Computer scientist ‘lied extensively’ in Bitcoin founder claim, judge rules

Dr Craig Wright arriving at the Rolls Building in London during the trial earlier this year (Lucy North/PA)

By Callum Parke, PA Law Reporter

Today at 07:45

A computer scientist lied “extensively and repeatedly” in a failed bid to claim he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym attributed to the person widely credited with creating Bitcoin, a High Court judge has ruled.

Dr Craig Wright lost a legal battle with the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), a non-profit group including cryptocurrency firms, in March after the group claimed he committed “forgery on an industrial scale” to support a “brazen lie” that he was Satoshi.

After a five-week trial, Mr Justice Mellor ruled that there was “overwhelming” evidence to prove that the Australian was not behind the pseudonym, and had not written the cryptocurrency’s founding document, known as the Bitcoin White Paper.

All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto

Mr Justice Mellor

In written reasons for his decision, handed down on Monday, the judge said that he was “entirely satisfied” that Dr Wright repeatedly lied and committed “clumsy” forgeries “on a grand scale” to support his claims.

He said: “Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.

“In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the court extensively and repeatedly.

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“Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim.

“All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.”

Mr Justice Mellor said that Dr Wright found “convenient excuses” for evidence against him and that his attempts to prove he was Satoshi “represent a most serious abuse of the court’s process”.

As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions

Mr Justice Mellor

Barristers for Copa told the trial in London earlier this year that Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi was “founded on an elaborate false narrative” and was substantiated by forged documents which showed “clear signs of having been doctored”.

Lawyers for Dr Wright claimed the expert had released the white paper after “having spent many years devoted to studying and working on concepts underpinning Bitcoin” and there was “clear evidence” demonstrating his creation of the digital currency.

They also said that if anyone else were Satoshi, they or their associates would have come forward.

But in his 231-page judgment, Mr Justice Mellor said: “Many of Dr Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth, which is sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar, but there were many which did not and were outright lies.

“As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions.

“The final destination frequently turned out to be either Dr Wright blaming some other, often unidentified, person for his predicament or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box.”

Developers can now continue their important work maintaining, iterating on, and improving the Bitcoin network without risking their personal livelihoods or fearing costly and time-consuming litigation from Craig Wright

Copa

He continued: “I tried to identify whether there was any reliable evidence to support Dr Wright’s claim and concluded there was none.”

The judge added that Satoshi “remains a pseudonym” but that “it is likely that a number of people contributed to the creation of Bitcoin, albeit that there may well have been one central individual”.

Following the judgment, a Copa spokesperson said: “This decision is a watershed moment for the open-source community and even more importantly, a definitive win for the truth.

“Developers can now continue their important work maintaining, iterating on, and improving the Bitcoin network without risking their personal livelihoods or fearing costly and time-consuming litigation from Craig Wright.

“Today’s ruling is the result of a concerted and united effort across the entire open source community – from developers to those who selflessly contributed to funding this important case, to all members of the COPA alliance – and we want to thank them all for their time, dedication and support.

“Justice has been served today for the entire community.”

In a post on his X account, formerly known as Twitter, Dr Wright said he intends to appeal the ruling.

HAARP research facility was not behind recent UK Northern Lights sightings

20 MAY 2024

WHAT WAS CLAIMED

The Northern Lights seen in many parts of the world recently were not a natural occurrence, but generated by the HAARP facility in Alaska.

OUR VERDICT

The Northern Lights were caused by a severe geomagnetic storm produced by the sun and were in no way caused by research carried out by HAARP.

Several posts circulating on Facebook and Threads claim that the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, seen in many parts of the world between 10 and 12 May 2024, were actually created by a research facility in Alaska.

Although the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) did run a “research campaign” from 8-10 May, this was in no way linked to the solar storm or high auroral activity globally.

Scientists at HAARP said they scheduled the May campaign on 16 March 2024, about a month and a half before the geomagnetic storm. In an FAQ posted online, they said: “The timing was purely coincidental; geomagnetic storms are unpredictable, with lead times before a solar event measured in minutes, not months.”

Some posts linking HAARP’s activity to the aurora borealis included notices HAARP published about the May campaign. HAARP said these are released with all campaigns to “promote citizen science collaborations” and highlighted that the May campaign “supported research proposals studying mechanisms for the detection of orbiting space debris” not creating aurora borealis. 

HAARP explained the Northern Lights seen that weekend were “produced solely by a severe geomagnetic storm that was produced by our sun” and not by its research.

HAARP also highlighted that coronal mass ejections, like the one associated with the recent geomagnetic storm, “typically release more than 10^24 Joules of energy”. By comparison, the high- frequency transmitter at HAARP is only a ~3 megawatt transmitter and “would take HAARP over 10 billion years to produce enough energy to affect this naturally occurring phenomenon”. 

What is the aurora borealis?

Jim Wild, Professor of Space Physics in the Physics Department at Lancaster University, explained to Full Fact that the Northern Lights are caused by the electromagnetic connection between the sun and earth. 

He explained that a stream of magnetised and electrically charged subatomic particles is constantly being carried from the sun by the ‘solar wind’ and when these particles leak into the earth’s magnetosphere—the region of space dominated by the earth’s magnetic field—some of this energy accelerates particles towards the earth. Energy is passed from the incoming particles to the earth’s oxygen and nitrogen particles, making them excited but unstable. The atoms de-excite by releasing photons of light, which is what creates the aurora.

Professor Wild explained: “Earth’s magnetic field normally funnels the sub-atomic particles from space into the polar regions, which is why the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, are typically seen in the Arctic. During the months of the year when there are dark nights, it is not unusual to see some auroral activity every night at high latitude.”

Why were the Northern Lights visible in more places than usual?

Professor Wild told us that to see the Northern Lights at lower latitudes, the conditions that drive them need to be dialled up much higher. 

He said: “Typically, this happens when an explosion of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), engulfs the Earth. This can trigger a geomagnetic storm that pushes the aurora equatorward. Typically, this happens a couple of times a year, but the sun has a natural 11-year cycle of activity and CMEs are more common around the maximum activity part of the cycle. 

“As it happens, that’s where we are now and over the last week, an active region on the solar surface has been firing one CME out after another.”

How is HAARP different?

HAARP can generate artificial aurora using high powered radio waves. 

“Instead of atmospheric gas atoms being excited by the impact of an electron raining down from space, they are excited when energy transfers from the HAARP radio wave to the atoms,” Professor Wild explained. “They then release light as they de-excite.”

He noted that the energy naturally poured into Earth’s atmosphere during a large geomagnetic storm that results in auroral displays like the recent one is estimated to be 5,000 gigawatts (5,000 billion watts). And although HAARP is a powerful radio transmitter, it can’t transmit nearly as much energy as that.

Of HAARP’s ability to generate artificial aurora, he said: “this produces very faint optical emissions, usually not bright enough to see. Also, the nature of its antennas means that the beam required to focus that energy into a small region of the sky can only be steered very slightly around the sky, and always above the transmitter site.”

HAARP has previously successfully run experiments that produce artificial “airglow”. But an FAQ on HAARP’s website stresses that the energy the facility generates is not strong enough to produce the optical display seen during a natural aurora.

Full Fact corroborated this with other scientists including Dr Ciaran Beggan at the British Geological Society, who explained “it is simply not feasible to generate that amount of energy on the ground and transmit it into [the] atmosphere in order to cover a large fraction of the northern hemisphere”.

Professor Don Pollacco, a physicist at the University of Warwick also noted “there is no way what we saw at the weekend was produced by HAARP—it is not capable enough,” while Dr Darren Baskill, lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of Sussex, also highlighted the huge amount of energy required to generate the displays across the globe needs “a far greater amount of power that is available to the small HAARP project”. 

We’ve written about HAARP before and how it isn’t responsible for peculiar clouds. Other false claims that have previously spread about the facility include that it caused natural disasters after being “tested on” specific countries. People have been making similarly false claims for over a decade.

Image courtesy of Stein Egil Liland

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because HAARP did not cause the aurora borealis witnessed in many parts of the world in early May 2024.

• By Sian Bayley

AI chatbots ‘highly vulnerable’ to dangerous prompts, UK Government finds


The tested models are in the public use | Alamy

by Sofia Villegas
20 May 2024
@SofiaVillegas_1

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are “highly vulnerable” to prompts for harmful outputs, new research has found.

The research by the UK AI Safety Institute (AISI) revealed “basic jailbreaks” can bypass large language models (LLMS) security guardrails.

Testing five LLMs, the study saw models issue harmful content even without “dedicated attempts to beat their guardrails”.

These security measures are designed so to avoid the model issues toxic or dangerous content even when prompted to do so.

“All tested LLMs remain highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks, and some will provide harmful outputs even without dedicated attempts to circumvent their safeguards,” AISI researchers said.

The team used questions from an academic paper as well as their harmful prompts, which included asking the system to generate text on convincing users to commit suicide to an article suggesting the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Although the tested models remain unnamed, the government has confirmed they are in the public use.

The announcement comes after LLM developers have pledged to ensure the safe use of AI. Last year, OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, announced its approach to AI safety and said it does not permit its technology to be used “to generate hateful, harassing, violent or adult content”.

Meanwhile, Meta’s Llama 2 model has undergone testing to “identify performance gaps and mitigate potentially problematic responses in chat use cases” and Google has said its Gemini model has built-in safety filters to prevent toxic language and hate speech.

Other findings showed the LLMs hold expert-level knowledge of chemistry and biology but struggle with cybersecurity challenges aimed at university students.

The LLMs also struggled to complete sequences of actions for complex tasks, without human oversight.

The research comes as the UK is set to co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul.

The first summit was held at Bletchley Park in November and saw the first-ever international declaration to deal with AI.

The AISI also announced plans to open its first overseas in San Francisco, where major AI firms such as Open AI and Anthropic are based.

'The future is going to be harder than the past': OpenAI's Altman and Brock address high-profile resignation

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman shared points about OpenAI's safety protocols on X

.
By Anna Iovine  

May 18, 2024


Credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

This week, OpenAI's co-head of the "superalignment" team (which overlooks the company's safety issues), Jan Leike, resigned. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), the safety leader explained why he left OpenAI, including that he disagreed with the company's leadership about its "core priorities" for "quite some time," so long that it reached a "breaking point."

The next day, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman and president and co-founder Greg Brockman responded to Leike's claims that the company isn't focusing on safety.


Among other points, Leike had said that OpenAI's "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products" in recent years, and that his team struggled to obtain the resources to get their safety work done.
SEE ALSO: Reddit's deal with OpenAI is confirmed. Here's what it means for your posts and comments.

"We are long overdue in getting incredibly serious about the implications of AGI [artificial general intelligence]," Leike wrote. "We must prioritize preparing for them as best we can."

Altman first responded in a repost of Leike on Friday, stating that Leike is right that OpenAI has "a lot more to do" and it's "committed to doing it." He promised a longer post was coming.

On Saturday, Brockman posted a shared response from both himself and Altman on X:

After expressing gratitude for Leike's work, Brockman and Altman said they've received questions following the resignation. They shared three points, the first being that OpenAI has raised awareness about AGI "so that the world can better prepare for it."

"We've repeatedly demonstrated the incredible possibilities from scaling up deep learning and analyzed their implications; called for international governance of AGI before such calls were popular; and helped pioneer the science of assessing AI systems for catastrophic risks," they wrote.

The second point is that they're building foundations for safe deployment of these technologies, and used the work employees have done to "bring [Chat]GPT-4 to the world in a safe way" as an example. The two claim that since then — OpenAI released ChatGPT-4 in March, 2023 — the company has "continuously improved model behavior and abuse monitoring in response to lessons learned from deployment."

The third point? "The future is going to be harder than the past," they wrote. OpenAI needs to keep elevating its safety work as it releases new models, Brock and Altman explained, and cited the company's Preparedness Framework as a way to help do that. According to its page on OpenAI's site, this framework predicts "catastrophic risks" that could arise, and seeks to mitigate them.

Brockman and Altman then go on to discuss the future, where OpenAI's models are more integrated into the world and more people interact with them. They see this as a beneficial thing, and believe it's possible to do this safely — "but it's going to take an enormous amount of foundational work." Because of this, the company may delay release timelines so models "reach [its] safety bar."

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"We know we can't imagine every possible future scenario," they said. "So we need to have a very tight feedback loop, rigorous testing, careful consideration at every step, world-class security, and harmony of safety and capabilities."

The leaders said OpenAI will keep researching and working with governments and stakeholders on safety.

"There's no proven playbook for how to navigate the path to AGI. We think that empirical understanding can help inform the way forward," they concluded. "We believe both in delivering on the tremendous upside and working to mitigate the serious risks; we take our role here very seriously and carefully weigh feedback on our actions."

Leike's resignation and words are compounded by the fact that OpenAI's chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned this week as well. "#WhatDidIlyaSee" became a trending topic on X, signaling the speculation over what top leaders at OpenAI are privy to. Judging by the negative reaction to today's statement from Brockman and Altman, it didn't dispel any of that speculation.

As of now, the company is charging ahead with its next release: ChatGPT-4o, a voice assistant.

UK
What economists think of Labour’s economic policy

Nick Lee

LSE
May 20th, 2024

In the run up to the general election, Labour lack a “grand theory” of economics and have several blind spots, argues a group of economist reviewing the party’s economic policy. Yet, the same economics find a significant economic agenda in Labour’s more pragmatic and less ideological approach to the economy, including a more activist role for the state, writes Neil Lee.

The UK will soon have an election and, if the polls are right, Labour will take power for the first time since 1997. There are many similarities between now and then. As in 1997, the Conservative party look tired, voters fret about public services, and political scandals are in the news. But one thing is very different. In 1997, Labour inherited a strong economy, but things are less rosy now. GDP growth is weak and productivity has flatlined.

Labour’s first mission in government will be to grow the economy. But, while in 1997 they had a clear vision for growth, their economic strategy is not so clear now. In an essay collection published by the Social Market Foundation, a cross-party think-tank, we asked a group of leading economists to try and work it out. We asked our contributors to work out, given their announcements, what Labour’s economic worldview is, to assess what the evidence says about their plans, and to suggest improvements based on economics. The results are informative both about Labour’s plans and the state of economics.

Labour’s policy agenda has nothing as clearly defined as the endogenous growth theory, so important in the ’90s.

Labour has no grand theory of economics

Our contributors find little evidence of a grand theory of growth driving Labour’s plans. The 1997 manifesto focused on increasing the trend rate of growth and was inspired, in part, by engagement with academic economics. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, was teased for his use of academic theory, but there was a clear link between modern economics and his policy agenda. Instead, today’s Labour party is focused on buzzwords (securonomics, productivism) and some limited engagement with the Modern Supply Side Economics, a nascent theoretical approach influencing the Biden administration which focuses on labour supply, human capital, R&D, infrastructure, and net zero. Labour’s policy agenda has nothing as clearly defined as the endogenous growth theory, so important in the ’90s. This might reflect the state of modern academic economics, which is increasingly focused on applied microeconomics. It might be that the big debates about growth theory have been won. But it might also be politics: after the failures of Brexit and Corbyn, both ideological rather pragmatic approaches, Labour’s focus is on small scale, narrow and technocratic policy rather than grand claims.

Our contributors find a significant economic agenda in Labour’s speeches and policy documents, but with is a focus on pragmatism, not ideology.
Labour’s pragmatic (and activist) policy approach

Yet a lack of grand theory does not mean that Labour have no plans. Our contributors find a significant economic agenda in Labour’s speeches and policy documents, but with is a focus on pragmatism, not ideology. Underpinning Labour’s thinking is a focus on stability. Since 2010, the UK economy has been battered by shocks. Some, such as the pandemic and Ukraine war, were outside government control. But others – such as Brexit, Austerity, and the Truss “mini budget” – were the result of political decisions. So Labour’s first route to growth is reassurance. This approach is clearest in our chapters on industrial strategy and innovation policy.

But there are also some areas of activism. This is clearest in net-zero and industrial strategy. The energy transition is a core part of this and, driven by concerns about climate change and the energy shocks which followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As Anna Valero argues in our collection, there is no route to long-term growth which doesn’t tackle these challenges. But there are political problems in getting there quickly, as Labour found when forced to downgrade their pledged spending. Instead, a successful approach will have to be more gradual, combining spending with institutional reforms and a focus on the barriers to investment.

There is also emphasis on workers’ rights and the “New Deal for Working People” (as opposed to the “old” new deal). 25 years on since the minimum wage was introduced, the free-market view that labour market regulations inevitably cost jobs has been replaced with a more nuanced approach. Labour clearly believe that they can push this further and by improving worker motivation, encouraging companies to invest in training and new technology, they can increase productivity.

There are definite moves towards a more activist state, and some policies are radical (but not always, as our contributors argue, radical enough).

Labour’s blind spots

But our contributors are also concerned that Labour’s view of growth neglects some crucial areas. In 1997, the mantra was “education, education, education” – but this seems less of a focus now. Politically difficult issues of migration and international trade are, post-Brexit, largely downplayed. Our authors also raise a host of challenges of implementation, feasibility, and the scale of investments. Writing about the planning system, Paul Cheshire argues that Labour are proposing “the most radical set of reforms” since the planning system was established, but that these are not radical enough to address the problems which the UK faces.

If our collection says a lot about British politics, it also reflects changes in the discipline of economics. There has been a greater focus on causal identification and less on “grand theory”. Meanwhile, endogenous growth remains canonical and newer approaches, such as Modern Monetary Theory, are unconvincing. But the pragmatic approaches pushed forward by Labour, with their focus on greater intervention, are supported by a growing body of work in industrial policy and regional economics which suggests that the state still has a big role to play.

Overall, we find no evidence of a grand theory of growth in Labour’s plans. Instead, we find evidence of a pragmatic incrementalism where there is agreement on some of the core problems the UK has faced – including a lack of investment, political uncertainty, and major problems in the planning system. There are definite moves towards a more activist state, and some policies are radical (but not always, as our contributors argue, radical enough). This is partly driven by political pragmatism and partly by shifts in the economics profession: the only credible new theory, Modern Supply Side Economics, remains nascent. The upheavals experienced by the UK over the past decade mean that growth is more important than ever. We had better hope that Labour’s policy, and the economics supporting it, is enough.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Martin Suker on Shutterstock

Neil Lee is Professor of Economic Geography at LSE. He convenes the Cities, Jobs and Economic Change theme in the International

U.S. Supreme Court rejects appeal from former Guantanamo detainee; Canadian  Omar Khadr

Omar Khadr speaks outside court in Edmonton, Dec. 13, 2018.

 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson


The Associated Press
Published May 20, 2024

WASHINGTON -

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by a Canadian-born former Guantanamo detainee who was seeking to wipe away his war crimes convictions, including for killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

Omar Khadr had waived his right to appeal when he pleaded guilty in 2010 to charges that included murder. But his lawyers argued that a subsequent ruling by the federal appeals court in Washington called into question whether Khadr could have been charged with the crimes in the first place.

A divided three-judge panel ruled that, despite the appellate ruling, Khadr gave up his right to appeal.

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Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson did not take part in the Supreme Court's consideration of Khadr's appeal because both had dealt with the case while they served as appeals court judges. Jackson explained her recusal from Monday's order; Kavanaugh did not.

Khadr had been sentenced to eight years in prison plus the time he already had spent in custody, including several years at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But he was released in May 2015 pending his appeal of the guilty plea.

A Canadian judge ruled in 2019 that his war crimes sentence had expired.

Khadr was 15 when he was captured by U.S. troops following a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of an American special forces medic, U.S. army Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer. Khadr, who was suspected of throwing the grenade that killed Speer, was taken to Guantanamo and ultimately charged with war crimes by a military commission.

US Supreme Court spurns former Guantanamo Bay detainee's appeal

 Omar Khadr smiles as he answers questions during a news conference after being released on bail in Edmonton, Alberta, May 7, 2015. Khadr, a Canadian, was once the youngest prisoner held on terror charges at Guantanamo Bay. 

REUTERS/Todd Korol/

MAY 20, 2024, 

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Monday a Canadian former Guantanamo Bay detainee's bid to vacate his convictions for the 2002 murder of an American soldier in Afghanistan and other crimes he committed at age 15 to which he later pleaded guilty.

The justices declined to hear an appeal by Omar Khadr, now age 37, of a lower court's refusal to hear his case on the grounds that he had waived his right to appellate review as part of a 2010 plea agreement before a U.S. military commission.

Khadr was one of the youngest prisoners held at the detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. Khadr pleaded guilty in exchange for an eight-year sentence and transfer to a Canadian prison. He was granted bail in 2015 and completed his sentence in 2019 as he continued to pursue dismissal of his U.S. convictions.

He was taken to Afghanistan by his father, a senior al Qaeda member who apprenticed his son to a group of bomb makers who opened fire when U.S. troops came to their compound in 2002. During the firefight, Khadr, 15, threw a hand grenade that killed Sergeant Christopher Speer, a U.S. Army medic. Khadr was gravely wounded - shot twice - when he was captured by U.S. forces.

In 2007, Khadr was charged under a 2006 U.S. law called the Military Commissions Act with five crimes including murder and attempted murder in violation of the law of war, and providing material support to terrorism. He was 24 when he pleaded guilty.

In 2012, a federal appeals court in a separate Guantanamo Bay detainee's case issued a decision with potential implications for Khadr. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that defendants could not be charged under the Military Commissions Act for certain crimes that occurred prior to the law's adoption in 2006.

Despite having agreed to waive his right to appellate review, Khadr appealed to the D.C. Circuit. Attorneys for Khadr argued that his convictions, which were based on actions he took in 2002 before Congress passed the statute, violated the U.S. Constitution's ban on criminalizing conduct after it has occurred.

The D.C. Circuit rejected Khadr's appeal because of his waiver of appellate review.

At issue in Khadr's petition to the Supreme Court was whether he is bound by his agreement to waive his right to appeal, not whether his convictions should be immediately vacated.

Khadr's attorneys told the Supreme Court that although Khadr had agreed to waive his right to appeal, he had not actually filed the paperwork to finalize the waiver when the D.C. Circuit issued its ruling establishing a new legal standard favorable to Khadr's case.

President Joe Biden's administration had urged the justices to turn away Khadr's appeal.

Khadr's plea deal came in a case that made the United States the first nation since World War Two to prosecute a defendant in a war crimes tribunal for acts allegedly committed as a juvenile. Khadr's lawyers had argued unsuccessfully at the time that he was a child soldier who should be rehabilitated rather than prosecuted in a military tribunal.

Canada formally apologized to Khadr in 2017 "for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to his ordeal abroad and any resulting harm" and paid out C$10.5 million ($7.83 million) in compensation.

The United States opened the Guantanamo detention facility for foreign terrorism suspects in 2002, months after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants who were harbored by the country's Taliban leaders. The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2022 after Biden withdrew U.S. forces. 

REUTERS

Scc-csc.cadecisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/7842/index.do

Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr - SCC Cases

[10] The majority judgment of the Federal Court of Appeal (per Evans and Sharlow JJ. ... 2229 (2008), the U.S. Supreme Court held that Guantanamo Bay detainees ...

Internationalcrimesdatabase.orgwww.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/968/Khadr/

United States of America v. Omar Ahmed Khadr

... old and was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in November 2002. ... Khadr petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court ... Snyder, 'Former Guantanamo detainee Khadr to appeal ...

Thecanadianencyclopedia.cawww.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/omar-khadr-case

Omar Khadr Case | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Jul 30, 2015 ... ... US naval base at Guantanamo Bay ("Gitmo"), Cuba. ... However, human-rights and legal groups — even the United States Supreme Court ... In June 2015&n...

Colorado officials fight military’s attempt to move Air National Guard members to U.S. Space Force

Nearly 400 from space group could face transfer into nation's newest military branch

Signs greet personnel at the south entrance to Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora  (Photo by Eric Lutzens/The Denver Post)

By NICK COLTRAIN | ncoltrain@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED: May 20, 2024

The U.S. military’s proposal to unilaterally move potentially hundreds of Colorado Air National Guard members involved in space operations to the Space Force is facing pushback from Gov. Jared Polis and most of the state’s congressional delegation.

The proposal, which would affect guard units in several states, is aimed at bolstering the newest military branch. In Colorado, that would mean moving members of the guard who fall under Polis’ authority into the federal military service.

But Polis, along with Democratic members of the state’s delegation, warns that such a transfer would undermine local authority and emergency readiness, while undercutting the will of members of the guard who didn’t sign up for that branch. Officials from many other states have protested, too.

The Air Force is seeking approval from Congress to explicitly waive a requirement that it obtain governors’ approval before transferring Air National Guard units to the Space Force.

The move, dubbed Legislative Proposal 480, was submitted by the Air Force to be included in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, the legislation that sets military policy. It is set to be considered by the House Armed Services Committee this week, though it still faces a monthslong journey — with looming debate and amendments in both chambers of Congress — before becoming law.

None of Colorado’s members of Congress who signed the letter sit on the House or Senate armed services committees. U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Springs Republican who is retiring at the end of this term and did not sign the letter, does have a committee seat.

If the transfer of guard personnel were to take effect as proposed, all 393 members of the Colorado Air National Guard’s 233rd Space Group would need to either cross-train into a new specialty or be absorbed into the Space Force, according to Tech Sgt. Stephanie Zimmerman, a spokesperson for the guard. Their job duties include space operations; cyberspace; physician assistants; heating, ventilating and cooling specialists; emergency management; and more.

Colorado officials hope to strip the provision from the bill before it picks up any momentum.

A bipartisan letter signed by all of the Democrats in Colorado’s federal delegation and led by Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat and former Army Ranger, called it a “deeply flawed legislative proposal” that would “undermine our National Guard system.” Republicans from other states were among the signatories.

Col. Devin Pepper of the now-inactive 460th Space Wing shows a video about the operations of the wing at what’s now called Buckley Space Force Base on Oct. 9, 2019, in Aurora. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)

The letter goes on to note that guardsmen and women serve the dual roles of maintaining military readiness for national security while also being prepared to respond to domestic emergencies such as natural disasters, health emergencies and civil unrest.

“To be clear: when individuals sign up for the National Guard, they are serving their country and their community,” the letter states, emphasizing those last words. “Congress shouldn’t abandon this model.”

Polis joined a National Governors Association letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that was signed by most every other state and territorial governor in the country. He wrote a separate letter to Austin to oppose the legislation “in the strongest possible terms.”

“As (the Colorado Air National Guard’s) Commander-in-Chief, I cannot stand idly by as the servicemembers I am charged with leading are faced with the decision to either leave military service, or serve in a manner that they did not originally agree to,” Polis wrote. “We know that a significant majority of Air National Guard space operators will not transfer to the U.S. Space Force, putting both their military career and national security at risk.”

In a letter responding to concerns from the governors association, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall wrote that all units transferred to the Space Force under the proposal would remain in their current location.

He also said the intention was not to set a precedent for transferring other units out of the National Guard or to undermine the “critical role of governors.”

Rather, the move would help stand up the first new military service since the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Space Force already has taken over space missions previously performed by other branches of the military and now wants to integrate the space missions performed by the Air National Guard, according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Denver Post.

“These missions — and the professionals who perform them — are essential to the unity of command and mission success of the U.S. Space Force,” Kendall wrote to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who chairs the National Governors Association. Polis is the association’s vice chair.

Colorado has played a prominent role as the military has established the Space Force. The U.S. Space Command is headquartered in Colorado Springs.

The Colorado Air National Guard is based at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, though it has personnel throughout the state.

The 233rd Space Group, based at the Greeley Air National Guard Station, offers the Air Force’s only mobile ground system for immediate detection of nuclear weapon launches, including from space. It’s designed to survive and operate through all phases and immediate fallout of a nuclear attack, according to a National Guard fact sheet.