTEEN DAYS IN MAY (1987)https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05m5xb9/fourteen-days-in-mayMAYA FOA & IBRAHIM HALAWA ON EGYPT'S MASS TRAILS (2019)https://www.thirteen.org/programs/amanpour-co/maya-foa-ibrahim-halawa-egypts-mass-trials-fais7l/'DAVE' TRAILERhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTTe-rxTyh0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. Nice to be with you.

Guess what? I'm taking a walk in the Norfolk countryside on an evening in late June 2019. How did it get to be late June? The last time I checked it was January. One day, quite soon, June 2019, will seem incredibly quaint and a long time ago. But at the moment, it's now. And where I am, I can report that it is going pretty well. The sun is going down. I'd say we're entering golden hour. So everything around me is bathed in very beautiful golden light. All the net owls and the trees whose names I can never remember.

No disrespect to the trees. And the big long stalky plants that have grown up just in the last week or two. With the white bits on the top. It is just such a lovely evening. Hmm. Rosie. Rosie, come and say hello. Come over here.

Oh, I love you. I've been away for a few days. I was doing a show in London and it was so great to get back and see Dog. We spent some time on the sofa, didn't Rosie just looking at each other and you looked so beautiful you know how it is sometimes you get back you haven't seen your loved ones for a little while and suddenly you think wow I I love you it's easy to feel like that with a dog. Teenage children,

it's a little bit harder. There's not too much sitting on the sofa and staring into each other's eyes. Little bits, take it where you can get it. Anyway, look, I was going to keep this introduction brief. So let me give you a brief introduction to podcast number 98, which features a conversation with Maya Foa. She is the director of the human rights charity Reprieve. You may know about Reprieve, but if you don't, let me tell you that Reprieve is a non-profit organization of international lawyers and investigators whose stated goal is to fight for the victims of extreme human rights abuses with legal action and public education.

I had a fascinating conversation with Maya about the work she does. We talked about all the fun things, the death penalty, torture, Jack Bauer, drone strikes, Obama, and whether I would be able to get out of Guantanamo. My conversation with Maya was recorded earlier this year in March 2019 in London. And as you will hear, our conversation happened thanks to a previous guest on this podcast. All will be explained. I'll be back at the end for a tiny bit more waffle, but right now, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this Then concentrate on that Come on, let's chew the fat And have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat And find your talking hat La, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la

La, la, la, la, la, la Have we met before? I don't think so. But is this a trick question? Well, no, because I sort of found out about Reprieve I suppose I think I heard Clive Stafford Smith talking at Brian Eno's studio oh yeah so we maybe did meet there right were you there that night I was running around with a man in a cape okay yeah so Brian Eno was on my podcast a while back and then afterwards he invited me and my producer friend Seamus to his studio to hear Clive talking about the work that Reprieve does.

I suppose Brian was kind of doing a, well, in the movies, they call them buzz screenings, you know, just to get people together and, you know, introducing people and seeing if they can sort of, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours or whatever. They're always interesting. I think Reprieve supporters are unlike many other groups of supporters of charities, just because Reprieve's a bit odd. You know, so we get artists and some celebrities and just very politically aware people. And then surprising groups of the general public gravitate towards us. But I do think it's odd. Guilty middle class people do you think people whose lives are comfortable and enjoyable and they read the papers and they're just consumed with guilt and shame for their comfortable lives when they see how difficult things are for so many other people but those people might i'm not saying that support a charity that feeds starving

children in af Africa as well. You know, but this is quite a I do think there's a there's something quite radical about supporting quite a radical charity. And Reprieve is, you know, you sort of we bill ourselves as protecting the rights of some of the people who are most hated by the world. So why would it's it's interesting. I guess it would be useful to start by finding out for people who aren't familiar with Reprieve what it is and what it does. Yeah, so Reprieve is a legal charity, although we don't only use the law. And we are focused on, we started off being focused on the death penalty because we were founded by Clive Stafford Smith, who was a death penalty lawyer in the deep south of America for decades. Is he a Brit?

He is a Brit. I mean, he calls himself an American, but in the same way that I'm an American and, you know, we have dual nationality. He worked there for a couple of decades representing lots of people in the deep south. And when he came back to Britain, it was just after he had made a documentary about a guy, Edward L. Johnson, who had really sadly been executed and he was innocent. There's four words. 14 days in May. 14 days in May, that's the one.

Which made a huge impression on me when I saw it in 1987, yeah. It was the public reaction to that that gave him and the director of that film, Paul Heyman, the idea to set up Reprieve, because there was such a strong feeling in Britain that this was really unjust, and it was. So Edward Earl Johnson, he was accused and convicted of raping and murdering someone. But was actually innocent. Right. And right through this documentary, it becomes clear to you that this guy is actually not guilty and yet he's on death row and every effort is being made to prevent him from being executed but it doesn't work out and i couldn't really

you know it was the first time as a young person that i'd seen anything like that and i just thought and and you know when you're a teenager anyway, and so much of the world seems outrageous and unfair and irrational. I just thought, what? That's mad. What's going on? Yeah. How can that happen? Yeah. It seemed unbelievable to me that in the modern world, there could be sort of miscarriages of justice like that. And you're sort of thinking, but they're making the documentary.

And how come it's not going to work out? Yeah. And I think the, you know, Clive and the documentary filmmaker, they were really close to Edward and they thought it was going to work out. They didn't think they were making a documentary about his last 14 days. So, yeah, incredibly powerful. And what's sort of striking now is that I work on the US a lot. is that I work on the US a lot. And the number of executions have gone down,

but you still have the same extraordinary injustices. And you watch the machinery go, and you watch how innocence is, actually in the words of a Texas governor, not relevant in the judicial process after a certain point. And they're saying that, why? A sort of legal standard, you know, from their perspective, they're saying there has to be an end to this somewhere. Yeah.

But I think philosophically... It's a compromise. At the end of the day, it's a compromise. The system works as well as it can. There are bound to be glitches. Is that what they're saying? They acknowledge there are glitches, though we know there are 150 people exonerated, and that's only the people that we know about. But I think philosophically, if you believe in the death penalty, and you sort of have to believe in your justice system and the infallibility of it, because otherwise, how could you continue to maintain that it works? People don't actually want to see innocent people executed.

So therefore, you have to create a system whereby innocence becomes effectively irrelevant in the justice system. So you see these time and time again, and then there's a perversity of what I see looking a lot at method of execution questions. A lot of inmates try to commit suicide before their executions, and then they're stopped, and often it's classed as a sort of misdemeanor you know they they tried to yeah they did something against the rules like one of our clients Brandon Road taken to hospital he slit his wrist he was terrified of the lethal injection and then they stitched him up they had to delay his execution which they were annoyed about but they left the IV in and then they used the same site for the execution a few days later

and actually that was the execution that took place using the British drugs from a driving school in just west of here in Acton, London. A driving school? Yeah, yeah. How do you mean? There was a pharmacy operating out of a driving school that we discovered. I spent quite a lot of time around Acton, Acton Ways, when I started at Reprieve. But we discovered, I spent quite a lot of time around Acton, Acton Ways, when I started at Reprieve, we discovered had been for six months selling sodium thiopental, which was the first drug used in all executions across the US, to states all over the place in the US for use in executions. And he was happily doing this, the guy who ran the pharmacy. It was really just a rum in the back of a driving school.

It's called Elbegon Driving School. And then a little sign still there says Dream Pharma. And that's where the United States of America was getting its execution drugs from. Because a lot of other pharmaceutical companies didn't want their products associated with capital punishment. Yeah, that was always the case. Actually, in 2010, this issue hadn't become as high profile as it has now. Was he also giving driving lessons? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know whether he mixed his profession. So I don't know whether people, you know, got a little... If you can't do the emergency stop... Take some of this. Yeah. So that was 2010, right? And the reason that happened was because it was actually just a sort of problem with the

manufacturing plant of one of the drugs they used to use and it's a capital punishment sort of falling victim to capitalism here they used old drugs because they didn't want to use expensive drugs because they didn't want to spend money killing people and they wanted to use these drugs that was off patent easy to buy problem is in America, the drug industry is so profitable that not very many companies continue to make these older drugs. So sodium therpentol had been replaced by propofol for almost all clinical procedures. There weren't very many manufacturers and the one manufacturer that was still making it had a problem at its plant. That's when, and I don't know exactly how this happened, but you can imagine, you've got these Department of Corrections officials in the US

who are responsible for getting the execution drugs. They've got no medical training, no pharmaceutical background. So what do they do? They go on Google. I'd really love to know how they stumbled on the pharmacy in West Acton, London, that then sold them the drugs. Enough drugs to kill hundreds of people, but they actually didn't end up using them because we got involved and sort of cut that off but that driving school that was the first of

many many weird outfits that states have gone to to get drugs because of course the legitimate medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry they're not gonna you know the branding says we make medicines to save and improve the lives and health of patients and you know doctors sign the Hippocratic Oath these people don't want to be involved in experimental procedures that torture and kill people yeah yeah and so how did you initially become involved with that particular case then because this is sort of interesting overview of the sort of things you do at Reprieve. Yeah, I'd started with no idea really what I was doing. I was a volunteer at the time and I was just, you know, trying to figure out what to do with myself, make myself useful. And things came in from here and there. And shortly after I arrived, Clive, the founder,

got a call from a death penalty lawyer he had worked with. And he said, I've got an execution scheduled tonight. And we know they didn't have the drugs for the execution. The guy's called Jeffrey Landrigan. We know they don't have the drugs, but they managed to get them somewhere. They couldn't get them from America. And we've just forced the state to say where they got them from. And all we knew at that point was that they came from a pharmacy in England. So this lawyer in America asked Clive if he could help them figure out what to do about this and clive who lives in dorset called the office and said does anybody have half an hour to do a research task on sodium thipental and you know where it might have come from in england

and i'm sorry to ask a question but why is that a problem that they're getting it from? Well, it might not have been right, but it was, I guess, sort of in theory, why would it be a problem? If you inject drugs that are bad quality or not what they purport to be, I think the lethal injection is torture anyway. But you can imagine that what you might be doing with the three drug cocktail that they used is using the first drug, which it emerged, came from the back room of a driving school, to put the prisoner to sleep. If that doesn't work, you're still awake when you get the second drug. The second drug's a paralytic agent and that is purely cosmetic. So the only function in this cocktail, as they call it, is to paralyze the prisoner just in case the first drug hasn't worked

so that he or she can't shout out i'm in excruciating pain i'm awake i'm still here i'm conscious so it's sort of to save the sensibilities of the people looking on precisely more than the actual yeah i think it's really interesting because there's a legal prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the u.s constitution which when we argue these cases that's what we're arguing that it's cruel and unusual and the more i've looked at this and like every element of the process is designed not to prevent the prisoner from experiencing cruel and unusual punishment it's actually designed to stop the public, you know? The lethal injection, this medical mask, the paralytic that stops us seeing

and makes it more torturous and stops us seeing it, all of that, it's not the best way to kill someone. It's the way that we feel is most palatable. Right. It seems more civilised than chopping someone's head off. Or firing squad or all of the other options that are available anyway so jeffrey landrigan get this call in half an hour research to us figure out where these drugs have come from i'd mentioned the first two drugs you you said what happens if why does it matter where they've come from yeah if the first drug's

bad quality it may not work that then means you've got a person who has been injected with a substance maybe it's got into the vein maybe it hasn't but it doesn't do the job it's intended to do second drug paralytic the individual's totally paralyzed can't say i can still feel everything third drug is akin to you know acid that's on fire coursing through your veins it has been admitted by the supreme court of america to be unconstitutionally painful, so torture. So what the US has to prove when they kill people is that it won't be torture. So if you're using a bad drug, it might well meet that threshold. So I start looking in 2010 to try and understand where this drug might have come from. And at that point, I hadn't found Dream Pharma, the backroom of the driving school. But I did establish that it wasn't FDA approved. It wasn't

a drug that was supposed to go to the US, one. Might have been veterinary, might have been counterfeit, might have been, you know, we don't know the chain of custody. So I've established a few things about the quality that was questionable. And I didn't know anything about the death penalty system at this point. So I'm sending this information across to the lawyer across the ocean. And he says, great, you know, can you turn that into an affidavit? All right. Didn't know what that was. It's a witness statement, essentially. So I learned how to do that, do that, send it over. I have no idea really what the process is. But, you know, I'm working through the night because they've got an execution that night. And you've watched 14

days in May, you can file things up to the last moment. So we're rapidly doing this, turning the research that was not half an hour but half a day with lots of phone calls to people who were very confused by who this person was into this statement. Eventually, get it in, wait to hear from the court. I remember finding out that there had been a stay of execution. I remember going to bed thinking, all right, great, okay, got tomorrow, go back to work on this. And I woke up to the World Service saying that after a brief stay of execution,

Geoffrey Landrigan was executed at X hours in the morning in the state of Arizona. And I thought, oh, you know the phrase rude awakening? I don't think I've ever had more of a, you know, real sense of what that means. And it made me, well well did it make me angry probably i think i probably am quite angry about abuse of power generally but it also is motivating you know it was extraordinary what happened there and then the brandon road case that i mentioned earlier

again that was with the dream farmer drugs i learned learnt very shortly after Geoffrey's execution, Brandon had been executed before I started at Reprieve, but I learnt about his case because I spoke to his mother, I know her quite well, I spoke to his brother, they both came to Europe, we did some work together, and the various doctors and lawyers who worked on it, and I ended up seeing the autopsy photos. This is the guy who tried to commit suicide and they saved his life only to kill him in the name of justice a few days later and his autopsy photos showed his eyes wide open and that is evidence that he wasn't put to sleep before the execution so it was torture so this man who was so terrified that he tried to kill himself before he was executed, then was tortured to death. And it was those two things plus the

investigation and an understanding of the supply chain, the global supply chain, which gave me a sense of a potential strategy for this. Those things in those first few days were what set me on the path that meant that now I continue to do that with the team and I now direct all of the casework at Reprieve. Yes. Yes, please. Yep. Yes.

Some people would say when you're talking about people being executed who everyone is fairly confident are guilty. So what? Tough luck. You're talking about bad people who have been horribly cruel to other innocent people. You know, they made their bed. Tough luck if it's not the right cocktail of drugs why should we care well i mean lots of answers to that question you know i tend to not get into that debate with people because if they are yeah death penalty i don't really because i

remember when back at school one like you know every now and again at school there would be a fun teacher who would come in and sort of do something wild and off the syllabus or whatever. Or you'd have some debate. And one of the debates we had was about the death penalty. And I remember that very early on. And, you know, you go through all the pros and cons and everything. And you come out of it thinking, wow, really, there's way more to it than I thought. Maybe I should.

Maybe I should talk more. No, I think it's just that fundamentally certain people. So there are people who just probably not going to change their mind ideologically. They might believe in assuming a person is guilty. And that is a big assumption. And the first point is always, do you trust the justice system? Do you think lawyers always get it right? Do you think that if you have money and if you don't have money, the quality of your lawyer is going to be the same? Do you think that race plays a part in

how people are sentenced? I think most of us have a decent amount of mistrust in the justice system and then the way different factors influence how people are impacted by that. So in America, race is a huge issue. Poverty is a huge issue in America and elsewhere. And, you know, politics is a huge issue. So depending on your audience, you know, it's actually questioning what we think about the structures that lead to a death sentence being given

because they're imperfect, right? Everywhere and discriminatory everywhere and it is always political i've now worked on this for nearly a decade and in every single country where i've worked on death sentences and executions always sort of comes down to political decision making in what way give us an example an example All right. So just a sort of obvious example of politics at play. You take Saudi Arabia at the moment, a few countries in the Middle East and North Africa, but post Arab Spring, we've got at Reprieve clients who were children who went to peaceful protests, prodemocracy protests right you'd think in

britain pretty okay to do that in fact probably think that's quite a good thing it's a fun day out yeah right fun day out turns out that one of them or there's a group of three ali dawood abdullah 16 17 and 17 years old went to one of these protests in Saudi Arabia. All of them were ultimately sentenced to death. Ali al-Nimr was sentenced to crucifixion. They still go with crucifixion. Right. So he gets, that was to try and make a point. Not with nails though.

Well, I was actually told by a lawyer who, I won't name, but who has worked with Saudi authorities on different cases, commercial cases. He said to me one day when we were doing quite a lot of media about Ali's case and the crucifixion, he said, you know, Maya, they're a bit confused by this, all this attention on the crucifixion. You know what they told me, Maya?

I said, no, tell me, tell me, what did they say? He said, well, do they know? We behead them first. So the method, so that we're clear, is is beheading then crucifixion okay so with those cases though on the charge sheet for ali al-nemer it was attending the protest administering first aid at the protest literally on the charge sheet for which you get sentenced to death you know other things you can get sentenced to death for in saudi arabia taking screen grabs of tweets was among the charges

that one of the guys that we've worked on. So stuff that kids in this country do all the time, you know, that you could be sentenced to death and executed for as a child. I think if you talk to somebody who's pro-death penalty, they're probably thinking about extreme cases where you really have the worst of the worst of the worst thing you can imagine. I think even in those cases, there is more to the story than the headline or our gut reaction.

And I also think fundamentally, obviously, a justice system needs to be more than our gut visceral reaction to something that we find horrific. That's sort of a reason we have processes and that we don't all go about killing one another in the street and mob violence. What happened to the boys in Saudi Arabia? They're still on death row. There was a commitment actually, and this is sort of where I think it's really heartening to be able to work at an organisation like Reprieve because we really advocated strongly

for them and at the time there was some British engagement with the Saudi prison authorities and we were saying that given our value system we believe that children shouldn't be sentenced to death and executed for attending protests that we needed to be really robust in our condemnation of that and also not be complicit in practices that could see us as the Brits engaged in death sentences abroad. So we talked about this quite a lot and in the end, David Cameron ended up having a conversation live with John Snow, I think, and he was asked, he was challenged to raise the cases of these three kids. And he ultimately did raise them with the authorities in Saudi Arabia. And there were, really sadly, the following January, there was a mass execution of 47 people, which included one person who had been arrested as a child who went to a protest,

whose case we didn't know about before the executions. But Ali Dawood and Abdullah were meant to make up the 50 and they weren't executed. And I think they weren't executed because there was so much international attention on their cases. And so there was sort of scrutiny on this process. If there hadn't been that, they would probably have been executed. So they're still on death row. Obviously, these were kids, they were going to school they had bright futures and it's awful that they're not yet um you know free and able to go about their lives at the same time it's a it's a positive result that they haven't been killed obviously but is it though just a

case of the regime sort of waiting for the right moment when people aren't paying attention well i think that's exactly why we would say we need to keep the pressure on and we and we try to i think that's sort of right i don't know but i think there's some level of protection because of the international attention at the same time obviously their sentences should be commuted if they've been given a guarantee and david cameron i think it was another member of the government actually said well i've been assured that the boys will not be killed. If that's the case, then what we need to see is a commutation of their sentences. But yeah, that's just, there are examples like that from these really bizarre, absurd examples all over

the place. Going back to the death penalty sort of pros and cons, as it were, I suppose the arguments in favour of the death penalty would be, obviously, first of all, that it's a deterrent, that people think, maybe I won't do that murder because I don't want to be executed. And also that it's a form of justice, retribution, you know, that it'll make people who've lost loved ones to crazy people feel better and that there is some kind of balance in the universe that has been restored by the perpetrator being removed so i think on the deterrent point yeah actually quite often you ask what i say to people when they ask me to say why the death penalty is wrong i'll ask why does it work tell me tell me why it works because there

are no studies that prove that it has a deterrent effect. In fact, it's the reverse. Anything that we have sort of suggests that it doesn't have a positive impact on crime. Rather, the studies that we see suggest that places that have the death penalty, there's often more violence, more violent crime. And, you know, you just have to look at the UK and the US and talk about murder rates. It's very clear we're a country without the death penalty. Our murder rates are much lower than in the US. So that's a myth. Proportionally speaking, yeah.

But that's a myth, I think, the deterrent effect. And there's also a sort of logic to why it's a myth. The second point you made about vengeance, some crazy person has killed somebody, I think, were your words. Well, if that person is crazy and they've killed somebody i don't know if i'm thinking oh wait in 20 years i might be executed in that moment of madness or that moment of passion you know horrible things happen and i don't think people are thinking very logically at that point you know maybe with tax evasion you're thinking okay now if i take this risk what's this reward you know that's a different kind of crime to a crime of passion yeah and then that point about the victims I feel really strongly about because what I find is is really criminal actually in the process in lots

of countries is that victims of crime or people who've lost loved ones to violent crime are used in the process to call for the death penalty. And in effect, they're being told by the prosecutors, you know, if this happens, if this person is executed some, you know, decades later, potentially, you will feel better is sort of the message they're trying to give and that's so harmful actually there are lots of victims that I've spoken with who have said we don't want the death penalty we want a resolution to this we want some kind of closure I think closure is a difficult concept but we want some way of moving forward we don't want a long protracted process and if you have the death penalty on the table it will be longer and justifying it in the name of

the victims when you don't give the victims a voice in the process, actually, and they don't, if a victim says, I don't want the death penalty, the state ignores it. In America, that is. In other countries, victims' voices are actually given a bit more weight. So I think that's a misnomer and also really, really problematic to use a group of people to serve a political end. And I maintain, you know, the death penalty is political. There's a reason why governors, when they're seeking to be re-elected, kill more people. There's a reason why before an election in another country, you might see, you know, the sort of show of strength, force from the leaders, which involves brutal crackdown on people. Do you know this quote from John McAdams, Marquette University Department of Political Science,

in favour of the death penalty? He's reasoning as far as it being a deterrent. If we execute murderers and there is in fact no deterrent effect, then we've killed a bunch of murderers. If we fail to execute murderers and doing so would in fact have deterred other murderers, then we have allowed the killing of a bunch of innocent victims. I would much rather risk the former. This to me is not a tough call. So he's saying, look, they're murderers. Maybe it's not an effective deterrent, but I'm up for taking the risk. Okay but so add one other factor into that equation what if we know that we get it wrong and we execute innocent people so I would say all right we have the death penalty we've got absolutely no evidence that it has a deterrent effect so I'm going to execute a whole bunch of

people and get it wrong a whole bunch of times without having an impact on violent crime, if anything, having an adverse impact on violent crime and killing innocent people. On the other side, so to use his sort of logic, illogic, you put people in prison, you don't execute them. You put a bunch of people in prison. Now, if they're guilty and if they would have committed further murders, you stop them from doing that because they're in prison. If they're innocent, after 10 years or hopefully fewer, will be a long time, maybe we'll have proven that they were innocent. And maybe in the meantime, we'll have identified who the actual murderers were, who maybe were out roaming the street killing people. that process whereby we can protect society and at the same time not kill innocent people is better when there's no proven deterrent value in having that additional bit of murder by state it just sort of feels i think especially when you get really horrific crimes you know when people are definitely guilty and they've done some

beyond horrific stuff you just think well see ya well i mean you know no we don't need you sticking around anymore you are a bad apple whichever way you slice it whether you're crazy whether you're responsible whether you're not you've done this thing and we as a society would rather you were no longer with us well some people would say that's what prison does it takes people out of society but we do feel things as individuals right and i go back to that point that we don't want our justice system to be acting on our, you know, basic visceral instincts. You know that I can force this information out of you. Dad! Don't you ever come into my office and talk to me like that again, do you understand me?

Dad! How do you turn on the kid channel? I'm done talking with you, do you understand me? I tell you! Do you understand me? I tell you. Do you understand me? Dad? Who the hell do you think you are? Dad.

There's no lawyer. It's just you and me. I tell you. Speaking of things that don't work. Yeah. Or that we're told don't work. Were you a 24 fan? Did you used to watch 24 with Jack Bauer?

I already said really crap at pop culture. No, I haven't seen it. What? I know, all right. Come on, Maya Foer. This is a yawning chasm in your cultural knowledge. You are absolutely right. Something that is very relevant to what you do

because I think you'll find Agent Jack Bauer, I don't know if he's an agent played by Kiefer Sutherland you know the show I'm talking about though right Jesus Christ I don't think she does I mean you were probably busy doing something positive in the world when it was on but I remember it particularly because it was one of the first big kind of what we now call box sets shows I love how you say that to me like i don't know what it means because you're right i might not but i have just about got you know what a box set

yeah okay good well 24 was the first big trailblazing type of box set at the dawn of the real explosion in popularity of dvds that people went out and bought as a box set and they watched it like five episodes in an evening kind of thing yeah and the conceit of 24 this is fun i didn't think i'd be explaining 24 was that it took place in real time so you've got 24 episodes each an hour long and it's a day in the life of jack bauer as he deals with i don't know it was usually terrorists of one kind or another. And there was a sort of existential terrorist threat. And he would be going around trying to get to the heart of it. And there'd be kidnappings and members of his family would be kidnapped and threatened.

And all kinds of terrible things would happen. And Jack Bauer would be going around kicking arse and taking names. He probably didn't even take the fucking names because he was so busy kicking arses. And so when was this? This was like the beginning of the noughts or something around then. But anyway, the reason I bring it up was that one of the main motifs and one of the main tools in Jack Bauer's toolbox was torture and he would find a guy

who was definitely bad and you know we knew from watching the show that this guy there's no shady area like maybe he is maybe he's not he's a bad guy right and he knows something that Jack needs to know there's a member of his family being held hostage. They've got 20 minutes to live because the room is filling up with gas or water or whatever it might be. And Jack has got to find out where the place is located. But the fucking terrorists aren't telling him. They're just going, no, I'm not going to tell you. Fuck you, Jack Bauer. So at a certain point, there's nothing else he can do.

What do you do? So at a certain point, there's nothing else he can do. What do you do? He has to get a biro and he has to stick it into the guy's leg, like right through his knee or whatever. And then the guy tells him. Because you would, wouldn't you, if someone was sticking a biro in your knee? You'd tell them anything to stop it.

You're not necessarily going to tell them the truth. And if you don't actually know, you're still going to say something to stop the pain. That's the problem with torture. I mean, obviously also obviously also inhumane but no it doesn't work like of course if you're being tortured you're going to give fake information or you're just going to give any information sometimes people are so delusional because you've been yeah you've gone into such a such an altered state through the i'm thinking about the war on terror style torture that jack bauer would do stipulations that if they gave him bad information there would be consequences so he wasn't getting bad information it was like listen if you tell me the wrong address and what if they don't know

as with many many many of the wrongfully held not even convicted people in guantanamo what if what if they get tortured really they've got the wrong right? So let's take an example. Just take, you know, you get these people, right? Some of them very likely the wrong guy. And the reason, and I'm talking about Guantanamo now, but we could take any other of the kind of scooping post-war on terror era. So the reason people get picked up or got picked up, some 86% of people in the first wave, it was through bounties that got offered by the US government in Yemen and Pakistan. You offer a bounty of, say, $5,000 for somebody who they say,

you know, give us a bad dude. That's like a quarter of a million equivalent at the time. So very easy for people in seven years' worth of salary, whatever, very easy for people to give up names because then they're made for the next seven years. So you don't know anyone, you give up a name, you do know somebody, but you're afraid of them, you give up the other name. So a bunch of people get put into Guantanamo in sort of the early days. And even one of the commanders said, I just keep getting given these Mickey Mouse terrorists. That was his word, Mickey Mouse

terrorists, like, so not actual terrorists. terrorists anyway one of these kids who got picked up thanks to a bounty sorry i keep thinking of like coconut now that you keep saying bounty i'm gonna get that out of my head it's a really expensive chocolate bar i was gonna say like i don't think i'd give people up for it but i mean that that mix up the the chocolate and the money bounty does go to the heart of this particular case. Because he was 14 years old, Mohammed El-Ghrani. He gets interrogated. He was tortured really badly, 14 again. And then so he spoke a certain dialect of Arabic and the interrogator spoke a different dialect.

The interrogator was Yemeni. He was Saudi. And there was confusion over one word and the word was zalat. And the interrogator was tryingi, he was Saudi. And there was confusion over one word, and the word was zalat. And the interrogator was trying to find out about money. But Mohammed al-Qarani thought it meant salad, because that's what it meant in his dialect. So this interrogator, this is a kid who's been tortured really badly, keeps asking him about salad.

Salad, where did you get? Well, I didn't need salad. But what if you needed? Where would you get the salad? Where would you go? He said, well, I mean, I'd go to salad. But what if you needed? Where would you get the salad? Where would you go? He said, well, I mean, I'd go to this market or this market. And he gave these addresses for salad. Of course, the CIA decide that he's a big financier for al-Qaeda.

And he gets held in Guantanamo for years. He's 14. He's held for seven years. He's now out. But, you know, that sort of thing. You torture that kid and the kinds of torture that they used russian roulette with like guns and knives and nails mock executions holding them upside down just waterboarding awful stuff that of course if you i mean you just get

into such that you'll say anything to stop the torture. And many of these people didn't know anything. So, you know, listen, I should probably watch 24. I'll concede that. I think you really should. But I'm not going to say that that is an accurate representation of, you know, the system. Nothing is that simple. one of the fundamental principles for me of doing this work that it's so easy for people to paint the world in black and white and it's comforting and what we do sometimes to immigrants in the political and public discourse what we do to people we've decided are bad people and we're

far-ish from Northern Ireland and the Troubles, but there was a whole group of bad people, good people and bad people, and we talked to the bad people. You've now got the war on drugs where we've decided that basically addicts, who I think some of us might say are quite vulnerable people, are these bad people and we've got to kill them all. And that was actually very racially driven when the war on drugs was created, that notion, that concept in the US. And now you've got Muslims who are being attacked. And of course, you know, you have Jews who are also considered to be or presented as the bad people. It's just dangerous. And I think as humans and then advocates and people working in this area, it's absolutely our job to tell stories that explain the complexity of any given situation and not to flatten it.

But I think that's also our duty as artists as well. So, you know, I don't know about 24. I'll have to have another conversation about that after I've watched it. It was exciting, though, back in the day. I haven't watched it for a while. I'm sure it doesn't stand up very well. But even then I remember people were saying, is this good? He's torturing a lot of people. Is this enjoyable to watch? Should we feel good about this? I guess if we put it the other way, right, that, you know, you take the group of people who are not currently being targeted and then let's go far away like you know the use of drones after Guantanamo you know right

like I wanted to ask you about yeah yeah so so from some hub in Nevada you've got a bunch of drone operators who are effectively playing what could seem like a video game. And they're seeing these people on a screen and they get to sort of press a button, pull the trigger as it were, and a drone drops this missile and lands somewhere in a community, in a village, and kills a bunch of people. And generally they kill a bunch of people.

This idea that there's precision is both wrong in terms of the number of people who can be harmed wrong in terms of the strategy take for example the double tap strategy whereby you drop a missile and then people die and the rescuers who go in to try and pull out survivors you drop another one then and they all get killed so So, you know, that is a lot of people without a great deal of precision. And then also the sort of methodology by which we pick the targets based on certain metadata, which can be very, very faulty, colour of the skin, the kind of headwear that they're wearing, you know, all of that stuff

has been shown time and time again we have a report called the multiple kills report you only die once well not true according to the us these high level targets have been killed like some of them seven times on average in our report four times so who's actually getting killed along the way before we maybe kill the high level target if we actually get them yeah flip that round and imagine that you know in in north london where we are now you've got you well you're wearing a baseball cap so you're probably a bad dude and i've got a beard you're and you've got a beard and you're a man also i'm smug and i'm white and middle class yeah exactly let's make it that particular group of

people but even on the basis of what the amer might look for, you're talking to me. We've talked about Saudi Arabia. We've talked with some amount of thoughtfulness about people who might be wrongly in Guantanamo. You could be a target right now. But let's say America's in coalition with another state that has drones and they're just going to drop them, just going to drop one now. that has drones and they're just going to drop them just going to drop one now and they're going to use all the metadata the fact that we met at this point probably after i leave because you know in this scenario i'm not the target yeah unlikely in real life but um you know that then gets justified it suits the government's agenda to be able to say these are good guys these are bad guys we're protecting you from the bad guys. They're bollocks. It suits the government's agenda. It's also presumably what a lot of people want their government to be doing.

They want to feel protected. Yeah. Yeah. But I hope maybe I'm wrong here. And I think part of why I've stayed in this job and been quite successful in some things is that I'm probably really, really I'm a blinkered optimist and maybe quite naive, but I think my belief is, and by the way, it sometimes gets proven right. I do see the best in a lot of people. I think that if you presented all of us, you know, just as a member of the British public with really sensible, pragmatic solutions, which also nod to the fact that things are complicated, but say, you know, yeah well let's take isis absolutely horrendous things happened over 17 years on from 9 11 surely 18 now we know that something awful happened and we need to understand how that happened and why in order to stop it happening again why did 15 year old kids go over to Syria to a war zone? Surely we need to understand that so that we can prevent stuff

happening again. I mean, that's just sensible. That, for me, we can all be talking about the value of protecting society. We can all be talking about the cost of different criminal justice solutions and the burden on taxpayers. And let me tell you, Guantanamo, the death penalty, these different things that we're doing are so much more costly than really sensible solutions that are also in line with the rule of law and human rights. Yeah. Did you ever meet Obama when he was in office? I did not. I did not not i'm waiting for my invitation right is that are you about to say is this the big reveal he's in the kitchen and uh he's going to come and talk to us amazing we're gonna have bounties there's going to be bounties there's

going to be banter he's going to tell us why he thought drone strikes were a good idea even though he was such a nice, cool guy and everyone was all excited when he got in. And he shot Guantanamo. And yeah, he was going to shot Guantanamo, but then it turned out not to be possible. But, you know, Obama, he was a good guy, right? He was a better alternative.

And now, especially in the age of Trump, you know, Obama was like the last statesman, noble, intelligent, posed, measured. The most recent. That's what I mean. The most recent one. And it was so hopeful when he got in and for all sorts of reasons. And you thought, well, here's a guy, here's a clearly sensitive, intelligent guy who's got some good ideas about how things are going to change now you're making faces at me because obviously in a lot of ways that didn't work out it's just what my face does actually

no it didn't work out in a lot of ways but yeah i mean i don't know i've never met the guy he hasn't been on my podcast but still still, I wonder what Obama would say. I haven't actually heard him address the topic full on. Have you? I mean, what were his justifications? No, not since he left. Presumably it was sold to him as this is, given all the options, the best bad option. We hope that it will reduce collateral damage. We hope these will be a more precise way of taking out bad guys than a lot of the alternatives.

There may be a lot of bad things about it, but really, Obama, you need to get behind this. And then I'm sure it would be nice for you to close Guantanamo, and I'm sure a lot of your supporters would love it. But really, it's not realistic for all these reasons. Have you ever seen the film Dave with Kevin Kline? Have you seen it? No, you haven't seen it. Come on, Mike. I'm going to send you a box set of 24 and Dave.

So Dave is a comedy, but it's about Kevin Kline plays a guy who is more or less the double of the president. So he has a job as a president impersonator. He turns up at parties and things like that, and he looks exactly like the president. So he has a job as a president impersonator. He turns up at parties and things like that. And he looks exactly like the president. And one day the president, the real president gets a heart attack. So he is then, for the sake of stability, drafted in to double for the president so that they don't have to announce that the president is ill because it's in the party's interest for stability and continuity so you get a a frothy satire of american politics and the kind of compromises that are

involved with being in office and the reality of how hard it is to to make the world a better place but i mean they don't really see it through in the film dave he just like he's also he's got a friend who's an accountant played by charles groden and his friend the accountant comes around and looks through like the budget and everything and goes who did this budget i could so he sits up all night and he fixes the budget you know he gets rid of the deficit and all this it's kind of like everyone's fantasy of like the government's's insane. You know, I could sort them out. That's basically what President Trump thought. Yeah, right.

Yeah. But you know what I mean? Let's assume that Obama is a good guy. In the spectrum of political figures, how does a good guy then come round to using drone strikes and fail to close Guantanamo? Like, argue on his behalf. How do you think? You know, as a devil's advocate? No, I can. I can. And I don't even need to be a devil's advocate. You know, plenty of devils in the world that don't need any more advocates. I think just reasonably, and again, this is about looking at things from every angle. I look at Obama, I think what he represented was really important. I think the backlash is

incredibly depressing. I think it was incredibly important what he represented. And I think the way he went about things, you talked about sort of statesman-like, was admirable. I think he was in a really, if I'm being reasonable, he was in a really difficult position around Guantanamo. He, you know, the real politic in America, the more work i do in america the more intractable that system seems i think it's actually much easier to influence things in britain than in america but just because of the reality of their a lot of the way money plays a role in their in their sort of um you know governance systems but anyway lots of reasons for that. Very, very difficult. And he didn't have the vote. So Guantanamo was a problem. And do we all think, yeah, drones was a terrible idea.

Maybe does he think it is? I don't know what he says at the dinner table. He's a really smart, thoughtful guy. I'm sure he's looked at this in the same way we've looked at it. Thought, well, actually, legally, I don't know. You know, but was it popular yes did it look like it might be it's a vote winner right to be able to say I'm not going to put troops on the ground I'm just going to have these very very high tech mechanisms and you know AI and we're going to use big data

and there's this big idea that we can be more precise the reality is that it didn't work out that way much like when Bush later talked about Guantanamo, he said it had been a failure. And I wonder whether Obama will at some point say that that was a mistake, that policy, the drone policy and the kill lists. I think that's quite possible. And I would never, you know, I think we have a tendency sometimes on the left to sort of eat our own. So whilst I can... Chomsky is so damning about Obama, like basically saying he was worse than any of them. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think there would be a really interesting conversation to have with Chomsky if that ever happened. I think it's about as unlikely as me going to have a bounty bar with Obama in the kitchen right now. But no, I think we can have... The benefit of being in a human rights organization like Reprieve is that we can be really, or just any third sector organization, we can be really robust, right? We have views and we can hold them really strongly. When devising strategies and communicating with decision makers, which is what

you do a lot of the time, you nuance those strategies. And to be effective, you've got to be smart about it. You've got to work out where your interests align you've got it you know so there's some amount of pragmatism involved but we get to have a really strong idealistic and yeah robust bottom line on certain things that politicians they could i think but often don't and don't feel they could and maybe it's just that they haven't been smart enough about the way in which they communicate their vision to the public or maybe the public isn't ready for that that's i'm not in politics to watch dave they need to watch dave yeah but i think it's all these different views can coexist and people can he can actually maybe think the same way as i do about some of the issues and the damage done by policy.

But when faced with two bad options, he picked a bad option. That's why we need to be really, this, my sector needs to be strong in communicating why the policy options are problematic that exist and the fact of there being other options and a lot of this is about communicating and making sure that the message is actually quite simple because what you said earlier about the right i think the right are really good on pr sometimes it's a very simple message sometimes the simple message doesn't even make sense which is why i made the comment about logic but preve it's not a political organization in that way though no no no but you know it's not political in that we're not party political but everything you do of course is not a political organisation in that way though, is it? No. No. But, you know, it's not political in that we're not party political.

But everything you do... Of course. ...has a political dimension. Yeah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blee blah Blah blah blue blah blee Blah blah blee blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo I've seen you on TV giving interviews every now and then, and I'm always impressed by how cool you stay. And because it is often a very emotive situation that you're dealing with in your work. How do you stay so cool in those situations? Like, do you find yourself in situations where people are really in your face and very emotional and getting really angry with you? Yeah, I do.

very emotional and getting really angry with you? Yeah, I do. But I don't know, this is a sort of crap answer, but I'm really interested in understanding where that sort of emotion comes from. Maybe there's a way in which this work, which is really emotional, I'm able to do because there is a degree of detachment. Obviously, fundamentally,

anybody who works on these sorts of cases, you get very attached to people. Executions are awful. People being tortured is awful, people being detained without charges is awful, you know, that it does have an impact. But at the same time, what's amazing about doing the work is that you're able to think through logically a strategy that works. And I really like logic. So when people get angry, emotion has got the better of them. And maybe they'll be saying something really compelling, and they'll be saying it with a lot of aggression. I'm interested, and I'll meet that aggression with probably a degree of distance, because I'm

immediately going into a sort of intellectual space, I suppose. Yeah, I don't think I even get angry with sort of in my my daily life about this stuff not from people who oppose my views I think when allies question or think that maybe you you know because you all care and you're working towards the same thing that's the only place where I think it it has a profound impact and I think that's the same for everybody who works in this area how does the work get funded you know how do people listening to this help if they want to help yeah well everybody can help in lots of different ways. So not just...

You didn't ask me to say this, by the way. I really didn't. No, that's true. I know that's why I started with not... Yeah, I mean, Reprieve is funded by really generous donations by members of the public, as well as some foundations and governments. But it's, yeah, that's a constant battle. You want to be able to continue to

do the work and the funding structures are insecure so there's that and it's wonderful people who give regular donations we are extremely grateful to and then there are other ways like we have i've talked about cases where the international attention on the case has been what saved lives and also people looking at cases in a different way and communicating that to other people. I think just engaging really proactively, just engaging with the material. We've got quizzes on the PRB process in Guantanamo now on our website, which is really fun. And you see, we'll shortly be launching one on different methods of execution. But you get to walk through why this is so absurd i'm gonna google it yeah prb process can you pass a prb

reprieve okay go and see if you can pass it can you pass the test to leave guantanamo start the quiz i'm gonna predict right now that I'm not going to pass. Well, give it a go. It says on the website... It's not impossible to pass. Indefinitely held without charge or trial, Guantanamo detainees must pass a periodic review board, PRB, hearing to be cleared for release.

In this quiz, we put you in the shoes of a Guantanamo detainee at a PRB hearing. 17 years ago, you were kidnapped, tortured, and of a Guantanamo detainee at a PRB hearing. 17 years ago, you were kidnapped, tortured and rendered to Guantanamo. Despite not being charged with any crimes, you still must pass a PRB to prove that you're no longer a threat. Although it sounds simple enough, you might find that faced with a series of bizarre and arbitrary questions, the reality is far from straightforward.

Do you think you can pass the test to leave Guantanamo? And so this is a real set of questions? Yeah, real things that have come up in PRB hearings with real results. Do you like American TV? Options are no, I don't watch TV. No, I prefer to watch TV from my own country. Yes, when I get out, I'm going straight to Blockbuster to rent my favorite series. Blockbuster's closed now.

So what's your answer? Nowhere I'd fall. I'd fall at the first hurdle. I like American TV, yes. Yeah. So I suppose, yes, when I get out, I'm going straight to Blockbuster to rent my favorite series.

That's what I'm going for. If you are released, you get no choice regarding the if you are released you get no choice regarding the country you are sent to and you may not be allowed to return to your home country if you had a preference would you rather be sent to albania belgium or el salvador belgium they've got beer i think if you're sent to belgium how will you support yourself options are i don't know i don't speak flemish or know anyone in belgium but i'll work hard learn the language and find a job my family will support me until i find work i have friends in belgium who can help

me find work well the last two don't apply so i'm gonna say i don't know i don't speak flemish or know anyone in belgium but i'll hard, learn the language and find a job because that's the kind of person I am. Uh-oh, you failed your review. Guantanamo detainees are expected to give lengthy descriptions of exactly what job you will do when you leave Guantanamo, even though you don't know what country you're going to and have been out of the workforce for years.

Your next PRB hearing will be in two years better luck next time but would i fail just from i only answered three questions yeah you failed yeah yeah you can give it another go there is a route to winning but i tell you it took me a long time to find it and in any event when you do you've basically inculpated yourself. So you have to admit guilt in some way. And then they say, oh, you've passed then. But nobody is getting out under the Trump administration. And indeed, we've got people who have been cleared for release. There's a guy called Taufik.

He's been cleared for release, I think, since 2002, perhaps. So he passed his PRB. He passed his PRB. And PR and prb right it's six defense and intelligence agencies so it's a serious thing he passed he was cleared he's been cleared for many years didn't say he wanted to go to belgium didn't say he wanted to go to belgium although nothing against them then they literally gave him they measured him up for new clothing for release he's never been released. He's still there. Bobby held indefinitely.

There are another six others who are, or there are six maybe who have been cleared. They're never getting out. And so what is the point here? Six agencies have said you're not a threat. You're not dangerous. And, you know, at a cost of every night, I think it cost the US.s taxpayer 29 000 to keep guantanamo open and you can certainly imagine how people who'd been through that experience or been innocent and had family members killed by drone strikes or whatever would be much more likely to be radicalized if they were

ever going to be well actually the people you know people, you know, people who we've worked with, who've got out, we have a Life After Guantanamo project, you know, they just want, really, they want kind of what sounds like a simple life, you know, and that is incredibly rich to them, the having families and getting a job at the bakery and going to Blockbuster, watching the box set. Yeah, doing all the things that I felt.

All right. Yeah. We're off to see Obama now. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, you promised, right? blockbuster watching the box set yeah doing all the things that i i failed to do all right yeah we have to see obama now yes yes yes yeah you promised right because i can see him okay he's waving at me he's tapping his watch yeah he's got to go over he's meeting uh keifer sutherland later Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics, and I don't want to stop.

And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes.

Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats that was my afoa rosie don't go down there that's overgrown now that whole area is out of bounds until i would say october and it changes so quickly just in a few weeks your favorite path suddenly becomes a no-go zone I don't know what's Maya Foa doing about that nothing uh so I hope you found that interesting I thought she was really fascinating Maya Foa and I'm very grateful to her for giving up her time as I said I put a link in the description of this podcast to Reprieve's website, where you can read more about their work and see if you would get out of Guantanamo faster than I would. There's also a link to the documentary that we spoke about that was such an important influence on Maya. such an important influence on Maya. Watching 14 Days in May as an 18-year-old made me think differently about things. I haven't seen it for a while actually and I think I'm going to

sit down and watch it again, maybe show it to my sons, but I really do recommend it and you can watch it on the BBC iPlayerplayer it's directed by paul hammond and as we said features the lawyer clive stafford smith who went on to found reprieve and they're fighting in this documentary to prevent the execution of edward earl johnson a mississippi man that um clive believed had been wrongly accused and sentenced to death. A very emotive documentary that I think would be interesting to you whether you agree with the death penalty or not. Rosie, come on. She's right down the end of the path. She stood there for a while as I was calling her, looking at me going, no, I want want to carry on I want to keep walking

I know it's still a nice night but I want to get back I'm going to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers with my son my wife is away visiting friends so it is father son movie night tonight we're going to get to watch a film that would be given a very short bit of shrift,

where my wife around, not that she turns her nose up at classic sci-fi all the time, but it's not her preferred genre. And it's been a long time since I've seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 version, that is. Directed by... Who is it directed by? Oh, it's Philip Kaufman, I think. I wanted to say Andy Kaufman.

Kaufman? Kaufman? It's either directed by Philip, Andy, or Gerald. Kaufman. Kaufman Kaufman it's either directed by Philip Andy or Gerald Kaufman Kaufman anyway I haven't seen it for a while and I it's one of those films that was quite a big deal when I saw it as a young teen got it out on VHS, watched it with my friend Tom. It was very creepy, but I do remember there being some funny bits, and I warmed to the Jeff Goldblum character in there. It's got a strange cast. Leonard Nimoy is in it as well, a very young Jeff Goldblum.

Donald Sutherland, of course, he's the protagonist. And so many weird, memorable bits. The most memorable, of course, being the dog with man's face. Spoiler, there's a dog with a man's face in one scene. It was right up there in my top five of freakiest things that I had ever experienced at that point. Just beneath walking in on my parents having a shag. But anyway, that's another story. Rosie! Come on! Don't go down there, I said. Hey! All right. So listen, back next week with the Renegade Master, Default Damager, Power to the People. No, back next week with another podcast.

Coming up to that hundredth episode. Also coming up to the Catcher in the Rye book club with Richard Iwadi and Sarah Pascoe. I can tell you now that's going to be in about three weeks' time. You've still got time to read Catcher in the Rye if you want to join in on the fun as soon as the podcast comes out. I'm going to go home now and watch some Glastonbury coverage and probably feel a little pang of regret that I'm not there and then get over it very fast when I remember how comfortable I am in my sofa.

Thank you very much indeed, once again, to Maya Foa and to Reprieve. Do visit their website, read more about what they do, maybe make a contribution to support their work if you feel you wish to do so. Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his absolutely invaluable production support on this episode. Thank you, Seamus. Thanks to Matt Lamont for his superb edit whiz-bottery on this episode. Thank you, Seamus. Thanks to Matt Lamont for his superb edit whiz-bottory

on this episode. Cheers, Matt. Appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks to ACAST for their ongoing support. And thanks to you for downloading this episode.

I think a hug's in order. Don't back off. There's no need to back off. Come on. Come here, come on hey, oh, hey okay, yeah get in there alright

till next time please take the very best of care and um you know, bear in mind I love you bye Bye. Thank you.