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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

by CatharineCruz Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

The Senate began investigating the CIA’s detainee program nearly six years ago. It completed a draft of its report two years ago. Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally released the report’s blistering executive summary. (The full report remains classified.) What took so long? It’s a tale of White House indecisiveness, Republican opposition, and CIA snooping.

More coverage of the CIA torture report.


“Rectal Feeding,” Threats to Children, and More: 16 Awful Abuses From the CIA Torture Report


No, Bin Laden Was Not Found Because of CIA Torture


How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report


Read the Full Torture Report Here


5 Telling Dick Cheney Appearances in the CIA Torture Report


Am I a Torturer?

It’s January 2009. Obama takes office. Within days, he shuts down the CIA’s detainee program. But he says he’d rather not dwell on the past.

January 11, 2009: President-elect Barack Obama tells George Stephanopoulos he’s not interested in a broad investigation of Bush-era intelligence programs, saying, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

January 22, 2009: Obama issues an executive order banning the use of torture.

However, the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to investigate. Lawmakers say they expect to conclude their inquiry sometime between August 2009 and March 2010.

February 27, 2009: On the condition of anonymity, Senate officials tell reporters that the intelligence committee plans to probe the CIA’s detainee program. The Associated Press reports that the review will take six months to a year.

March 5, 2009: The panel votes 14-1 to proceed with the investigation. Committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Kit Bond, R-Mo., formally announce the investigation. The press release says the review should take one year.

Then Obama signals he might reverse course and prosecute CIA employees involved in torture. The Senate investigation starts going off the rails.

April 16, 2009: Attorney General Eric Holder releases four of the Bush administration’s legal opinions sanctioning “enhanced interrogation.” Obama says he will not prosecute the CIA employees who acted on the Justice Department’s orders and “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

April 20, 2009: Feinstein asks Obama to “withhold judgment” on CIA prosecutions until the committee review is finished. “This study is now underway, and I estimate its completion within the next six to eight months,” she writes to the president. “A study of the first two detainees has already been completed and will shortly be before the committee.”

The same day, then-CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry tells “Lou Dobbs Tonight” the report should take six to eight months to complete, but “obviously a lot of people are looking for it to happen a little bit quicker since this has been going on for a long time.”

April 21, 2009: Obama suggests he might be open to prosecutions. “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama says. “I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”

Mid-2009: The CIA creates a secure facility where congressional aides will be allowed to view the documents related to the investigation. Feinstein later says the CIA provided a “stand-alone computer system” that was “segregated from CIA networks.”

Aides start sorting through six million pages of documents. The process is initially slow because the CIA hires contractors to read each document before giving it to the committee, to ensure the Senate aides don’t get access to sensitive documents unrelated to the detainee program. “This proved to be a slow and very expensive process,” Feinstein later says.

August 24, 2009: Holder opens a “preliminary review” into potential prosecutions.

The next week, Feinstein tells “Face the Nation” she wishes the Justice Department would wait for the committee to complete its report.

“We’re well along in that study,” Feinstein says. “And I’m trying to push it along even more quickly.”

September 26, 2009: Republicans on the committee withdraw from the panel’s review. They say the Justice Department’s concurrent investigation will make CIA employees afraid to answer the committee’s questions.

“Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the committee’s review,” Bond says in a statement.

Feinstein says the committee’s investigation will continue without the Republicans’ support.

Senate aides notice some fishy things happening at the CIA. The committee blows past its projected deadline.

February 2010: Around this time, about 870 documents disappear from the computers in the CIA facility where congressional aides are conducting the investigation, Feinstein later alleges.

May 2010: Another 60 documents allegedly go missing. As Feinstein tells it, CIA personnel first deny that the documents are missing, then blame the IT contractors, then blame the White House. The White House says it did not tell the CIA to remove the documents.

May 17, 2010: The CIA apologizes for removing the documents, Feinstein later says.

At some point in 2010: According to Feinstein, around this time, aides discover the “Panetta Review” – an internal report written for then-director Leon Panetta that acknowledges “significant CIA wrongdoing.”

She says “some time after” aides find the Panetta Review, those documents disappear from the computers too.

The committee keeps working. The Justice Department closes its inquiry without pursuing prosecutions. In 2012, the committee starts hinting at the report’s findings. New ETA: Soon. Real soon.

June 30, 2011: After a preliminary review, the Justice Department’s special prosecutor clears CIA employees of wrongdoing in 99 cases of alleged detainee mistreatment. He recommends that the Justice Department investigate just two cases of detainee deaths.

April 27, 2012: Reuters reports that the committee has found “no evidence” that CIA torture led to any significant intelligence breakthroughs. At this point, the report is still being finalized.

April 30, 2012: Feinstein and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., issue a press release saying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not help the government find Osama bin Laden. They say the committee will complete its review “soon.”

August 30, 2012: Attorney General Eric Holder announces he is not prosecuting any CIA employees for detainee deaths.

September 6, 2012: The New York Times reports that the committee’s review is “nearing completion.”

In December 2012, the committee votes to start the declassification process. Now lawmakers just need the CIA to provide its comments on the report, and then the committee can vote again about which parts should be released.

December 13, 2012: The committee votes 9-6 to approve the report for the declassification process. Feinstein says the report is more than 6,000 pages long.

Committee co-chair Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., votes against approving the report. He says the report contains “significant errors, omissions, assumptions and ambiguities – as well as a lot of cherry-picking.”

But the report isn’t declassified right away — the first step is to send the report to the White House, the CIA and other federal agencies for their comment. “After that is complete in mid-February, the committee will vote again on how much of the report should be declassified,” the New York Times reports.

The CIA does not like the report.

January 30, 2013: Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., expresses his disappointment that CIA director nominee John Brennan has not yet reviewed the committee’s report.

February 7, 2013: Brennan reads the 300-page summary of the committee’s report in time for his confirmation hearing. He tells the panel, “I must tell you that reading this report from the committee raises serious questions about the information that I was given at the time.”

He adds, “I don’t know what the facts are or what the truth is. So I really need to look at that carefully and see what CIA’s response is.”

February 15, 2013: Comments are due to the committee. Neither the CIA nor the White House submit a response by the deadline.

March 7, 2013: The Senate confirms Brennan as CIA director. An anonymous senior intelligence official tells the Wall Street Journal that the agency objects to most of the committee’s report.

March 26, 2013: Brennan is now responsible for assembling the CIA’s response. Anonymous former senior CIA officials tell the Washington Post that an early draft is “highly critical” and finds “loads of holes” in the committee’s report.

May 7, 2013: Anonymous former officials tell the Washington Post that the CIA is still assembling “a defiant response.”

May 10, 2013: Brennan meets with President Obama and shows him the CIA’s response, the Intercept later reports. White House photographer Pete Souza snaps this photo, which reportedly shows Brennan holding the response:

Pete Souza

June 2013: The State Department sends a classified letter urging the committee not to declassify the report. In the letter, then-assistant secretary of state Philip Goldberg warns that if the committee reveals the CIA’s cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, it could endanger American diplomats and harm foreign relations.

June 27, 2013: The CIA officially responds to the report. The 122-page secret rebuttal reportedly lists errors and criticizes the committee for failing to interview any CIA employees. A committee aide says the panel tried to interview those involved, but the CIA did not cooperate.

The same day, Udall issues a statement accusing intelligence officials of leaking “inaccurate information” critical of the committee’s report. Udall alleges that the CIA and the White House “repeatedly rejected requests to discuss the Committee’s report with Members or Committee staff.”

But the committee thinks the CIA hasn’t properly considered one important piece of evidence – the agency’s own internal report, which allegedly acknowledges CIA wrongdoing. Lawmakers push forward.

Between June 27, 2013, and January 15, 2014: The committee concludes the CIA’s official response is at odds with the Panetta Review, which found evidence of wrongdoing. At some point during this period, congressional aides take printed copies of the Panetta Review out of the secure CIA facility where they have been assembling their research, without the CIA’s permission.

July 19, 2013: Feinstein says she’s leading a push to declassify at least the 300-page executive summary of the report.

Chambliss says he disagrees with the report’s conclusions, but he thinks both the summary and the CIA’s response should be released. He adds that the report is flawed because it relied too heavily on documents. “The folks doing the report got 100 percent of their information from documents and didn’t interview a single person,” he says.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says the Obama administration still wants to address some “factual questions,” but the administration thinks “some version of the findings of the report should be made public.”

July 25, 2013: The New York Times predicts the report will be partly declassified “in the next few months.”

November 26, 2013: Nothing has happened. The ACLU files a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the committee’s report and the CIA’s response to the report.

Late 2013: Feinstein asks the CIA to give the committee “a final and complete version” of the Panetta Review.

December 17, 2013: Udall publicly discloses the existence of the Panetta Review in a congressional committee hearing. The committee asks the CIA to hand it over.

January 6, 2014: Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House compel the CIA to respond to remaining information requests. He also asks for “a public statement from the White House committing to the fullest possible declassification of the Committee’s study in the most expedient and responsible manner possible.”

Early January 2014: The CIA refuses to give the committee the Panetta Review, arguing that the documents are privileged.

The CIA accuses Senate aides of hacking into the agency’s computer networks. The Senate committee accuses the CIA of hacking into its computer networks. The brawl goes public.

January 15, 2014: As Feinstein later recounts, on this day, Brennan calls an “emergency meeting.” He tells her that the CIA searched the committee’s “stand alone” computers for copies of the Panetta Review. He believes committee aides may have obtained the documents through illegal means. Feinstein says the documents were made available on the committee’s computers.

January 17, 2014: Feinstein writes to Brennan and asks him to end his investigation of the Senate committee, citing separation of powers.

Sometime during this chaos: The CIA’s inspector general files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the CIA spying on the Senate.

The CIA’s general counsel files a crimes report with the Justice Department about the Senate spying on the CIA.

March 4, 2014: McClatchy first reports on the feud.

Udall sends another letter to the White House. “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he writes. “It is essential that the committee be able to do its oversight work – consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers – without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”

March 5, 2014: Brennan denies allegations that the CIA spied on committee members. “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan says.

March 11, 2014: Feinstein tells the whole story on the Senate floor. She accuses the CIA of violating “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

March 12, 2014: The president says he will not “wade into” the dispute between the committee and the CIA.

March 19, 2014: Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, writes to Brennan and Holder to notify them that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms will investigate charges that the CIA accessed the committee’s computer network.

March 31, 2014: The Washington Post details the main conclusion of the committee’s report: that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress about torture.

The committee votes to declassify the summary of the report.

April 3, 2014: The report is now more than 6,200 pages, and the executive summary is 481 pages. The committee votes 11-3 to declassify the executive summary and conclusions.

Now it’s up to the CIA to complete its declassification review. The White House says the process will be expedited. Feinstein anticipates it will take just one more month.

April 11, 2014: McClatchy publishes the report’s findings. Among them: torture was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence, the CIA repeatedly misled the Department of Justice, and CIA employees used “interrogation techniques” that had not been approved by CIA headquarters or the Justice Department.

Feinstein says she is opening a new investigation to find out who leaked the findings. “If someone distributed any part of this classified report, they broke the law and should be prosecuted,” she says. “The committee is investigating this unauthorized disclosure, and I intend to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

Udall writes to President Obama, asking that the White House oversee the declassification process instead of the CIA.

July 31, 2014: CIA acknowledges that, despite Brennan’s earlier denial about what he called “spurious allegations,” the agency did in fact spy on Senate investigators. An internal agency review found that CIA officers created a false online identity to access to computers used by the investigators and read their emails. The review also said that when CIA officers were first asked about the spying, they showed a “lack of candor.”

August 5, 2014: Release of the report is put on hold after the Senate objects to CIA trying to redact evidence that the agency had misled investigators. “I have concluded the redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions,” said Feinstein.

December 9, 2014: The Senate Intelligence Committee releases the executive summary of the report. It concludes the CIA mislead the public, Congress, and the White House both about the severity of treatment and about effectiveness of torture.

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How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report

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The Hunger Game

by turystycznypbs2 Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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“This is my house,” Waed would tell Hassan after the shelling began. “I’m not leaving it.” Photograph by Andrew Quilty

There was a circle of friends who lived on the southern edge of Damascus in a district called Yarmouk. They were artists, mainly. Actors, filmmakers, photographers, and musicians. Their neighborhood was a maze of alleys and tightly packed, four-story cement block buildings, and it smelled faintly sweet and dusty. On the roofs, the friends would sometimes sit to smoke cigarettes and look toward a horizon filled with rusted satellite dishes and rooftop water tanks. They could see laundry hung out of windows and rugs draped over balconies. In the evenings, they could watch men flying pigeons from their rooftop coops. Off to the west, they could see Mount Hermon, and if it was winter, there would be snow on it.

There were many sounds: children playing soccer in the alleys, men advertising the watermelons they pushed around on wooden carts, stereo-projected voices calling the devout to prayer. In between the honking of horns and vrooming of motorcycles there were the coos of pigeons, the dings of bicycle bells, the gossip of neighbors.

The scent of food always beckoned on Yarmouk Street: warm, cheese-filled pastries dripping with sugary syrup; the best falafel in Damascus; pizzalike things called fata’ir that came in 10 different varieties and cast tantalizing scents a block away. People were poor in Yarmouk, more so than in most of Damascus, but there was always much food. Many had large bellies.

Who then could conceive that imams would one day announce it was no longer religiously taboo to eat cats or donkeys? Women and children couldn’t yet dream they would soon be sifting through the grass for edible weeds. No one could imagine that on a street outside some apartments, there would be a little pile of cat heads next to men and children flaying the mangy animals and boiling them in a pot.

From the edge of Yarmouk, above the distant buildings miles away, the friends could see the house of Bashar al-Assad, sitting high up on a hill. They did not like him. People they knew had gone to prison for suggesting an alternative political vision, however subtly. They felt so choked by his secret police that when someone they didn’t know showed up at a party, they regarded him with suspicion and measured their words. Sharing a cigarette laced with hashish at the edge of Yarmouk, they would joke about the eyes of the dictator being upon them, and they would laugh cynically.

Among this group of friends were Hassan and Waed. (I’m withholding their last names to protect their families.) Hassan was a budding actor and playwright, and Waed had been a student of English literature. They were a handsome couple, both in their mid-20s. Waed was reserved compared to most of the group, but sharp and self-possessed, with gentle eyes and long, wavy hair. Hassan had a long face, a head of shiny black curls, and dense, dark eyebrows that arched high when he became excited. He loved to joke about things—ridiculous things, like the schlocky keyboard players who perform at weddings, and serious things, like how his grandparents’ honeymoon in 1948 consisted of being driven out of their homes in Palestine—”life’s a bitch”—and coming to Syria.

Their friends were refugees, mostly, as was nearly a third of the population of Yarmouk. They had been born in Syria and most of their parents had, too, but they were not citizens. The Syrian regime, like other Arab governments, held that naturalizing them would absolve Israel of its responsibility for the Palestinians it displaced. Refugees came to Yarmouk in waves, first after the mass expulsion in 1948, then in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Yarmouk became the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Poor Syrians eventually moved in and outnumbered the Palestinians, but it remained known as “the camp.” In less than a square mile, Yarmouk contained an estimated half-million people, nearly 13 times the density of Manhattan.

As places to be a refugee went, it was a good one. In Syria, unlike neighboring Lebanon, Palestinians could do most of the things citizens could, including going to college. Waed and her sister were the first women in their family to attend university, at the urging of their illiterate grandmother. The school was two hours north of Damascus, and Waed had to travel there alone every week. She would leave on Sunday and come back Friday morning. Or so her parents thought.

They didn’t know that Waed would actually come back to the capital on Thursdays, as soon as she finished classes. Hassan would meet her at the bus station and they would go to the city’s main park, one of the only green parts of Damascus, where it smelled like eucalyptus and there were gushing fountains and winding rows of carnations. They would stroll around, snack on nuts, and talk for hours on the park benches. Once it was dark enough to move around unrecognized, they’d return to Yarmouk. There, they had a secret place. At the top of Hassan’s four-story building there was a little cement-walled room with no doors. Hassan and Waed would wait in the stairwell, sometimes for hours, until Hassan’s mom closed the door of her apartment for the night. Then they’d sneak up to the little room. The next morning, Waed would sneak out and go home, pretending she’d just come off the bus.

Years later, the two became engaged. Waed dropped out of college to get work so they could save up for an apartment and get married. The after-school trysts were over, but Thursday nights remained sacred for them. That’s when they would go to the weekly salons put on by Mazen Rabia, a mentor of sorts for their group. It was at these gatherings, while living in Yarmouk in 2009, that I first met Waed and Hassan.

Yarmouk before the siege (above) and after the shelling (below), with residents lining up for United Nations food aid Abed Naji; UNRWA/Reuters

Mazen had spent five years in a political prison for his association with the Commun­ist Workers Party. There, he was introduced to theater. Mazen came to believe that in Syria, the most powerful subversion was in art, not in politics, because art was difficult to suppress. Once, Mazen produced a play based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but the censors refused to let him stage it because Kafka was Jewish and they accused Mazen of trying to spread Zionist propaganda. He changed the name of the play to The Cockroach, the censors didn’t notice, and he performed it to a full house 10 nights in a row.

On Thursday nights at Mazen’s, Hassan and Waed would squeeze onto a couch or a spot on the floor. Everyone would watch a film or listen to people read their poetry or see someone’s photo project. They would discuss these works, and Mazen would bring food out—chicken, fries, eggplant with ground beef, hummus, pizza—and people would drink beer and anise-flavored brandy clouded with water. Someone might play flamenco guitar or put Algerian Rai on the stereo, or maybe Manu Chao. Hassan would drag Waed onto the dance floor, and then they would sit out in the courtyard where people talked about literature (was Faulkner better in Arabic than in English?) and politics (if they won the right to return to Palestine, would they actually want to leave Yarmouk?). Then Mazen would throw everyone out and they would walk home. Snippets of songs would trickle from radios into the streets, and sometimes they would see old men shuffling to the mosques for the early morning prayer. It was 2010. The world was safe.

Fall came, then winter. Hassan wrote plays and acted. A man lit himself on fire in Tunisia and there was a revolution. Then there was another in Egypt, and in Yemen, and Bahrain. They watched it all on TV, but the camp rolled on with its usual cadence. They still gathered at Mazen’s. They still talked and sang about returning someday to Palestine. They thought the fever of these revolutions would spread to Syria, and some of it did. Friends of theirs were arrested and released, but Yarmouk stayed the same.

Then, on the internet, some people made a call for Palestinians to have their own Arab Spring uprising. It was 2011, and they were calling it the “third intifada.” People in the West Bank and Gaza would rise against Israel, and the diaspora would storm the borders, unarmed. It would happen on Nakba Day, the day Palestinians commemorate their expulsion. Waed and Hassan were excited about it at first, but then pro-Assad Palestinian parties in Syria got involved and Hassan became suspicious.

Every year, the regime held events in the Syrian-controlled section of the Golan Heights to commemorate the Nakba, but they never let anyone near the border. This time, however, they left the road to the border open. Hundreds of young men rushed the barbed wire fence that separated the two countries. Young men threw rocks. Israeli soldiers fired their rifles. It happened again a few weeks later, on the anniversary of Israel’s seizure of the Golan Heights; 23 of the protesters were killed by Israeli soldiers, around 350 injured.

The dead in their wooden boxes floated over the heads of people filling Yarmouk Street. Hundreds surrounded the headquarters of the pro-regime Palestinian party. Was the regime trying to deflect attention from its own atrocities by trotting these young men off to get killed by Israeli border police? Some threw rocks. A 14-year-old boy was shot dead from the building. The people inside fled, shooting in the air as they left. The crowd stormed the headquarters and lit it on fire. They chanted, “The people want the end of corruption” and “God is great.”

As the months passed, Syria started to slip into war. The military had killed protesters in Dara’a, and by November tanks were opening fire on Homs. Hassan decided he needed to become more active. He wasn’t going to become a fighter, though he sympathized with them. What people needed, he decided, was comedy. Along with a few friends, he started filming skits and posting them to YouTube. Some of them were about the ridiculous details of daily life—people consumed with their smartphones, self-obsessed poets, men who bragged about how many phone numbers they’d scored from women. Other videos brought humor to the experience of war. As the fighting started taking its toll on the communications infrastructure, Hassan did a skit of himself running through the streets like a rebel fighter—to find cell coverage.

Humor was in short supply in Yarmouk. Mazen’s gatherings continued, but the tone had changed. There was no more dancing. Pro-regime Palestinian militiamen stood on corners around the camp. People from other parts of south Damascus, where there was fighting between regime and opposition forces, were flowing in, bloating Yarmouk’s population to as many as 900,000, nearly double its prewar density. At Mazen’s, the group of friends would discuss how to find apartments for these newcomers. How would they get them medicine and food? How would they register their kids in schools? Many of them started smuggling food and medical supplies to nearby neighborhoods coming under siege. Hassan headed a group of activists who documented events and posted their videos to YouTube.

For Waed and Hassan, there was a silver lining to all this chaos. With enforcement of building codes vanishing, they began to transform their little unfinished room into a studio apartment with a tiny bathroom and a kitchenette. Then, in December 2011, they got married.

But things were no longer the same. People began to disappear. One night, regime loyalists showed up at Mazen’s apartment and took one of their friends away. Shells would land in Yarmouk at random times. Mazen and others fled Syria.

On December 16, 2012, Waed was at work, on the other side of Damascus, when Hassan called and told her not to come home. MiG fighter jets had stormed over Yarmouk and launched missiles at several schools in the camp. Seconds later, they hit a hospital. Then the mosque, full of displaced people. Some people from Hassan’s film crew ran to the mosque. Bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere, like a pack of cards thrown up and left to lie as they fell. Men rushed around the place of worship, streaking the puddles of blood on the floor. Children screamed. Some just stared silently.

Waed told Hassan she would stay away, but as soon as she hung up the phone she rushed to Yarmouk. People were filing out of the camp by the thousands, carrying babies or armfuls of luggage. Waed pushed past them. Stay away from Yarmouk Street, they told her. There are snipers. But Yarmouk Street bisected the camp. The only way she could get to Hassan was to cross it.

She found the thoroughfare, always so jammed with cars and smelling of exhaust and pastries, empty. The only humans she could spot were a few men with guns—opposition fighters. She’d never seen any of those in the camp, but now she took a deep breath and ran toward them, shouting, “Long live the Free Syrian Army!” She heard bullets crack up the street and found Hassan standing in front of their house. “What are you doing here?” he exclaimed. His face showed both terror and relief.

The next day, thousands more left Yarmouk, including Waed’s family. Some crammed into relatives’ apartments in other parts of the city. Others slept on the streets. Hassan and Waed wouldn’t go. As the days passed, the shelling got heavier. Stray bullets came through their bathroom wall. One morning, Hassan woke Waed and told her they had to move downstairs into his parents’ apartment, where it was safer. She got up, closed the door, and went back to bed. “If you want to go, go,” she said. “This is my house, and I’m not leaving it.” She wasn’t trying to be a martyr; she just couldn’t let it go. No matter how rational it might have been to move, it was more comforting to close her own door to the world falling apart outside.

The fronts in Syria were hardening. The opposition controlled most of the country’s north, and nearly every major city had rebels battling the regime for control. Religious fundamentalist groups were starting to gain influence in the opposition, and suicide bombings against regime targets were on the rise.

A pro-regime checkpoint went up at the beginning of Yarmouk Street. Waed had to go through it to get to the other side of Damascus, where she worked for a company building a private hospital wing for the Assad family. Every morning, she would steel herself before making the journey. Regime snipers had set up on the rooftops. Several of the main streets of Yarmouk were now closed off like this, and when people had to cross them, they would dash across in a zigzag pattern to make themselves difficult targets.

She walked along the sidewalk, nervous yet determined. She and Hassan needed money to eat and the snipers targeted young men, so there was no way for him to work. Besides, there was almost no food for sale in Yarmouk anymore. The checkpoint blocked flour and gas from getting in. No one was allowed to bring in more than one bag of bread.

Rather than risk the checkpoint and its snipers, or wait for the intermittent UN aid packages, many started breaking into shuttered shops and abandoned houses to find something to eat. Within weeks, the camp’s complicated social hierarchy was obliterated. One neighbor of Waed’s parents, a well-respected historian, was now looting for bags of macaroni with his wife to feed their five-year-old twins. To cook them, Ghassan Shahabi and his family pulled doors and windows from abandoned apartments and lit a fire outside.

Waed and Hassan were fortunate, relatively speaking. Her government-related job allowed her to leave the neighborhood every day and bring back food, and their neighbors had left behind a supply of heating oil. It was colder than usual that winter. One night, it snowed, and people went outside to make snowmen. Ghassan, his wife, Siham, and their children were bundled up in blankets by a fire in the street, a warmer spot than their freezing apartment.

Ghassan and Siham grew hungrier. One day, they decided they couldn’t take it anymore. During the morning window when the checkpoint opened, they put the twins in their car, drove into the city, and bought 25 bags of bread. The next day, on their way back in, a soldier searched the car and found their stash. Only one bag goes in, he told them, and the car has to stay out of the camp. Siham and the kids got out of the car with their one bag, then a soldier called from the other side of the checkpoint.

“Ghassan Shahabi,” he shouted. “Never mind. It’s okay. Go ahead and come in with your car.” Maybe the soldier had seen the kids and had a change of heart? Siham and the girls got in the backseat. Ghassan drove ahead. A sniper bullet pierced the window and went straight into Ghassan’s back, and then the gas tank was hit and erupted in flames. Ghassan’s lifeless foot continued to press the gas pedal. The car drove a ways down Yarmouk Street and crashed into a wall. People rushed to pull the screaming kids out of the car. They buried Ghassan immediately.

In the days that followed, Siham and the children gathered remnants of bread where they could find them and warmed them on the fire. After eight days, she decided, “If we die, we die. It’s better to die by sniper fire than by hunger.” They paid someone to drive them to the entrance of the camp. Snipers shot along the road, and when they got out of the car, they saw a man and a boy lying dead on the street. They ran to the checkpoint and got out. Eventually they found their way to Lebanon.

In Paris, Mazen got a call from a neighbor back in Yarmouk. The other day, in the little alley in front of his apartment, a dog had dragged in and eaten the lower half of a human body. The books on the shelves of Mazen’s apartment were all gone. Presumably people had burned them to keep warm.

By June 2013, people in other parts of Syria were starting to accuse the regime of using chemical weapons. The United States and the United Kingdom were now officially aiding the rebels, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia historically funded by Iran and Syria, was fighting on the side of the regime. Only 20,000 people remained in Yarmouk, leaving the streets eerily empty.

One day after midnight, Waed and Hassan heard a man call Hassan’s name. Downstairs was a car with some men from an Islamic opposition group. They told him to get in and drove away.

The men interrogated Hassan. Why had he been filming in a cemetery earlier that week? He explained that he was filming a man whose relative had died. Every single day the man went to his grave and put a flower on it. Hassan wanted to capture that quiet moment. The men asked if he was a spy. Was he filming the area to tell the regime where the militants were located?

Eventually they let him go, but Waed was seething. She and Hassan had been happy when the opposition fighters first showed up—perhaps they would go on to depose Assad. But it had been five months, and now she had to show her ID both at the regime checkpoint and to the Free Syrian Army fighters. Rumors were going around that the FSA was looting houses and stealing the little food aid that was getting in. More and more, bearded men were shouting at her for not wearing a hijab, for not fearing God.

Waed quit her job—the checkpoint was closed too often, and she was worried about being locked outside. It was time to leave, she told Hassan—she had family they could stay with. But now he refused. All those people in the camp, he said, they couldn’t just leave them. He wanted to keep going, to make a film, something.

Then, one day in July, the checkpoint closed permanently. No one could get into Yarmouk, and only the sick, which mostly meant the starving, could leave. Anyone who showed up at the checkpoint with an injury was presumed to be a fighter and likely to be arrested or killed. There was hardly any electricity, sometimes no water. The regime cut off all outside aid. No food was getting in, no medicine. Nothing.

There was a time when this sort of thing was common. The Goths blocked off the main entrances of Rome and cut off its aqueducts in 537, letting disease and famine spread throughout the city for more than a year. It was good to trap civilians inside, because they ate up food that would otherwise sustain the fighters. When the Romans besieged Jerusalem in 70 A.D., they allowed pilgrims to enter, but didn’t let them leave.

In the Middle Ages, sieges were far more common than battles. They became increasingly deadly as urban areas grew. World War II brought what was probably the deadliest siege in history when the Nazis surrounded Leningrad for 872 days. A million people in the city perished.

When the war was over, many thought no one would ever try something so horrific again. Then, in the early 1990s, the Serbian army blockaded Sarajevo, cutting off food, medicine, and electricity for years.

While the Syrian regime made global headlines with its use of chemical weapons, its use of starvation has largely slipped under the radar, even though it is far more pervasive. Assad has been trying to prevent food and medicine from entering opposition-controlled parts of Syria, while also destroying 60 percent of the country’s hospitals. Parts of Homs were cut off from the outside world for three years, and most of southern Damascus came under siege by last year, as did large parts of Aleppo. As this story went to print, some 250,000 people—the population of Orlando, Florida—were living under siege in Syria, completely cut off from outside food or aid. Most of the time regime forces were responsible for the blockades, though opposition forces began using the tactic too.

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The Hunger Game

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Olympics to Crack Down on Human Rights Abuses…After 2022

by USAUnitedCashLoans123 Posted on October 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Following widespread allegations of wrongdoing in both the Beijing and Sochi Olympics, human rights protections will be added to the contracts signed by future Olympic host cities. The International Olympic Committee’s president presented this change to Human Rights Watch at an October 21 meeting.

The new language will contractually require host countries to “take all necessary measures to ensure that development projects necessary for the organization of the Games comply with local, regional, and national legislation, and international agreements and protocols, applicable in the host country with regard to planning, construction, protection of the environment, health, safety, and labour laws.”

These changes make the human rights requirements for Olympic host cities more explicit than ever before, particularly with the mentions of health, environmental, and labor concerns. The new “international agreements and protocols” rule makes it clear that hosts will be required to abide by laws like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits forced labor, arbitrary arrest or detention, sentence without trial, and protects freedoms of assembly, religion, and opinion.

Beijing, China and Sochi, Russia floundered on some of these protections during the 2012 and 2014 Olympic Games. The international community criticized both host countries for corruption and exploitation of migrant construction workers: Sochi contractors cheated workers out of wages, required 12-hour shifts, and confiscated passports to keep laborers from leaving. In both countries, authorities regularly forced evictions and silenced media and activists. A Russian law passed in the months leading up to the Games that criminalized gay expression garnered global outrage.

Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, says the planned wording will make it easier for the IOC to take official action if a host country breaks contract—through litigation or “the thermonuclear option,” termination. Even before such extreme consequences, she is optimistic the explicit wording will give the IOC more power to “put the scare in any host country that is not playing by the human rights rules.”

“This is a real rebuke to Russia,” she says. “The IOC wants to avoid a repeat.”

Since host cities for the next three Olympic Games have already been selected and signed contracts, host countries will be held to the new clause beginning with the 2022 Winter Olympics. Worden says this is particularly timely, as two of the finalists—Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China—have repressive governments. (The third finalist is Oslo, Norway.)

The human rights clause expands on another impending addition, previewed in a September letter from the IOC to the 2022 candidate cities. That statement promised that future host city contracts will have “an express reference…to the prohibition of any form of discrimination.”

Technically, host cities like Sochi and Beijing were already broadly obligated to steer clear of human rights violations and discrimination: The Olympic Charter calls for a respect for “human dignity” and bans discrimination “with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise.” But, “we’ve clearly reached a moment when the words of the Olympic Charter are not enough,” says Worden. “You have to put these guarantees in a contract and force the host country to sign it.”

Worden hopes the IOC’s action will be adopted by organizers of other mega-sporting events at risk of mishandling human rights, such as FIFA. Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, estimates in an ESPN documentary that, at current rates, 4,000 people will die in preparation of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

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Olympics to Crack Down on Human Rights Abuses…After 2022

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Will Cambodia Flood a Sacred and Biodiverse Valley for a Dubious Dam?

by AshleigFHIY Posted on October 19, 2014

Mother Jones

On September 15, Cambodian police detained 11 environmental activists for blocking a convoy of government vehicles headed for Areng Valley, the site of the controversial Stung Cheay Areng hydro dam project. The activists were released, but twelve Royal Cambodian Armed Forces officers are now stationed at the makeshift roadblock where villagers have been protesting the dam since March. Nothing now stands in the way of Sinohydro Resources, the Chinese company that the Cambodian government has contracted to construct the dam.

Earlier this year, my film crew and I traveled to Areng Valley to document the story of the Chong people and their fight to stop this proposed dam, which they fear will destroy their forests, livelihood, and heritage. The Chong, who are considered Khmer Daeum (or original Khmers), have lived, farmed, fished, and hunted in this valley for more than 600 years. At a protest, one woman expressed her purpose clearly: “We’ve come to protect our land for our future grandchildren. And we’re afraid all our spirit forests will be lost.”

If built, the Stung Cheay Areng dam would flood at least 26,000 acres or 40 square miles (some estimates say 77 square miles) — displacing more than 1,500 people who have no desire to leave their ancestral homes. The government plans to forcibly resettle them within the Central Cardamom Protected Forest, a vital elephant corridor, causing further encroachment on an area internationally recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. The dam would thereby threaten the habitats of 31 endangered animals, including the world’s largest habitat for the threatened Siamese crocodiles.

Conservation experts also question the project’s economic viability, citing high production costs and a very low rate of economic return. During the rainy season, the dam is hypothetically capable of producing enough electricity to power some 87,000 US-style homes. But, according to Ame Trandem, Southeast Asia Program Director for International Rivers, “the dam will only operate at 46 percent capacity during the dry season, precisely when Cambodia most needs the electricity.”

The proposed Stung Cheay Areng dam is one of 17 the Cambodian government intends to build over the next 20 years to tackle the country’s energy crisis. The dam building spree is prompted by some of the highest electricity prices in Asia. But Cambodia will sell most of the power to neighboring countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. And, as a US State Department cable obtained by Wikileaks indicates, “the proposed dams’ construction and maintenance contracts will funnel near and mid-term profits to foreign construction companies.”

As with all large hydro dams being built in the country, Sinohydro will transfer ownership of the Areng dam to the Cambodian government in 40 years, just as maintenance costs spike and substantial sediment build-up is predicted to render the dam nearly inoperative. Many of the dams so far built are poorly constructed; the Stung Atay dam, located not too far from Areng, collapsed mid-construction in December 2012, killing four workers.

“Cambodia’s hydropower ambitions are not new, but China’s substantial foreign aid in the form of grants and soft loans has driven much of the recent progress,” the Wikileaks cable notes. Indeed, Sinohydro is the third company the Cambodian government approached to build this dam. Two Chinese companies that conducted feasibility studies pulled out of the project. The first company discontinued its involvement on moral grounds, citing issues of corporate social responsibility; the environmental and social impacts are irreversible and cannot be mitigated. The last company to bail concluded the dam was “economically unviable.”

So then why is the Government of Cambodia so eager to pursue this project? According to a Phnom Penh Post investigation, one of the country’s wealthiest and most politically powerful couples—Cambodian People’s Party senator Lao Meng Khin and his wife, Choeung Sopheap—are believed to have brokered the deal between Sinohydro and the Cambodian government. This would not be their first foray into environmental devastation for profit. The couple are the owners of Shukaku Inc, the company behind the controversial Beoung Kak Lake development in Phnom Penh, which has forcibly evicted and displaced over 1,500 families. They also own Pheapimex Group, a controversial development firm responsible for the land seizure of hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and farmland in Cambodia.

Furthermore, the couple is connected to powerful logging syndicates that stand to benefit from the dam project. The construction will provide unhindered access to the Central Cardamom Protected Forest, building roads where none currently exist, and sending loggers deeper into the forests in search of rosewood, a highly prized luxury hardwood. Logging is technically not permitted in protected areas, but activists fear that timber will find its way onto trucks in the concession area. At that point, as one conservation activist noted, it is as if “the timber has already reached Vietnam.” When the Stung Atay dam was built, conservation experts estimated 1,300 cubic yards of rosewood would be harvested. However, in actuality, at least 20,000 cubic yards were harvested, netting approximately $220 million in profit for timber companies. Experts expect the total area deforested in this project would almost equal that of the combined surface area cleared in four existing dam projects in the Cardamoms.

The loggers are often poor migrants who have themselves been displaced by the destruction of their forests and farmland. Continuing this cycle of devastation they receive temporary permits to enter the forests and clear land, supplying luxury timber to logging tycoons. Once the land is cleared, it will never be reforested. Businessmen will snap it up for development. Meanwhile, local, indigenous communities are pushed deeper and deeper into protected areas, where they will, of necessity, place demands on previously pristine forest and wildlife habitats. According to a Global Witness report, since 2003 400,000 Cambodians have been harmed by economic land concessions granted to companies for industrial agriculture or dam construction. More than 70 percent of the concessions in 2012 were situated inside national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and protected forests.

A panel of Sinohydro experts recently approved the technical feasibility of the project. The Cambodian government is expected to waive through the dam’s environmental impact assessment, allowing Sinohydro to begin construction.

Meanwhile, local NGOs like Mother Nature and Khmer Youth Empire continue to wage an empowering social media campaign against the dam and rallying protests in Phnom Penh. International environmental organizations like International Rivers, Conservation International, and Wildlife Alliance are also exerting pressure on the Cambodian government and Chinese companies to pull out.

Villagers in Areng, dedicated to stopping the dam, vow to continue blocking the sole access road into the valley. One woman vehemently expressed it thus: “Even if they piled money one meter above my head, I don’t want their Chinese money. I want to stay in my village. Even with all this money, I could only spend it in this life. I wouldn’t be able to pass it on to my grandchildren. I just want my village and my land for the future of my grandchildren.”

And they just might be successful. On October 1, the leader of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, Sam Rainsy, said he’d been assured by Prime Minister Hun Sen that the activists call for a moratorium had been heeded. The dam would be put on the backburner for the foreseeable future, it’s fate left to “future generations” to decide. However, the Minister of Mines and Energy has continued to insist that the dam will be completed by 2020 while the Minister of Environment assured that the dam had not been cancelled and nor had construction been postponed. It remains to be seen which party in this complicated fight over land and money and tradition will win out.

This project was made possible by a grant from The Kendeda Fund, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Sundance Institute Artist Services Program. The film was originally produced for The New York Times Op-Docs.

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Will Cambodia Flood a Sacred and Biodiverse Valley for a Dubious Dam?

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Would Joe Biden Put His Son In Prison For Doing Coke?

by DollieBrigstock Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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So the son of our Vice President was booted from the military for doing coke. This must be an awkward situation for Joe Biden, given his role in cracking down on drug use over the last few decades. Joe Biden created the position of “drug czar,” a key step in the drug war. As the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, he played a major role in passing mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. He was the main sponsor of the RAVE Act in 2003, meant to crack down on MDMA use, which would have held club owners liable for providing “paraphernalia” like glowsticks and water. He still vocally opposes marijuana legalization.

To be clear: Hunter Biden wasn’t caught with actual cocaine. He just failed a drug test. But what if he’d happened to be found with a little bag in his pocket? Would Joe Biden would find it fair for him to serve 87 months, which is the average federal sentence for drug possession?

Of course, were Hunter Biden to be caught with powder cocaine, he would likely fare better than someone caught with crack. To his credit, Joe Biden himself has pushed for reducing the longstanding sentencing disparity between crack and regular cocaine, but possession of 28 grams of crack still triggers a five-year minimum sentence. It takes 500 grams of regular cocaine to trigger the same sentence. That’s an 18-to-one difference. (African Americans make up 83 percent of people convicted for crack offenses, even though the number of white crack users is 40 percent greater than that of black users, according to a National Institute on Drug Abuse study).

America has more prisoners than any other country—a quarter of all people behind bars in the entire world are in US prisons or jails. Nearly half of all federal prisoners are serving sentences for drugs. Many of them won’t have a chance to “regret” their mistakes and move on, as Hunter Biden has said he will.

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Would Joe Biden Put His Son In Prison For Doing Coke?

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

by Rad7edzw Posted on October 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is a question that every prisoner ponders once the realization sets in that his freedom is gone: Can the mind be liberated when the body is not? It’s been a while since I’ve asked myself such a thing—I was released from an Iranian prison three years ago—but a Chinese dragon in a former prison factory at Alcatraz makes me think about it again. Its multicolored face is baring its teeth at me when I enter the cavernous room. In this space, prisoners washed military uniforms during World War II.

The dragon is the first of many installations in the art exhibition by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, called @Large. The beast is a startling greeter—its whiskers are paper flames—but the impression softens as I look closer. The long body, shaped like a traditional Chinese dragon kite and suspended by strings from the ceiling, snakes gracefully throughout the open factory floor, illuminated by the soft afternoon light spilling in through a multitude of little windows. Bird-shaped kites are suspended throughout the room. It is quiet. This prison room feels like freedom.

There is more to it. Every segment of the dragon’s long body is painted with flowers from countries that seriously restrict the civil liberties of their citizens, such as Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. Other parts of the dragon are adorned with quotes by prominent dissidents. One is from Ai Weiwei himself: “Every one of us is a potential convict.”

A man listens to Ai Weiwei’s sound installation “Stay Tuned.” Shane Bauer

That’s something this man surely never forgets. The themes of Ai Weiwei’s art have not been popular with the Chinese authorities. In 2011, he was arrested for alleged tax crimes and held for 81 days without charge. He hasn’t been allowed to leave China since. There are cameras mounted outside his studio in Beijing, to monitor him.

Ai directed the layout of the exhibition through video conferences with Cheryl Haines, director of the San Francisco based For-Site foundation, who initially came up with the idea of an exhibition designed specifically for Alcatraz. After she got Ai to agree, the National Park Service, which manages the island, decided to consult with the State Department. “Having a prominent Chinese dissident set up such a large exhibition was politically sensitive,” Marnie Berk de Guzman, For-Site’s Special Projects Director, told me—though State officials readily approved the project. They knew the exhibition would deal with themes of freedom, captivity, and human rights. What they did not know is that the United States would be among the many countries Ai would call out for cracking down on dissidents.

In @Large, Ai gives us the opportunity to reflect on the psychological differences between the watcher and the watched. From the dragon room, a side door leads up a set of clanky metal stairs that open onto the “gun gallery,” a long narrow hallway that guards once walked to monitor the inmates on the shop floor below. From the guards’ vantage point, the dragon that was so graceful and beautiful up close looks like a caged, threatening beast. The flowers and quotes on his body appear muted through the cracked, foggy windows. My attention is constantly drawn back to the most dangerous aspect—his wild, burning head.

“Refraction” Shane Bauer

Walking down the gallery, I catch glimpses of “Refraction,” a gloomy, five-ton structure that gives the impression of a giant bird wing. I cannot get up close: The only way to view the piece is through the cracked windows of the gun gallery. The installation obliquely references Tibet: Its “feathers” are made of reflective panels originally used in Tibetan solar cookers. Whomever we are to imagine confining it did not find it necessary to imprison the giant bird itself, only the appendage that gives the animal its freedom.

One installation, “Trace,” has 175 portraits laid out in a field of Lego bricks. Each image is the colorful, pixelated likeness of someone who has been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs, political actions, or affiliations. There are more faces from China than any other country. Among them is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, named the 11th Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama. After his selection at age six in 1995, he was detained by Chinese authorities and hasn’t been seen since. Scattered among the Iranian, Bahraini, and Vietnamese faces are a few American ones: Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. There is John Kiriakou, currently in prison for disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer who engaged in brutal Bush-era interrogation programs.

There is also Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi American imprisoned for violating sanctions by sending money to family and friends in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era. He was convicted in 2012, nine years after Saddam’s fall. One of the largest faces is that of Shaker Aamer, a detainee who has been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but remains at Guantanamo 12 years after his arrest, still without charge or trial.

“Trace” features the faces of 175 political prisoners.

The large number of faces and names in “Trace” make it difficult to connect to each person, but in Alcatraz’s mess hall, there are people sitting at tables and writing messages to political prisoners. This installation, “Yours Truly,” offers free postcards decorated with national birds and flowers, each addressed to a specific prisoner. Ai understands that a prisoner’s greatest fear is being forgotten, and given that many of these postcards will certainly be intercepted before they arrive, the project may be intended to remind prison authorities that people are watching.

Alcatraz is an appropriate place for an exhibition about political imprisonment. While the island’s tourism literature focuses on hard-core criminals like Al Capone and the Birdman, it has also held hundreds of nonviolent political prisoners. Hutterite pacifists were put in solitary confinement here for refusing to serve in the military in 1918. World War I conscientious objector and anarchist Philip Grosser spent part of his year and a half on the island in “The Dungeon” where he subsisted on bread and water in complete darkness. Jackson Leonard was sent to Alcatraz in 1919 after distributing Industrial Workers of the World literature on an Army base. World War II veteran Robert George Thompson did time there in the early 1950s after joining the Communist Party USA.

This part of the island’s history is indirectly referenced in @Large. In the prison psych ward, opened exclusively for the exhibition, visitors can enter two “psychiatric observation cells,” small rooms lined with clinical looking green tiles where the mentally ill were kept in total isolation. There is nothing to see; the only thing to do is stand and listen to the traditional chants playing through hidden speakers. One is a Hopi song, a reminder of the 19 Hopis imprisoned here in 1895 for opposing the forced education of their children in government boarding schools.

The cells feel like an artifact of a bygone era, but prisons and jails around the country still routinely place the severely mentally ill in solitary cells, where they can languish for months or years. “It’s hard to imagine not going crazy in a room like that,” one of the @Large guides comments to me.

“Blossom” Shane Bauer

Down the hall is the “Blossom” installation. Thousands of tiny ceramic flowers, drained of color, evoke China’s Hundred Flowers campaign. In 1956, dissidents were crushed after a brief period of tolerance, banished to oblivion like these white heaps of flowers filling the sinks, bathtubs, and toilets of the psych ward.

There is one section of the prison the National Park Service did not initially offer Ai for his exhibition—the cell block. But he insisted on access, and NPS agreed.

Visitors enter the tiny cells—I can’t even fully extend my arms between the walls—and sit on a single metal stool at the center. In each one, I hear the music or poetry of dissident artists past or present. There is the screaming punk rock of Pussy Riot—”Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist, become a feminist, become a feminist!” There is the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. There is Fela Kuti and Czech poets and singers from Tibet and Robben Island.

I sit in one of the cells and listen to the words of Ahmad Shamlu, an Iranian poet imprisoned by the Shah.

They sniff at your heart—
These are strange times, my dear
—and they flog love
By the side of the road by the barrier
Love must be hidden at home in the closet

In the background I can hear a guard shouting, clanging the cell doors shut repeatedly to show the tourists what it might sound like, had they been imprisoned here. Sitting in the tiny cell, facing the wall, it is not hard to imagine that the clamor is real. Looking at the vent, where the mournful poet’s voice comes in, it is not hard to imagine he is a neighbor, whispering to me secretly.

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

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Obama Is Supposedly Getting Ready to Close Gitmo. Here Are 9 Other Times We’ve Heard That.

by VictoriPhilpott Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rejoice! President Barack Obama intends to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay…seven years after he initially promised to do so. Per the Wall Street Journal: “The White House is drafting options that would allow President Barack Obama to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by overriding a congressional ban on bringing detainees to the U.S., senior administration officials said.”

If that sounds familiar, that’s because Obama has repeatedly pledged to shutter the controversial detention center since the early days of his first presidential campaign. Once in office, reality—and congressional resistance—stymied his plans.

Here’s a noncomprehensive list of nine previous times Obama or his aides talked about closing Gitmo:

June 2007

Barack Obama told a Texas crowd on Sunday that he wants the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee facility closed, a step the Bush administration is considering…”While we’re at it,” he said, “we’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus.” —Washington Post

November 2008

The Obama administration will launch a review of the classified files of the approximately 250 detainees at Guantanamo Bay immediately after taking office, as part of an intensive effort to close the U.S. prison in Cuba, according to people who advised the campaign on detainee issues. —Washington Post

January 2009

The detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantanamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States. —White House Executive Order

December 2009

In ordering the federal government to acquire an Illinois prison to house terrorism suspects who are currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Obama on Tuesday took a major step toward shutting down the military detention facility that its detractors say had become a potent recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. —New York Times

March 2011

The Administration remains committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and to maintain a lawful, sustainable and principled regime for the handling of detainees there, consistent with the full range of U.S. national security interests. —White House Fact Sheet

October 2012

“There are some things that we haven’t gotten done. I still want to close Guantanamo, we haven’t been able to get that through Congress.” —Obama on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

April 2013

“I continue to believe that we’ve got to close Guantanamo. I think, well, you know, I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us, in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.” —Obama during a White House press conference

January 2014

“With the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay—because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals, and setting an example for the rest of the world.” —Obama in his 2014 State of the Union address

September 2014

After a two-year lull in which no low-level prisoners were released, the detainees in early 2013 began a widespread hunger strike. The protest prompted Mr. Obama to revive his effort to close the prison. He appointed Mr. Cliff Sloan, a former White House and corporate attorney, and another envoy to negotiate transfer deals. —New York Times

Don’t be surprised if you see similar stories in 2015 and 2016.

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Obama Is Supposedly Getting Ready to Close Gitmo. Here Are 9 Other Times We’ve Heard That.

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Dot Earth Blog: Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers?

by Myrna Posted on October 10, 2014

A fresh push builds for Peru to bring law and order to its violent Amazon forest frontier. Link: Dot Earth Blog: Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers? ; ; ;

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Dot Earth Blog: Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers?

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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Defenders of Children’s Rights

by Myrna Posted on October 10, 2014

Two campaigners for children’s rights are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Original article:  Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Defenders of Children’s Rights ; ; ;

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Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Defenders of Children’s Rights

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Do You Know Where Your Old iPhone is Going?

by SebastiGoloubev Posted on September 29, 2014

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Do You Know Where Your Old iPhone is Going?

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