Here I Stand

by Amnesty International UK

  “Right, except…” She frowns. “So how can we be killer robots and wear T-shirts that say we’re against them?”

  Costa throws his hands up in the air. “We’re not killer robots, Stelle. You weren’t listening. We’re Robot Killers.”

  Estelle sits on the bottom stair. “Oh,” she says.

  “Val kept saying he’d renamed us Robot Killers. The thing is, he didn’t really even notice it himself – the difference, I mean. So I figured a visual might help.”

  Estelle nods. “Right,” she says. “How’d I miss that?”

  Costa smiles. “There’s this cool thing in the article about the tortoise and the hare. You know, the old fable?” She nods. “So, the woman from the UN –” he clicks his fingers – “Angela Kane, that’s her name. Anyway, she says the new arms race is between the tortoise of international law and the hare of changing technology.”

  Estelle nods. “And she thinks the tortoise has a hope in hell?”

  “He wins in the fable, right? Come on, Stelle. Lighten up.”

  She growls. Costa growls right back at her, then hands her a T-shirt. He turns to go, then turns back again. “Practice tonight. Be there.”

  She’s there, breathless and kind of hyper. She straps on her Rick. Starts chording something.

  Val rolls his eyes. “Nice to see you and all, but we don’t have time to learn something new.”

  “We don’t have time not to,” she says. Meanwhile, Ahmed is following the chords and starting to riff. Then he abandons the keyboard and picks up his Strat. He never thinks of himself as a guitarist, but for some songs keyboards just don’t cut it. Estelle nods, encouraged.

  “We’ve got exactly four more practices before Crying Out Loud,” says Val, raising his voice over the music. “There’s an agent coming, guys. Club dudes. We’ve gotta sound like we know what we’re doing.” But Ahmed’s already calling out the changes and Costa is thumping on his Fender. Val accepts defeat ungraciously, which is great because he pounds out his frustration on the drums.

  Estelle sings and Costa throws in a raw-edged harmony. Then Ahmed stops them and suggests a guitar setting. Total grunge. Robot Killer grunge.

  The big day arrives. The weather holds. There are goodly crowds in party mode even for the early acts. Robot Killers set up and look out over the crowd. Val’s got that shifty look on his face.

  “What?” says Estelle, worried.

  “You’ll see,” he says and drowns out her next words by counting in the reggae beat of the first tune, “Banker Pod Man”, a little ditty about alien spawn taking over the international banking scene.

  And on it goes. The band rocking, the crowd growing in numbers, dancers in colourful rags under blazing blue skies while sunburns blossom on an acre of exposed skin. Estelle is in her element, playing her heart out, eating the mic, sending out all those words that were so hard to find and which these wonderful boys of hers – whatever they’re called – help to shape into missiles of sound. These words are missiles filled with impressions of a world she doesn’t get so well but passionately believes in and wants to understand – demands to understand – and is willing to work at. This is why she does it, she thinks, and she turns to Val, whose grin reflects her own, but with something else. A glint in his eye. What?

  Way too soon their set is almost up: time for one last song. The new one. The one that proclaims the words on their T-shirts. Says it loud and proud.

  Val strikes his drumsticks together to catch the pulse of it, but then it’s all Estelle, pounding out the grunge on her trusty Rick, a petite giant killer channelling Neil Young through Foo Fighters through some seismic event in the Pacific, where the new mountains force their way up from the sea to be taken notice of.

  Plate tectonics. Reshaping the world.

  Now Ahmed appears out of his nest of keyboards with his Strat stuck on and he’s playing the riff with her. And Costa steps up to the front to give it some bottom end and, finally, Val brings in the heavy machinery. It’s like he’s pounding the skins with baseball bats. The crowd goes ballistic.

  Robot Killers

  Kill it.

  Kill the cancer.

  Cos a killer robot don’t

  Take no for an answer.

  Kill it.

  Don’t let it grow.

  Cos the fool thing cannot tell

  If you’re friend or foe.

  Kill it,

  before it starts to kill.

  You gotta sign a petition

  And make your politicians

  put their names on a bill.

  Cos it don’t matter

  If it’s day or night,

  When a killer robot’s

  Got you in its sights.

  It’s a bot on a mission,

  Lookin’ for a fight.

  And it don’t know squat

  ’Bout human rights.

  And so it goes, with the audience jolting and jiving and joining in on the chorus:

  Find, fix, track, engage – attack!

  Find, fix, track, engage – attack!

  Which is when the robots come.

  First one, then another, then two more near the back of the bopping, weaving crowd. Then more, half a dozen, a dozen. Little silver bots with clumsy hands and big cute eyes, rolling into the arena so that for one horrible, electrifying moment Estelle thinks it’s here: World War R.

  So she sings harder as if it’s the last thing she might ever do and rock and roll is the only thing left.

  Except…

  People are laughing. They’re dancing their hearts out and punching the air with their fists and singing along and digging it! And laughing. Laughing at the cute robots and… What is this?

  They’re taking pamphlets from the robots’ mouths, patting them on their cute shiny heads. And now, instead of seeing what has been thrown up into her vision by her darkest fears, she sees what’s in front of her eyes. The robots are wearing Robot Killer T-shirts. They’re aluminium activists. Some fan girl in a yellow bikini top and faded blue jeans that match her hair comes up to the stage, waving pamphlets at Estelle. She’s yelling something and Estelle falls to her knees at the edge of the stage to hear her.

  “Your words!” Blue-hair shouts, her face an enormous sun-filled smile. That’s what the robots have come to deliver, with their appealing metal faces and their tech allure.

  Estelle turns to Val, who’s laughing his head off, clobbering the drums like an out-of-control heart. “We are Killer Robot Killers!” he shouts at her and the words are caught up in his mic and echo out over the music and the crowd. “Killer Robot Killers unite!

  “I’m so glad to be a part of this important collection and to raise my voice along with Estelle Seymour’s against killer robots. It seems that the further we remove ourselves, physically, from the grieved acts of warfare, the easier it is to turn our backs on the suffering. As a rock ’n’ roll singer, I know how loud a song can be when the amp is cranked up high. But drowning out the noisy business of killing people isn’t the point; one has to hope that songs and stories of protest find their way into the ears of those who can stop the violence.” Tim Wynne-Jones

  SPEAKING OUT FOR FREEDOM

  Chelsea Manning

  Chelsea Manning grew up in a conservative community in the Midwest of the USA. As a teenager, then known as Bradley, she moved with her UK-born mother to Wales. She joined the US Army in 2007. She realized she was transgender – outwardly male but inwardly feeling she was female – but felt she had to hide this identity in the military. In 2009 she was sent to serve in Iraq, where the US Army was in the sixth year of war against insurgents after the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein. As an intelligence analyst, Chelsea gained a shocking insight into the secret reality of the way the Iraq War was being fought. In 2010 she exposed what she had learned to the world. She is now serving a 35-year prison sentence but believes strongly that she acted for her country and her duty to others – and was true to the spirit of the American tradition o
f freedom.

  Chelsea E. Manning 89289

  1300 North Warehouse Road

  Leavenworth, Kansas

  Statement through Amnesty International

  for Public Release

  Subject: Interview for Amnesty International

  Why did you become a soldier?

  I enlisted as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army in summer 2007. At the time I had a job as a barista at Starbucks and was struggling with my gender identity. Each night I came home to news reports on the television of more soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq during the troop “surge”. I felt a strong sense of duty to people, and felt that maybe I could help out my country. I also thought that if I went into a war zone I might not have to deal with my feelings of wanting to be female any more.

  Were you proud to be a soldier?

  Absolutely! I was proud then, and I still am today. I am very proud to have served with my comrades to my left and right. I am also very proud to have sometimes succeeded in protecting the people of Iraq.

  That’s what I think instils pride in most soldiers – the sense of duty and commitment to those around us.

  What led you to the job that gave you access to all this information?

  I was highly skilled at collecting and sorting through pages and pages of raw information and breaking it down into something that could be more easily understood. I have always worked a lot with computers, even when I was much younger. The military recognized that potential and placed me in a job where I had access to a lot of information going back several years.

  I went to college to learn to be an analyst, and they taught me some of the tools and methods that can be used to sort through all this information. But I think you need to have a natural talent to be able to do this kind of job successfully.

  I also had to get a government security clearance. This required a lot of paperwork, and I had to submit to a thorough background investigation. The government even sent investigators to interview my family and friends.

  Did you gradually realize the implications of what you were reading, or did you realize it all at once?

  It was a very gradual process. All this information seemed overwhelming at first. It didn’t make sense to me because I hadn’t put all the pieces together in my mind yet. But as I got used to it and became more familiar with how it worked, it slowly made more and more sense. The moment I realized that the information in these documents was attached to real people, from real places in the real world, was a powerful moment – and emotionally quite overwhelming.

  For example, while in Iraq I came to figure out the details of a national crackdown on people who disagreed with the Iraqi prime minister at the time. The government sent police to arrest, torture and even kill people who were merely expressing a different opinion.

  Describe how you felt as you came to decide what you had to do.

  I felt afraid. I felt completely overwhelmed. It was a lot for me to try and figure out. It was a very lonely place to be. There was a lot at stake, for me personally and for everyone around me. When it comes to hard situations, sometimes there isn’t anyone there to tell you the right or wrong answer. You might not have a lot of time to make a decision. In situations like this you have to follow your instinct. I felt I had to make a decision within a couple of months. It’s a very humbling feeling – I felt very small and powerless for a lot of this time. But I still had a decision to make, and I wondered how I might feel ten or twenty years from that time if I didn’t do anything. I made my decisions based on that feeling.

  What did you hope would be the outcome of making this information public?

  I was hoping there could be a more informed public debate on America’s foreign policy. The public in America did not understand what was actually happening in the world around it, and without information they couldn’t contribute to how its government and military were operating.

  I was hoping that such a debate could lead to reforms on government secrecy, and on the conduct of the American government abroad. But mostly I was hoping to promote more of an understanding about the kind of wars we were having in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars between militaries and insurgencies are very, very messy. A lot of innocent people get detained, threatened, displaced or killed – by both sides. The portrayal of this kind of war in America was becoming glorified and heroic – which was very, very far from the reality.

  Why do governments keep information secret? Why is the fact that they do so regarded as an even more dangerous secret?

  Governments are supposed to keep information secret to protect people – most often their citizens. But often governments use secrecy as a means of protecting themselves. Using government secrecy policies to cover anything and everything is a common habit for governments, and it is important for the public to counter and combat this whenever they can. I believe it’s the job of normal citizens to stay vigilant, because governments often hide things – and won’t come clean unless they believe it benefits them.

  Tell us how the words of former US president James Madison resonate with your experiences.

  When I was a teenager, I read The Federalist Papers. James Madison wrote most of these articles, back in the late 1700s when the USA was just starting out as a nation. He talked a lot about checks and balances in government and outside of it. He talked about the separation of powers between the courts, the lawmakers and the policy-makers, as well as the role of the public and of the press. I thought about this a lot while I was in Iraq. I saw the failure of their government to provide for their citizens and it reminded me a lot of James Madison’s powerful logic. The level of secrecy by the military and the government in America also became clear to me. Madison talked about how the accumulation of these powers – legislative, executive and judiciary – in the same hands or in the hands of a few can be dangerous for society. My experience of government has been of this danger becoming a reality.

  You are one person, and the military and the government are so powerful. Through all this, have you ever felt afraid?

  I am always afraid. I am still afraid of the power of government. A government can arrest you. It can imprison you. It can put out information about you that won’t get questioned by the public – everyone will just assume that what they are saying is true. Sometimes, a government can even kill you – with or without the benefit of a trial.

  Governments have so much power, and a single person often does not. It is very terrifying to face the government alone.

  Can you describe a moment when you have particularly felt this way?

  It’s a very difficult feeling to describe. Not long after I was first detained by the military, I was taken to a prison camp in Kuwait, where I essentially lived in a cage inside of a tent. I didn’t have any access to the outside world. I couldn’t make phone calls. I didn’t get any mail. I had very limited access to my lawyers. There was no television or radio or newspapers. I lost the sense of where in the world I was. The military had total control over every aspect of my life. They controlled what information I had access to. They controlled when I ate and slept. They even controlled when I went to the bathroom. After several weeks, I didn’t know how long I had been there or how much longer I was going to be staying. It’s an overwhelmingly terrifying feeling. I became very, very sad. At one point, I even gave up on trying to live any more.

  Do you hope good will still come from your actions? What might this look like?

  This is a very difficult question to answer. I don’t know. I don’t even want to try and work it out. I am hopeful that people can gain more of an understanding of how the world operates. Across the world, governments can easily become centred on themselves and their interests, at the expense of their people.

  I am also hopeful that, perhaps, the next time a demo-cratic government thinks about committing military forces to the occupation of a country which is likely to lead to an insurgency, we can try and look back, and learn from the last time. War is a terrible thing, an
d this type of warfare is one of the worst. I hope that we can avoid getting excited about this kind of thing in the future.

  You had some bad times in detention, particularly before your case went to trial. What is it like for you in prison now?

  I try to stay as active and productive as possible. I don’t have access to the internet, but I read books and newspapers a lot. I work hard at the job that I have in prison – work with wood. I am also always trying to learn more, working on my education. I also exercise a lot. I run all the time! I do cardio exercises to stay in shape. I write a lot, too.

  What helps you to stay positive in prison?

  I love reading the mail that I get from all over the world. I love talking on the phone with people I care about. I always feel so much better when people send me their warm love and strong words of support. I love staying active and engaged with the world. It is an amazing feeling!

  Thank you so very much for taking the time to interview me. I appreciate you offering to hear my answers.

  Why This Book Is Important

  Amnesty International is the world’s largest human rights organization, and together with eight million supporters worldwide, we stand up for human rights, believing that everyone has the power to change the world for the better. We seek to protect people wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied. Human rights belong to all of us, no matter who we are or where we live.

  This book is inspired by the fact that human rights can be denied or abused even in countries like the UK or the USA, and we need to defend them constantly. Stories and poetry are a wonderful way of making us think, helping us understand the world and other people. More than that, they can inspire our empathy – which we need if we’re to overcome prejudice.