VICE heads to North Dakota fracking territory to meet the new generation of young and wealthy directional drillers who are taking part in the politically loaded and controversial method of obtaining oil.

Images courtesy of Marina Hoermanseder

If there is one star designer who stole the show at Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week, it’s Marina Hoermanseder. The French-Austrian designer may not admit it, but she has a bit of a medical fetish. So much that her main inspiration is 18th century orthopedic medical gear, the buckled straps of hospitals and insanity wards. The medical pieces used to help people with back problems, broken necks or deformed wrists are now on the runway.

While you may not see crutches on the runway (though there are in some fashion shoots), the results are crazy. She combines red silk ruffles, inspired by smallpox, and head accessories that looks like plaster casts. All in all, she has one goal in mind: To give women a symbolic spine of self-confidence in fashion.

A former intern of Alexander McQueen, Hoermanseder is pretty fresh out of school. She has already drawn the attention of Lady Gaga, dressed Eve for a gala and seen her garb on Peaches. Combining fetish elements, sharp contrasts and unconventional beauty made from vegetable-tanned, hand-lacquered leather, she always turns something typically ugly into something beautiful.

As she gears up for a catwalk show in Delhi to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we chatted over the phone about her love of medical research and the art of profit.

VICE: How did you get interested in 18th century orthopedic medical equipment?
Marina Hoermanseder: I used to work a lot with corsets. I wanted to learn how to make corsets from the renaissance era and I found an orthopedic medical corset from the 18th century. I couldn’t let go anymore—I thought it was interesting for its medical point of view but also old pictures were old beautiful. They have a creepy side to them, if someone has a deformed back, but still the photos were so beautiful. I have the idea to transform something that isn’t positive into something beautiful and fashionable. It gives me a lot of ideas for my leather work. Inside outs, insanity, closing leather, I really enjoy medical research, to be honest.

Do you have a medical fetish?
Not at all. When I was a child, I was always running around, I was a naughty kid. I did a lot of sports and ended up at the hospital for breaking my arm or my leg. I was afraid of doctors. Even my parents today don’t really understand how I’m inspired by something I was really afraid of. Maybe it's a subconscious thing?

I’ve seen crutches used in fashion shoots with your work, why not the runway?
I don’t think I would do that. I don’t want to go that far. I want someone to see the collection without showing crutches or wheelchairs but still have the idea of “Oh, this is pretty medical.”

I was at your fashion show in Berlin. How has your vision changed?
I did study economics before studying fashion, my parents requested it. It was a good thing, I’m very happy about it. Now I know all the business stuff that’s going on in the office, I’m not dependent on someone else. I know the business side. I don’t only do leather and fetish garb because I wanted to show I can also do fashion someone would wear. I want to see my work in the streets. I’m not doing it for the sake of art forever, but to get attention with show pieces but adding commercial pieces with it which have details—leather buckles, collars, belts—that you would still recognize is me. The new bags, too. I have a lot of fun with accessories.

How did Lady Gaga get a hold of your work?
I got an email from her studio while I was on the road in Italy. I had to make a break because I had this email. I didn’t know if it was true, you just get an email. Gaga always says she supports young artists and students. Eve the rapper saw my collection and after the show her stylist said “She wants it! She needs it!” I said yes, but I need to put it on her myself. It was my baby and I wanted to have it worn correctly. So I went to this gala in London. Peaches wore my pieces on tour, too. I would love to have Michelle Obama or Kate Middleton wear my stuff because it has an influence on sales.

In your spring/summer 2015 collection, why did you decide on putting a mouth piece plaster on a dress?
It was dual: who am I putting this onto? It looks so much better on dark skin but it also looks weird having his half-white mouth on a black model. I have critics I’ve read who said: “The bride is not allowed to talk.” Her mouth is closed in this thing. But I didn’t even think of this. It comes from an orthopedic corset for your neck. If your neck is not straight, you wear it. I rebuilt what i saw in an old medical book. I knew it would catch attention and I love working with leather. I love moulding lips.

You say you’re giving women a spine of self-confidence in fashion?
It comes with the territory of using scoliosis corsets. It does give the spine support, the spine support is not only medical but you stand differently. You really feel taller. In the last collection, I’ve also worked with legs, while the skirt comes from an orthopedic wristband that has three buckles, it led to collages and the straps came around the whole arm and skirts.

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Image via Flickr user trec_lit.
Canada has been doing some pretty incredible shit when it comes to women’s rights internationally. Just this past week, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird traveled to London to speak up for girls at a global summit on ending child marriage. And back in May, Prime Minister Harper was praised by likes of the president of the World Bank and the United Nations Secretary General when he hosted a summit for ending the preventable deaths of poor mothers and their babies in developing countries.

But, even as Canada pours millions into ending child marriage and billions on maternal and child health, critics say that Canada's not doing enough to help some of the young girls who need it most: pregnant child brides, who often have little say over when or whether they have babies.  

Fourteen million girls are married before they turn 18 in developing countries each year. With hips that are typically not ready to bear babies, they’re five times more likely to die from childbirth than girls in their 20s. About 70,000 die from complications related to pregnancy each year.

The prospects for their babies aren’t so bright either. They’re more likely to be stillborn or die just a few days after they come into the world. And those that survive are typically less healthy and less weighty than babies born to women in their 20s.

The statistics above might be heartbreaking, but there’s some good news: apart from a serious effort by Canada and others to end child marriage, part of this problem can be solved with condoms. Well, not just condoms, but family planning programs involving education, contraceptives, and other resources to help couples plan for and time the birth of their babies.

But Canada has a spotty record when it comes to doling out condoms and other family planning tools. In 2010, when Prime Minister Harper pledged $5 billion to help mothers and their babies in the world’s poorest countries, he also said that none of the money would go to family planning or abortion. In the face of heavy criticism, he quickly reversed his decision on family planning. But, by March 2014, less than one percent of the $2.28 billion the Canadian government had spent on maternal health went to family planning programs, Action Canada for Population and Development (ACPD) reported.  

ACPD’s executive director, Sandeep Prasad, says this is a huge problem for teenage girls because nine out of ten teenage pregnancies occur within a marriage.

“Generally, young girls who are forced into marriage don’t have agency, right? They don’t have choice,” says Cicely McWilliam, senior advisor at Save the Children Canada. “They are inherently going to have a more difficult time making their own healthcare choices than someone who can choose when and whom they wish to marry themselves.”

More than half of the girls under 18 are married in six out of the ten countries where Canada’s maternal health efforts are focused. Many of them are among the 222 million women in developing countries who don’t have access to contraception.

But Rosemary McCarney, president and chief executive officer of Plan Canada, says that family planning is “embedded in most of the programming” that groups funded by the Canadian government are doing to cut down on the deaths of mothers and babies.

“When women come in to get their children vaccinated, you’re talking about that,” McCarney explained. “When they come for their antenatal visits, you’re advocating exclusive breastfeeding for the health of the child. Exclusive breastfeeding also has some efficacy on delayed fertility. There are all kinds of ways that it’s part and parcel of what we all do.”

At the same time, Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, says that there simply isn’t enough funding dedicated to family planning internationally. While more governments have started to pay attention to the need for it, we may not even have accurate data on the scale of the problem of early pregnancies. When the deaths of young brides go unrecorded in poor countries, they are “lost in the statistics,” he says.

“The bottom line on all of this is the status of women,” he adds, explaining that we have to pay attention to gender equality to create lasting change.  

But Diana Rivington, the Canadian International Development Agency’s former director of human development and gender equality, says that, while the Canadian government boasts about “saving mummies and babies,” it’s not dedicating enough resources to promoting women's rights and gender equality. These two things are critical to ending forced marriage and child pregnancies in the long-term, she explains. 

Between 2006 and 2012, only one to two percent of Canada’s overseas development assistance was spent on projects focused mainly on gender equality, says a report published earlier this year by a women's policy group involving the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, Oxfam Canada, and other Canadian non-profits. Since 2008, less and less aid has been given to organizations dedicated to women’s equality in developing countries, the report adds.

“If you do not see women and girls as independent actors in their own right, if you don't see that women and girls as much as men should be choosing the timing and spacing of their families, you have a real challenge," Rivington says. “You have to see women and girls as valuable and as worthy of being treated independently… In the short term you save women and girls' lives by doing maternal health and building up a health system, but then you should also be providing family planning information and supporting that.”


@alia_d

Everyone knows juggalos gather once a year to celebrate the Dark Carnival and Faygo, but the Gathering of the Juggalos serves as more than an excuse for juggalos to launch cheap soda onto their friends’ cars. The music festival allows people society generally frowns upon—especially women, or juggalettes as Insane Clown Posse's female fans are called—to feel comfortable in their bodies.

At this year’s event, all types of juggalettes danced in mists of Faygo as they flaunted their booties and butts—or “juicy poopers” as the Busey Beauty tent described gals’ rear-ends. Girls flashed other girls' cameras; a lesbian breathed fire over a little person giving a lap dance to a man in a wheelchair; and a mom squeezed her titties in front of her son at the Miss Juggalette beauty pageant.

Everyone was freaky, and few people critiqued juggalettes' bodies. Even during the beauty contest, few men catcalled girls, and most of the girls complimented each other instead of throwing each other down the stairs Showgirls-style.

“I love [being a juggalette] because, unlike everyone else, they accept that I am who I am,” said Miss Cyainide, an underground musician who competed in the contest. “Even though I’m fat, they accept that. Everyone here treats each other like one.” 

In honor of these sexy ladies, here are our favorite NSFW photos of some of the beautiful little people, beauty queens, and wrestlers we encountered at the Gathering of the Juggalos. 

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1987

I’m up in the Angeles Mountains with my friend, Stephen, sleeping in a car and photographing a bunch of religious cultists. The last ceremony before we leave is conducted by a sexy young witch who conjures up orgasmic spells for an enthusiastic circle of nerdy worshipers. When I take a picture she plays to the camera and I get a twinge in my dick. After the show Stephen talks to her and she agrees to meet us halfway down the mountain at a folksy café. Her name is Raven and she’s 20 years old. She’s a good witch with a regal attitude. She is accompanied by a young cartoonish guy in a black cape, whom we all ignore. Stephen has a portable recorder and asks her questions about witch stuff. She cuts him off mid-sentence and asks me what kind of pictures do I take.

“I photograph stuff and things, you know. I’d like to photograph you.” We lock eyes and I grin. “I think we could make some good pictures.”

“You’re a very lucky man,” she says. “I’ve been looking for you. I want you to photograph me, explicit photographs like in Penthouse magazine. I know you from lives lived in other times, and you can know me in ways other men will never know.”

“That’s great, Raven. Can I get your phone number?”

A couple of days later I call and she’s got it all set up. I pick her up in the Camaro and we check into a little tea-cup and potpourri hotel in Newport Beach. I don’t have any money but I have a credit card with a $2,000 limit and six rolls of Kodachrome. She brings four suitcases stuffed with props and lingerie. I open a cheap bottle of champagne and roll a joint. An hour later I’m lying on the bed taking pictures and Raven’s panties are on the floor. She’s straddling a broom handle like she’s ready for takeoff. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” I tell her. “Let’s fuck.”

Raven says she wants to, she really really wants to, but she can’t make love to me until I’ve professed my love to her. I have to say the words, I love you. “And then,” she tells me, “you can experience me completely and your life will be my life and my life will be yours.”

I don’t want to make love and I don’t want to swap lives. I just want to fuck, and it feels a bit premature for vows of devotion. “I’m sorry, Raven, I don’t love you.”

“That’s a shame,” Raven says. “If you change your mind let me know, but I won’t wait forever." I don’t change my mind and we don’t fuck, though a couple of hours later I talk her into nasty poses while I jerk off.

The next day she signs a model release and gives me a hug. She asks me would I like to go to Disneyland and bring my six-year-old son, Austin. It sounds like fun, taking Austin to Disneyland with a real witch, so I make a date for the next weekend. On Saturday I pick up Austin in San Diego and Raven in Santa Ana and we all go, holding hands, to Disneyland. She’s in full costume—all black and flowing, red lips and long red fingernails like bloody razor blades. People point at her and she loves the attention. She plays her part like a method actor. Austin has a good time and rides the rides with Raven while I mostly watch and take hidden hits off a stowaway reefer. I enjoy myself and put everything on the card.

I’ve been crashing at my friend Gus’s art studio in the Valley. Gus is in New York working on a movie, so I’ve got the place to myself. I invite Raven to spend a couple of days and a night with me so we can make some more pictures, black and white, fine art for posterity.

Raven doesn’t drive so I cruise down to Santa Ana and bring her back up to Van Nuys. She talks about heavy metal music and magic spells. We make photographs until the sun goes down, but I’m not inspired and this work is never going to hang on the walls of a museum. I uncork wine and cook a salmon loaf with dill sauce and little potatoes.

Later in the evening she disappears into the bedroom for an hour and comes out wearing lace and leather, nine-inch heels and a pointy witch hat. She tells me she can wait no longer for my devotion and then spritzes me with an atomizer of oily love-potion. She closes her eyes and chants in witch lingo and sign language telling some god or goddess to set things right. She kneels between my legs and tells me this is the last time she’s going to ask, do I love her?

“Why does it matter so much?” I tell her. “Surely you don’t love me.”

She scrapes her claw-like fingernails across my denim button-fly. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you,” she says.

I’ve got a boner and what the fuck, I go ahead and say it, I love you, and with that she unlocks the gates. We have sex but she insists on complete control and I insist on a condom and it’s not all that much fun. In the morning, as I’m driving her home, she tells me we need to start looking for a place of our own so she can move out of her parents’ house. She tells me I should probably get a job and another credit card. For the next three months I hide out like the typical male asshole and don’t return her phone calls and eventually the calls stop and I mail her the slides.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

West Africa is being plagued by a new outbreak of Ebola—a terrifying disease that causes its victims to bleed to death from the inside out. Ebola has no cure, and the latest epidemic is spreading fast.

VICE News visited Liberia, where many feel the outbreak began in the bushmeat markets of Lofa. Western scientists feel that the consumption and preparation of meat from monkeys, fruit bats, and other forest animals is behind the transmission of Ebola, and possibly a new supervirus—which, if left uncontrolled, could kill a third of the world's population.

Bowe Bergdahl. AP Photo/U.S. Army

This is the second installment of Robert Young Pelton's account of his involvement with the 2009 search for Private Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. Read the first part here.

Events following the mysterious disappearance of Private Bowe Bergdahl from his Army base in Afghanistan were investigated thoroughly in 2009... but without Bergdahl providing any input. The report is still classified, but what we can be certain of is that, up until this point, the Army hasn’t uncovered anything serious enough to prevent Bergdahl from returning to active duty at a desk job in San Antonio, Texas. Then again, keeping him as an active duty soldier means he remains squarely under the auspices of the military justice system. But despite his new job and promotion to Sergeant (as well as over $350,000 in back pay), intense public and political scrutiny and outrage over the prisoner swap of the Taliban Five—as the five Mullahs from the Taliban’s inner circle came to be known—means that Bergdahl now is facing another exhaustive military investigation to endure alongside his pro bono attorney.

Discerning the truth—or at least an agreeable version of his motivation—about Bergdahl’s disappearance on June 30, 2009, is now wrapped up with outrage over the exchange of five Taliban Mullahs for the safe return of the last American POW. What we will learn is that the seemingly opportunistic and hasty release of the Taliban Five from GTMO was going to happen regardless of Bergdahl’s fate.

What is acutely apparent is that many are passing judgment on Bergdahl without all the facts, including those regarding this young man’s life before his service in the military. This is exemplified by a court case currently under review in Hailey, Idaho, where as of today a judge will determine whether CNN has any merit in its suit against the Blaine County Sheriff Office and its decision to withhold, according to the prosecuting attorney, an “inactive law enforcement record” from November 2009 that did not result in any charges filed.

The record in question was requested by the Cable News Network last month, along with three other law enforcement records related to the Bergdahls that were released. The request for the fourth was has been twice denied on grounds that releasing it would constitute an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” according to Blaine County Sheriff Gene Ramsey and the prosecutor assigned to the case. But will a 20-year-old police record regarding Bowe Bergdahl as a minor teach us anything relevant about his kidnapping, or will it only serve as more fodder for the 24-hour “Two Minutes of Hate”, as George Orwell described the generic focusing of hate on an individual?  

It is important to look back and see how things have changed. Even when Bergdahl’s kidnapping was linked to allegedly walking off his base, he was a hero awaiting release. In February of 2013, John Brennan flashed a yellow Bowe Bergdahl bracelet during his televised Senate hearing before lawmakers voted on his nomination to become CIA director. US Senator John McCain, well-known for his status as a former POW, staunchly defended the swap of prisoners for Bergdahl as late as February 2014 before flip-flopping on the issue when public opinion began to sway the other way. Even Paul McCartney and Queen Latifah wore Bergdahl bracelets as part of a PR partnership between veteran’s groups and the Grammy’s.  

During Memorial Day weekend 2012, Bergdahl’s parents Bob and Jani were the focal point of over half a million veteran bikers at a rally in Washington, DC. After years of frustration with what they viewed as stagnation on the part of the government and military, they decided to go public about their son’s kidnapping. President Obama finally called the Bergdahls that weekend to discuss the matter. The Bergdahls had been concerned about what they perceived to be negligence and inaction regarding the government’s effort to get their son released from his captors. The elder Bergdahls, whom Bowe has yet to speak to since his return for unexplained reasons, were even invited to the Rose Garden at the White House upon Bowe’s release to publicly welcome him home.

It seemed all of America wanted Bergdahl back—until five bearded Pashtuns were included in the swap.

Following his release, the unspoken question that belies the media’s coverage of the debacle is whether everyone would’ve wanted Bowe back had they been briefed on the trade-off for his freedom.

Except viewing Bergdahl’s release as a prisoner “swap” is not only injurious to Bergdahl’s position as the victim of a criminal kidnapping, but also irrelevant. The five Talib prisoners had been renditioned and imprisoned eight years before Bergdahl’s disappearance. President Obama’s repeated assertion ever since his election was that he wanted Gitmo closed and the policy of enemy combatants being held without charges behind us. The Mullahs in question were captured fighting a war that had been going on for six years between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. They actually surrendered to the Americans. They would have either been deported back to their home countries—oddly enough, to Pakistan, where Bergdahl was held—or transferred to a facility in the States, or even The Hague, if charges were pressed. Had they been released quietly along with hundreds of other prisoners, most Americans wouldn’t even know who they were or why they were renditioned in the first place. But they were released without the consent of Congress—and quickly, in a very public manner.

It should be noted that the Taliban issued both the video of Bergdahl’s transfer and that of the Mullahs’ joyous arrival in Qatar. Those videos, along with the five publicly seen videos made under duress and during his kidnapping, have shaped the young man’s international infamy.

Contrasting the media frenzy, mostly from the right, was a June Gallup poll showing that America was split on the idea of prisoner swaps (an opinion that hasn’t changed much since a similar 1985 survey). The media focused on the outrage, and those looking to embarrass the Obama administration in an election year fed the press stories that didn’t hold up to fact checking. The list of soldiers who apparently died or were wounded looking for Bergdahl include some tasked with guarding election polls and others engaged in routine patrols. If any American soldiers did die while specifically searching for Bergdahl, the facts have yet to be presented. But the area called RC East did engage in a frenzied attempt to run down dozens of dead-end leads long after all indications were that Bergdahl was in Pakistan—a fact known by July 2 to the military because his captors told the media.

Bergdahl’s release, then, is just the latest episode of confused frustration for a man who went adventuring and ending up losing his liberty in a war officially dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom.

The story of finding Bowe Bergdahl (the on-the-ground logistics of which are detailed in Part 1, published last week) started back in Afghanistan in the early summer of 2009. Working out of a gaudy pink house in Kabul, the military was able to ping Bergdahl’s exact location twice on the day of his disappearance. Our network made it clear that the kidnappers were high-tailing to the relative safety of Pakistan, only 60 miles away. By the end of that week it was clear to our team and “TF,” or Task Force 373, that Bergdahl had made it over the border into Pakistan, well outside the official jurisdiction of NATO and US forces.

There was a desperate sense of urgency to stop Bergdahl from crossing the border.  But when his predicament became known by numerous Haqqani and Taliban members contacting the media on July 2, it was too late—he was already neck-deep in a much more complicated (and darker) world.

Once word was on the street that an American soldier was missing, a massive wave of disinformation drowned out the few critical details needed to locate and collect him. Within hours of Bergdahl’s kidnap, the same media outlets that had agreed to keep New York Times Dave Rohde’s kidnapping secret for seven months began blasting out highly critical articles and opinions, and pundits (some who even suggested that the Taliban shoot their captor) disparaged Bergdahl and his sympathizers’ credibility. Then, perhaps chastened by the rush to condemn the 23 year old, other reporters who actually visited Bergdahl’s home town and friends in Hailey, Idaho, came away with a very different profile—CNN, for instance, titled their 2009 report on the POW “Bowe Bergdahl, an adventurer and gentleman.”

By July 2 or 3, between GPS-related pings from his kidnappers and on-the-ground intelligence provided by our AfPax network, we had numerous reasons to believe that Bergdahl had been taken to Pakistan after being sold to Mullah Sangeen and Siraj Haqqani, his direct report and military commander for the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network. We also had reason to believe via our contacts that Bergdahl was being held in the same converted clinic in Miran Shah, North Waziristan, as David Rohde, the American journalist taken captive just 11 days earlier.

We knew this because my team had been tracking Rohde’s location and condition at the request of his then-pregnant wife. After seven months, she was mortified at the slow and arguably questionable handling of her husband’s release by contractors hired by the New York Times. The Haqqanis had been demanding seven GTMO prisoners and $7 million for Rohde’s release, a ransom that had been reduced from $25 million and 15 prisoners. The New York Times could have been instrumental in releasing prisoners from GTMO but days before Rohde’s escape (or rescue), his hostage negotiation team had gathered around a million dollars in AIG insurance money to buy him back.

Now that Rohde had flown the coop, the Haqqanis had lost their “golden sparrow”—local slang for a lucrative hostage.

Despite all this horror, something even more disturbing was afoot. An operative coming out of the region, going by the name of “WILLI,” contacted one of our people because it was suggested to him that he work with us on what was supposed to be a lucrative subscription contract for the US military. The man claimed to be an American surgeon under contract by the kidnap-and-rescue insurance provider for the New York Times that was handling Rohde’s abduction.. We passed, but we did set up a meeting later on with Michael Furlong, the government contractor who was our go-between for WILLI, at the Meridien Hotel in Dubai.

During this meeting, the American surgeon described to Furlong how he had arranged someone locally to arrange for Rohde’s guards’ nan delivered bread to be drugged, and how he had also slipped a rope into the house to allow Rohde and his two Afghan friends to escape. The implication, as we were told, was that this covert bread-poisoning mission saved the New York Times around $1 million. David Rohde insists that no such rescue happened but also admits he has not told the complete story in his book or his three part New York Times article. It is not unusual for local doctors to be used to gain access to militant hideouts, as in the case of the doctor who confirmed the location of Osama bin Laden.

Not coincidently, the person in charge of Rohde’s rescue or at least kidnapping was retired CIA officer and founder of the Agency’s Counter Terrorism division Duane “Dewey” Clarridge. The convicted (and later presidentially pardoned) perjurer is an outspoken dirty-trick specialist who at the time of Bergdahl’s capture was in his late 70s. He is famous, or infamous, for his involvement in the Iran-Contra disaster, the Contras, the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, his alleged linkage to the forged Niger Yellow Cake letters that contributed the Iraq WMD debacle, and a long list of other questionable, geopolitically-destabilizing, never dull acts.

Clarridge and Furlong insisted that bringing his network of “Jason Bournes” together for the New York Times could provide real benefit to the US military. His byzantine and now defunct network of American contractors, cranky right wing bloggers, conservative celebrities like convicted-former-Marine Corps-colonel-turned-conservative-pundit Ollie North and espionage-thriller novelist Brad Thor, along with a haphazard collection of hired Afghans, could provide a robust flow of intelligence and public spin,  while keeping tabs on the movements of Bergdahl and the intentions of his Haqanni captors. The only problem was that the offer of services as citizen spies for the US military in Pakistan and Afghanistan was illegal. We were not in the spying business, had been through Title 10/Title 50 mill and gave an emphatic “no.”

That didn’t mean that the US military couldn’t use Clarridge’s ad hoc network. In 2009 the US. military command was quite honest about their lack of visibility on the ground in Afghanistan. Over the years, the war had shifted from a peacekeeping mission to a very active insurgency. Based on the success of the “Surge” and “The Awakening” (essentially hiring the locals to provide their own security) in Iraq, the mantra for US operations in Afghanistan became “counterinsurgency” and the winning of “hearts and minds.”

This was all fine and good, except the American military had no idea what was actually on the minds and in the hearts of most Afghans. US forces lived inside walled bases, drove around in six-ton armored vehicles, and literally had to pay experts a lot of money to glean what the Afghans were doing and thinking in response to US occupation. Worse yet, the war was being waged by fighters who came from Pakistan to fight as mujahedeen inside Afghanistan, the former, again, being a place where the US military was not allowed to operate.

In my 15 years of traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan, I had built a network of major and minor contacts inside the hostile and friendly forces in both countries. My solution was simple: provide a 24/7 feed of Afghan and Pakistan news, which made understanding the region as easy as reading about a soldier’s home town. We would work in Pakistan and Afghanistan and provide a fresh, unique source of in depth information.

Keeping US-armed forces out of Pakistan was critical to American operations in Afghanistan, as well as ensuring that plainclothes spies were relegated to the CIA without any direct connection to the military (“Title 10-Title 50 issues” is the phrase commonly used to refer to this delineation). Any action by US forces inside Pakistan could have—and probably would have—been considered an act of war. Hence the interest in the AfPak network, as our primary objective was to collect good, local intelligence from trusted sources and stay as far outside of the military structure and workflow as possible.

But we would soon find out that this was impossible.

In this image taken from video obtained from the Voice of Jihad website, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, Bergdahl sits in a vehicle guarded by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan. AP Photo/Voice of Jihad Website via AP video

The problem, both in Afghanistan and in regards to Bergdahl’s capture, was not the lack of information but rather the oversaturation of bad information. If you were on the ground in the tribal areas, you didn’t need to be a spy to figure out where Bowe Bergdahl was or who was holding him. “The American” was the topic of teahouse chatter from Miran Shah to Kabul. For some reason, certain elements within the American military refused to acknowledge this truth and continued their “search” for the missing private long after my team was told to back off our search after locating Bergdahl’s probable whereabouts.

And it wasn’t just our team and the local tribes who knew of Bergdahl and his captors’ location. As early as July 2, 2009, the US media connected the dots on its own. Taliban commander Bahram Khan Kochi called AFP, and Mullah Sangeen called Reuters and the Associated Press to relay specific details about how Bergdahl was captured while also taking the opportunity to chide the Americans for attacking the southeastern areas of Paktia and Ghazni (when it was clear that their hostage was being held in Pakistan). The public knows this because it was US military spokesperson Captain Elizabeth Mathias who relayed it all to the world media on on July 2.

Much of this information on Bergdahl was lost in the effort to promote  the Afghan version of“The Surge,” a July 2 US military operation to retake Marjah, a dusty area in the south.

“They have put pressure on the people in these two provinces and if that does not stop we will kill him,” Sangeen told Reuters over the phone. Sangeen also told CNN: “The US soldier visited a military post in Yusuf Khel District and got drunk. He was ambushed while returning to his car and taken to a safe place.”  

Mullah Sangeen’s version of events was that Bergdahl had left the base and gone AWOL without any intention of joining the Taliban, as so many of his detractors have suggested since his release. But maybe Sangeen was slightly mistaken, since he wasn’t present at the kidnapping himself. The local version is that Bergdahl left the base to visit with his Afghan National Police buddies, or maybe less dramatic—as some of have claimed—he was nabbed outside the base mid-crap, pants around his ankles. Later on it would be discovered that this was not the first time Bergdahl had wandered off the base, nor was it that unusual for anyone to leave the tiny enclosure.

We tracked Bergdahl as he headed south and east, and not just because of our gut feeling that he had been sold to the same people who had held (but lost) David Rohde a few days before. A trusted sources told us he had an  employee kidnapped in the same area by the same tribe around this time. We passed on those kidnapping routes to the secret team looking to find Bergdahl. Aerial-eavesdropping assets followed the phone signals as Bergdahl headed to Pakistan—directly contradicting the intense military attacks south of Kabul and elsewhere for weeks afterwards.

While we, along with some elite elements of the military command in Afghanistan, felt almost certain that we knew exactly where Bergdahl was being held, at the end of an intense week, we were told to “wave off” and his unit initiated a search-and-rescue campaign inside Afghanistan, chasing dozens of bad tips. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the military continued to insist that his kidnappers had initially planned to smuggle the soldier across the border into Pakistan, but due to their aggressive missile strikes and Pakistani bombing attacks on the region, they then decided to move him to Taliban-controlled areas south of Kabul. The military version of Bergdahl staying in Afghanistan beyond early June has never been proven to be true.

Although our initial call was that he had entered Pakistan early on, two weeks after my team (and, independently, others) had confirmed that Bowe was being held in Pakistan, his unit’s search-and-rescue mission continued unabated inside Afghanistan. Leaflets were still being dropped, doors were still being kicked in, and violence was used to intimidate the locals into handing over the kidnapped American. Even Mark Bissonette, the SEAL Team Six member who participated in the bin Laden raid before authoring No Easy Day, has recounted his previously top-secret assignments to locate Bergdahl south of Kabul—all while it was known by others that he was being held in Pakistan. On July 14, 2009, Bergdahl’s kidnappers made a 28-minute video of their hostage. Four days later, it was posted online. The goal was to show the Bergdahl was being treated well, fed and wearing local garb.

After his kidnapping, Bergdahl was first taken from the former clinic in North Waziristan because it was where Rohde and two locals were being held. Then Bergdahl was driven out of Miran Shah to Palasin, northeast of Miran Shah. His captors kept him at a farm just off the road, guarded by the father of Mullah Sangeen.

On paper and in speeches, Pakistan was technically America’s ally in the war against Islamic fundamentalist violence. It was an extremely conservative Islamic nation that was largely established in response to the marginalizing of, and violence against, Indian Muslims following WWII. The tribal areas along the west of Pakistan make for an odd frontier of clans that are linked to Afghanistan ethnically, but territorially divided by the Durand Line. At the time of Bergdahl’s kidnapping, a covert war was just gaining momentum: the use of a rotating covey of unmanned aircraft to maintain persistent surveillance on targets who had been legally cleared by the CIA for targeted assassination. Since 2004, no more than 4 strikes a year had been launched. In 2008, more people would die from drone strikes than the previous four years.

The CIA had a rapidly growing assassination program with what must have been a quiet blessing from Pakistani government. But the initiative was seemingly separate from the efforts of the international forces in Afghanistan. This arrangement complicated the sensitive task of retrieving Bowe: Sending American troops to get him in Pakistan would cause great embarrassment and jeopardize this lethal but still secret program.

At the same time, the 2008 election had brought in President Obama, who pledged to scale down the war in Afghanistan. Privately, he was being asked by his theater commanders in Afghanistan to ramp it up. He didn’t like it when ISAF commander General McKiernan told him that they would need 30,000 more troops in country. Obama refused, McKiernan was forced out, and President Obama liked it even less when the general’s replacement, Stanley McChrystal, requested three times that number of troops.

Obama eventually agreed to McChrystal’s replacement, General David Petraeus, who continued “the Surge” after his predecessor resigned in the wake of Michael Hastings’ Rolling Stone story. And then there was Pakistan. It was clear that the country was once again the center of gravity and safe area for Taliban, even if the militant group had initially left that country in 1995.

Obama’s solution was to recognize the support the Taliban had in the south and make peace with them—via Pakistan.

This more sophisticated solution was why the late Richard Holbrooke was brought in. He was a large, brusque man, famous and respected for being instrumental in navigating the jigsaw puzzle that was the Yugoslav Wars and brokering peace in the Balkans. He was tapped for a newly created position: special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. We were asked to help him monitor the chaos inside Pakistan during a brutal military attack on South Wazirstan. Part of his job was to negotiate a political settlement between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan. As is traditional in the region, the first matter at hand is release of prisoners back to their families. Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of Afghan and Pakistani prisoners were being held at GTMO and other gray zones outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. The other more simplistic demand made by the Taliban was that all foreign troops leave Afghanistan.

But then as if by divine intervention, there was Bergdahl. Had Bergdahl not been kidnapped, there would be no prisoner “swap.” Only a ludicrous on sided demand by a losing insurgency to release all their prisoners But as we will see in Part Three Bergdahl was the first pawn pushed onto the diplomatic chessboard that broke this stalement.  

This was the situation in January 2009, when Holbrooke came aboard.

The following April, under Holbrooke’s watch, Barnett Rubin, a Pennsylvania native and political scientist considered to be an expert on Afghanistan and South Asia, began negotiations with the Taliban. His conduits were a former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan and Abdul Salam Zaeef, a prisoner released from GTMO in 2005 who had materialized all across the internet as the iPhone-waving spokesman for the talibs during the early days of the American insurgency. Rubin would go on to write the forward for Zaeef’s 2010 autobiography that detailed the life of a man who helped establish the Taliban. It was clear that the Taliban were getting cozy with the United States again.

By early 2011, Rubin, Holbrooke, and Zaaef had brokered a basic deal: Bergdahl would be returned safely for six of the Mullah Omar’s inner circle currently being held at GTMO. If there were additional terms, they were not made public.  

Then, perhaps inevitably, the unexpected happened. In December 2010, Richard Holbrooke died of heart failure. On February 2, 2011, during a particularly vigorous workout on a GTMO elliptical machine, 49-year old Awa Gul, the sixth talib, died of cardiac arrest. Gul had left the Taliban a year before 9/11 and was working with the CIA on a surrender in Nangahar Province before being renditioned to GTMO in December 2001 on his way to meet American officials.   

Before being put under for a risky heart surgery, Holbrooke told the doctor: “You’ve got to end this war in Afghanistan.”

He was joking.

US Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee February 7, 2013 in Washington, DC while wearing a Save Bergdahl bracelet. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

The American public was not let in on the backchannel negotiations to end the war and Bowe’s utility in moving talks forward  Back home, Bergdahl’s role began to take on its own narrative.

On July 18, 2009, the world first saw Bowe as a captive via a 28-minute video released on the Taliban’s al Emaara media wing. The video was filmed on July 14, the same day that President Obama announced he was sending 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

The video, featuring an Arabic Taliban “logo,” depicts a bearded Bergdahl with a shaved head who is eating while wearing local garb. After flashing his dog tags to the camera, there is a lengthy series of clumsy questions posed by an English-speaking Afghan. The POW’s answers are predictable and, in my opinion, seemed staged—they mostly revolve around the futility of America winning a war in Afghanistan. In moments that ring more sincerely, Bergdahl mentions missing his girlfriend, grandfather, and his family. He tries to cry. He asks for his government to “bring him home.”

By Christmas Day, another video was released showing Bowe as a “war prisoner” in full military gear, including sunglasses. The ten-minute video also (somewhat randomly) included footage of a number of vets complaining about the war, patched onto the end.

By the following spring the “Surge” of US troops into Afghanistan was heating up. ISAF Commander General McChrystal and intelligence chief General Mike Flynn liked what my company, AfPax, was doing with its local network of information, news, and intelligence providers. They were trying to figure out a way for us to work together. Having easy the tribal violent hinterlands, we had direct connections to various leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan—which would have allowed a largely ignorant policy situation much-needed insight into the violence that was beginning to envelop the region in a way that hadn’t been seen since the Afghans fought off the Soviets. For various reasons (primarily our suitors’ increasingly apparent desire to use our intelligence to track hostile targets), we were unable to reach a satisfactory agreement. Our goal, which was synonymous with the theater commander, was to simply let them know what the Afghans were doing.

Still, my team was kept busy putting out fires we didn’t start in the west, south and north, such as when Special Operations called in airstrikes that killed dozens of our civilian contacts—people who would have otherwise potentially been on the scene providing direct connections and insight to the US command. That insight could have perhaps helped tamp down the violence.

We tracked Bergdahl via a network of Zadrans and Kochi businessmen. We were able to keep tabs on his condition. Unlike most criminal kidnappings in Afghanistan, unless the impasse of Guantanamo Bay prisoners the Taliban wanted were released, a deal with Bergdahl wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. They also demanded the release of a number of detainees (at one point the list expanded to include almost 50 prisoners) held inside the secret US prison at Bagram, along with a cash payment of $25 million.

By spring 2010, the US government was in all-out Surge mode. At the time, “retreat” was not even in their vocabulary. No one was going home, at least not yet. In the fall of 2009, we managed to strike an amicable deal with our government contactor contact Michael Furlong and his ex-CIA counterpart Dewey Clarridge, and the $24 million that they had been dangling like a carrot to underwrite our AfPax network was finally handed over. Furlong then put together another bizarrely-selected group of Czech video game producers, former Delta Group commander, and a host of various “contractors” who set up shop at a luxurious Turkish-built camp near the Kabul airport—complete with pool, full bar and palm tree decorated swimming pool. This group would then take Dewey’s network and feed it into the military-intel chain via a fusion center, much of it with the source stripped out.

On March 14, 2010, the New York Times printed a row of large photos above the top fold. One of them was a portrait of me. The headline read “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants” atop an extensive article that identified a legal gray area in which civilians were allegedly profiting from providing intelligence in Afghanistan to the US military, supposedly with the goal of finding and killing militants. The article got it half right. It was written by Mark Mazzetti, and after its publication I spoke openly with him about my work in the region. Thankfully, the Times later corrected and amended the article, pointing out that I was a writer and not a government contractor. But the disinformation contained in the piece was effective—if the goal was to effectively terminate any beneficial relationship my team had with the military in Afghanistan, then it did its job.

There was also something decidedly strange lingering in all of this mess. At the time I had never met one of the men featured alongside my portrait on the front page of the paper of record. The man pictured was former CIA officer Dewey Clarridge, and as has been made apparent by the details laid out above, a man I became very interested in following the Times article. I also knew that a very unusual group of individuals had appeared on the New York Times payroll about a month after Rohde’s October 2008 kidnapping, and I was even more certain that I wanted nothing to do with them.

In December 2008, the New York Times activated their kidnap, recovery, and extraction policy with insurer AIG in response to David Rohde’s kidnapping. In an effort to reduce their liability and protect their client, AIG subsidiary Clayton Consultants, a well-known hostage-negotiating firm started by a State Department employee, was assigned to handle the situation.

Clayton Consultants had been sold to Triple Canopy, a private US security company, in 2007, and someone decided to bring in Boston-based American International Security Corporation (AISC) headed by retired Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel Michael Taylor. Taylor had been working on multi-million dollar government contract training Afghan Commandos. He would later serve prison time after being convicted of rigging the bid. Taylor had been charged in 1995 by Robert Monahan, a Massachusetts State Trooper, with assisting drug traffickers by providing phony passports and doing a jailbreak in Florida.

After Taylor was brought in, he wrangled legendary CIA wild card Dewey Clarridge. Dewey had a controversial past as the CIA’s loose cannon, and was involved in a number of high profile scandals that stretched from the Niger Yellow Cake letter the mining of the Nicaraguan harbors, which led to a embarrassing conviction of the United States by the World Court in the Hague. He was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and even indicted on nine counts of perjury and false statements by a US court in November 1991. As the former head of the Counter Terrorism branch of the CIA, Dewey had worked South Asia before and was eager to get into the fight the best way he knew how: dirty tricks. Out of the CIA since 1987, he had outspoken opinions about his former employer.

Long retired, Clarridge worked out of his aging bungalow in bucolic suburb of Escondido, north of San Diego, California. He would cobble together a team that included a former Army doctor who did surgeries on child deformities in Pakistan, an ex-marine officer who ran a security company in Jalallabad, a feisty right wing blogger, and a gaggle of Reaganesque media supporters to create an ad hoc paramilitary and intelligence operation. Somehow they would find and potentially rescue Rohde if ransom payments could not be worked out.

By January 2009, the New York Times had only upped its offer to one million dollars for Rohde and his two hired Afghans. There was no way the media company or its contractors could secure the release of prisoners from Gitmo—the ponderous wheels of Western security, lawyers, security consultants and lost out. After waiting for a suitable offer from his employer and not getting it, it only took a week for the kidnappers of Rohde to flip him to someone who would drive a harder bargain. On November 17, 2008, Rohde was walked over the border and delivered to the most feared jihadi group in Pakistan: the Haqqanis.

The Haqqanis demanded a more reasonable $8 million, but they still wanted a group of prisoners held in Bagram and Gitmo released in exchange for Rodhe. At that time, the 800 to 1200 prisoners held at Bagram were supposed to be “secret,” so kidnappers’ demand for their release was often swept aside as immaterial—just as any demand for prisoners in Gitmo was considered even more of a reach because the president of the United States had to ask permission from Congress before releasing any inmates.

It wasn’t easy dealing with Rohde’s kidnappers. There were five faces and each wanted $5 million: the original kidnapper from Ghazni Atiqullah, the Haqqanis, the Mehsuds, a tribal shura acting as middleman and even the Pakistani government all wanted a slice of the $25 million total payout. In addition to the money, there were ten prisoners in Bagram that they demanded be released along with the five senior talibs in Gitmo. Then the demand dropped slightly to $10 million with ten prisoners from the Afghan prison Pul-i-Charki. And then it went down to $8 million.

At this point, Rohde is ordered to make a clumsy video in which he must cry—and the ransom is dropped to $5 million and only five prisoners. It is important to note that Rohde’s fate is kept secret by request of the New York Times and he is not used as bargaining chip for any peace talks. But the demand for prisoners is problematic. The Times offers more money to compensate.

During his kidnapping, Rhode was first moved central Afghanistan and then around North Waziristan. For a week after he was grabbed on his way to interview Abu Tayyab, he was driven between four different locations in Logar, Wardak, Ghazni and Paktika provinces—until he was forced to hike into Pakistan on the night of November 17.

Once across the border in Miran Shah—the home of the Haqqanis’—Rohde remembered that he was held in at least five different locations. He was to later learn that “abu Tayyab,” the low level talib commander he drove south to interview in the first place, was the jihad name of Mullah Atiqullah (which was his false talib name). The real name of the man who sold him out to the Haqqanis was Haji Najibullah Naeem. Naeem was captured a year later and then released with a number of other Bagram prisoners. There was no attendant outrage from the media. According to source in the the Nation, the Pakistani ISI also arrested the guards who kept Rohde in Miram Shah, but then released them without charges. Once again the kidnappers and those who condoned them seemingly got off without any penalty.

By June 21, 2009, the New York Times staffer was safely in Dubai. Following Rohde’s dilemma along with the obvious interconnection between criminals, the Taliban, the Haqqanis and Pakistan was a real time exercise for our fledgling network.

It was at this point that an odd intersection of history occurred. As the Texas-based doctor working for Taylor and Clarridge was traveling back from Afghanistan to the United States with his family, he stopped in Dubai. He talked to Michael Furlong and our people about his recent work on locating Rohde and told a fascinating story.

Their version of the Rohde escape was that the American doctor convinced a local doctor to drug their kidnapper’s bread and smuggle in an appropriate length of rope in a bag. Once again Rohde has publicly denied that he was assisted in his escape, but would confirm that his fixer’s version was correct. The fixer, Tahir Ludin, told the media that he kept the guards up late until they fell asleep, allowing them to use a rope to climb over and down a 20-foot wall. After their daring escape, they were somehow able to avoid detection or capture and find a Pakistani base that would not tip off the Haqqanis. Like the Kurosawa film Rashomon, each person has their own view of what happened. But logic would dictate that the odds that all the guards fell asleep in sync after seven months of constant vigilance—and that a rope long enough to scale a compound wall was available—are hard to figure. A Pakistani police station that both sheltered the victims and interrogated the guards without pressing charges in a Haqqani controlled area is also deserving of extra scrutiny.

Rohde wrote a three-part story for the New York Times, as well as a book with his wife entitled A Rope and a Prayer, about his kidnapping, but he is careful to mention that although the book is factually correct, he deliberately did not provide all the details. Either way, by June 2009, David Rohde was free and the Haqqani’s were not happy.

***

The March 2010 New York Times above the fold article had ended our run with the military and supposedly Dewey’s crew as well. The capture of David Rohde was long forgotten, and in May 2010 Dewey had sent an “official” note to his military contacts that he was shutting down his network and laying off 200 people. I had moved on to other networks in pirate-infested Somalia. But Dewey still persisted. The firm Furlong and Dewey used to funnel this was called International Media Ventures, based close to JSOC in Florida.

In a last chance effort to revive his network, Clarridge scraped together a random collection of emails for Michael Furlong into a “Mega Deliverable on the Haqani Network.” His report, entitled “Atmospherics and Contractor Open Contact Analysis on Haqani Network,” carried a disclaimer: This consolidated deliverable contains three series of IO (INFORMATION OPERATIONS) atmospherics reports. This effort supports IO and is not an inherent intelligence collection activity. It is based upon raw, open-source contact conversations. IO Atmospherics are not vetted contacts corroborated by all-source intelligence. The contractor analysis is also raw and not a finished intelligence product. Once the IO Atmospherics Cell (A-Cell) accepts these deliverables as government property, the information can be provided with traditional Open Source information to the J-3/J-2 Fusion Cell.

The information operations atmospheric designed for “force protection” ranged from insightful to pedantic to ludicrous. The email included suggestions on “What to do with the Haqani Network—Pragmatic Recommendations,” with advice like, “The Haqani Network should be targeted holistically, with a range of operations which encompass the whole spider’s web of the Network.” The 30-page, 8,660 word document starts off formatted analysis but ends up being snippets of badly translated comments from local Afghans. In other reports, Dewey’s team, with the urging of the US military who felt their mission was being undermined by a lack of support for the Karzai family, then began to go after Karzai and his shady brother Ahmed Wali (who ruled Kandahar like a Pasha). Dewey was convinced that Hamid Karzai was a drug addict and even tried, Castro style, to get beard trimming for analysis and proof. Wali Karzai would be eventually be assassinated by his own bodyguard.

It should be made clear that the US military in Afghanistan desperately needed information it wasn’t getting. Major General Mike Flynn, the head of intel in Afghanistan, suggested in a major think tank report that the military “think more like a journalist (and) retrieve information from the ground level and make it available to a broader audience, similar to the way journalists work. These analysts must leave their chairs, he believed, and visit the people who operate at the grassroots level.” Which was exactly what we were doing and want they wanted us to do.  

When AfPax was active, we stayed away from the earnest, overeducated COINdinestas’ that poured out of Iraq into Kabul. All those linked to General Petraeus were smugly confident in repeating their “Iraq Awakening meets Three Cups of Tea” agenda.  Their view was that “talking to Afghans” was going to win this war. By July 27 of 2010, Petraeus had even written a manual for counterinsurgency. It urged soldiers to “confront the culture of impunity.” Along with this shift to “thinking” warfare, our military contact Michael Furlong began to expand the role of Dewey Clarridge and his band of misfits. An uncomfortable mix of insight from intelligent people with access interwoven with the worst of local gossip made for a badly designed carpet of confusion. As a Hail Mary move, they enlisted the help of writer Brad Thor and Olly North to tell the media that Mullah Omar had been arrested. By May 11, only the right wing blogs were picking up Dewey’s intel.

Magically,  Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times wrote another piece on Dewey on May 15: “U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts.” Someone was clearly leaking information to the media in a desperate effort to get Dewey’s team out of the game.

Undaunted and unpaid, Dewey began sending emails via HushMail to intel director General Mike Flynn, and whoever else would listen to him, regarding the Haqqanis and Bowe Bergdahl. Although his main focus was not Bowe (13 out of 500 reports covered Bergdahl by the end of 2010), the information gleaned from local Zadrans around Miran Shah and the Shawat valley was highly prejudicial and often fictional. The locals Dewey had hired for intelligence provided wildly varying reports with no attribution or secondary sources. Creating “atmospherics” under the label of “force protection,” Furlong sought a loophole get Clarridge covered under a SOLIC contract vehicle. Dewey’s reports, many of which portrayed Bergdahl as a collaborator or sympathizer of his captors, were never confirmed but added to the concern that he might not be a victim.

There was another problem: the CIA’s covert war against the Taliban inside Pakistan was picking up. In 2007, there had been five drone strikes inside Pakistan; in 2008 there would be 35, and 53 in 2009. The month after Bergdahl was kidnapped in June, drone strikes accelerated. This number more than doubled in 2010, with 117 recorded strikes. Bergdahl’s presence in the exact areas targeted by the Agency was an inconvenient truth. In October 2009, Siraj Haqqani begins discussing prisoner swaps in earnest for Bergdahl. The demands were identical to those for David Rohde, the former hostage they had just released: big money and a dozen prisoners.

To remind the world that an American prisoner of war was still alive in Pakistan, on December 25, 2009, the Taliban sent another one of their quirky videos of Bergdahl. This time he was wearing a US helmet, uniform, and sunglasses with a prayer rug.  

Where Dewey did provide benefit was using his makeshift network to track the Haqqani Network, which was now directly targeting Kabul with suicide bombers. By June 2010, the military had throttled back its efforts in tracking Bergdahl. Michael Hastings wrote an article that effectively ended the career of General Stanley McChrystal. By the end of the month the human dynamo and “man-who-would-save-Afghanistan” was gone. The one man in the region who fully understood intelligence collection and wide-net input via videoconferences with 600 people, the lean hard charging Ranger turned General who knew how to get people out alive in the dead of night, was gone.

His champion and CENTCOM boss, General David Petraeus parachuted in as commander of ISAF to save his “COIN” legacy in Afghanistan. A year later he, too, would be out. The sense that America would “win” the war in Afghanistan was gone. The Taliban had won. As they predicted, they simply outlasted and drained the American effort—exactly as they had done with the Russians.  

But Bergdahl remained. And because America did not want to be seen “negotiating with terrorists,” Germany was asked to act as middleman for Bowe, and then Qatar royal family. The original idea was to simply let each of the six men go without fanfare and mixed with other prisoners from Guantanamo that were being repatriated. The deal to remove all Taliban leaders from sanctions and release all Taliban from Gitmo to herald a peace framework would be crafted in secret and then announced at the second Bonn conference in December of 2011.

On January 3, 2010, the office opened to create that deal. But the peace negotiations between the Taliban and Karzai that could have facilitated the release of Bergdahl hit their first speed bump. The negotiations were led by Ambassador Naem and Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy commander of the Taliban and a member of the Quetta Shura. But Baradar, one of the founders of the Taliban in 1994, was suddenly arrested by the Pakistanis (he would be released without charges on September 21, 2013).

The next month, the Taliban pushed harder for talks to release their imprisoned members. In February, they announced that a shura had determined that Bergdahl had gone on missions to kill Afghans, and as such that he deserved the death penalty. The US also decided to get aggressive—Mullah Sangeen had been targeted for a drone strike but (according to the CIA) he was surrounded by women and children, so the decision was made to pass.

In March, the Taliban suspended talks, blaming the “aggressor” Americans for delaying the release of the Gitmo Five. Then Karzai tried to shoehorn himself in and bring in the Saudis. The simple hostage swap as a way to move forward peace talks was not working out so well.  

A third video of Bergdahl was released on April 7, 2010. This time more Gitmo and Bagram prisoners were requested. In the video, he is fit, but talks about being “pretty lost in my life. I love my family, I haven’t shown it very well And I haven’t given my family the love they have given me.” That summer Bergdahl was moved between the Shawal area and then Degan. A number of locals knew about the American but none would come forward for the $25,000 reward. Even when Bergdahl managed to escape his captors in June for five days, the villagers brought him back and his captors put him in a cage. Bowe must have been at one of the lowest points in his life.  In September 2010, Mullah Sangeen Zadran’s father was killed by a drone strike.

That same month the High Peace Council of Afghanistan was created to negotiate peace with the Taliban with the prisoner swap as part of the discussions. In the first real breakthrough that same month, the United States handed over control of the Bagram jails to the Afghan Government. The total number of prisoners held by the US in Afghanistan that had not been charged with crimes ranged from as many as 4000 to as few as 200 and now the Afghans would be in charge of deciding their fate. Not only is it common for relatives to buy prisoners out of jail, but Karzai was under pressure from thousands of Pashtun families. In an effort to appease the Taliban, the prisoners begin to trickle out.

Ten days later, the prisoner releases andpeace talks with Afghanistan that might have freed Bergdahl suddenly crashed. In September 2011, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of the Afghan peace council, was killed in a massive explosion in Kabul. The most likely culprit was Pakistani intelligence or al Qaeda, who had been methodically targeting members of the Northern Alliance since Massoud was killed in 2001. But the Haqqanis had the logistics to make these massive suicide and vehicle bombs work.

In January 2011, more troops were being sent to Afghanistan. If things weren’t complicated enough, Blackwater contractor Raymond Davis was arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, after shooting and killing two local men. It turned out he was working as security for CIA teams searching for targets inside Pakistan, including members of the Haqqani family. Pakistan ordered all Blackwater employees (who also load the Hellfire missiles on the drones) out of the country. On January 22, the New York Times writer Mark Mazzetti ran a third article on Dewey Clarridge, finally knocking the former spook and International Media Networks out of the game. With the Eclipse Group no longer feeding tips to the headshed, the Haqqanis’ attacks on Kabul began to increase.  The man who brought Dewey into the game, Michael Furlong, was put under investigation for contract fraud and went on resign in July 2011 with no charges filed. It was also on September 2, 2011 that the US filed charges against Michael L. Taylor, the owner of AISC and the man the New York Times ended up hiring to find Rohde. He was under investigation for fraud with his $54 million training contract in Afghanistan.  The media and legal assaults on those who kept tabs on Bowe and the Haqqani’s were effective.

Dewey’s crew of Jason Bournes were finally out of the game.

If you had to pick the smartest show on TV, you’d probably go with something that like House of Cards (though technically on Netflix) or Modern Family, or any number of things on HBO—shows that are smart in that they showcase dynamic writing and complex characters, and offer a fresh perspective. But the smartest show on TV has none of these traits; it’s smart because it’s fooled you into thinking it’s something that it’s not. It’s smarter than you—The Bachelor.

While often dismissed as trashy television, The Bachelor simply can’t be ignored, if for no other reason than that it’s on a fairly unprecedented run. Since debuting in 2002, the franchise has enjoyed a remarkable thirty-one seasons in primetime—eighteen of The Bachelor, ten seasons of the spinoff, The Bachelorette, and three of its second spinoff, Bachelor Pad. And there’s no signs of slowing down—last year’s The Bachelor finale drew over 11 million viewers and this season’s The Bachelorette (whose finale is today) consistently ranks #1 or #2 in the Nielsen nightly ratings. 

What’s more, the show’s formula has remained virtually unchanged in its 12 years: Twenty-five or so single women vie for the heart of one eligible bachelor, who ultimately chooses and proposes to one of them after eight weeks of gradually narrowing the field. The bulk of the show is a whirlwind journey of four-star resorts, exotic locales, extravagant dates across the globe, with all the tears, fights, and secrets—better known as “drama”—you might expect when a couple dozen women simultaneously date the same man and live under the same roof. However, the heart of the show, quite literally, is the narrative of two people falling in love and eventually finding their way to each other.

Photo Courtesy ABC/Javier Pesquera

Put simply, The Bachelor is many things at once. It has the love triangle (and rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) intrigue of a soap opera, the voyeuristic appeal of a reality show, and the competitive draw of a game show. But what it really is underneath all of that is something completely different: a carefully devised, high budget social experiment—one that would make Stanley Milgram jealous.

Here’s the founding question: Can you make a large group of women fall in love with a man they’ve never met in two months time? (You can reverse genders in the case of The Bachelorette.) The answer, as has been proven over the course 27 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, is yes. Each season at least four of the contestants tell the bachelor they are “falling in love” or actually utter the words, “I love you”—the bachelor cannot reciprocate until the proposal—and a great deal more display strong feelings for the bachelor and express real sorrow at being eliminated; it’s a near inevitability that they too would’ve expressed such emotions had they been chosen to stick around. In fact, it is so rare that a contestant does not take a liking to the bachelor that it made “Bachelor history” (a term they like to use) when two women decided to leave on their own on the last season of The Bachelor, including this year’s bachelorette, Andi Dorfman. Needless to say, the formula works. The more interesting question is, how?

The first trick of the Bachelor Experiment, as we’ll call it, is to put the bachelor on a podium. The main way this is done is by limiting the contestants’ exposure to him. When they meet for the first time, the women are brought out of a limo one by one and are afforded a greeting of about thirty seconds. Throughout the first night, and for much of the remainder of the show, the interactions continue to be brief. While the women may “steal him away” from the group for a few minutes of private conversation (besides the cameras, of course), it isn’t long before another contestant does the same. After a while, it begins to look a lot like a meet-and-greet at a mall or a bookstore, where people line up for hours just to shake the hand of a celebrity. Only in this case, it’s not the celebrity that creates the long line, but the long line that creates the celebrity. After being in this environment for enough time, the bachelor looks a lot like a star, always in town for one day only. So when a contestant is given the chance to spend the day with the bachelor on a “one-on-one date” (a normal date) as opposed to a “group date” (something that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in the real world), it’s a little like Leonardo DiCaprio just asked them to prom. More importantly, after being in a constant state of pent up emotion—not just because the conversations are mostly short, but because they sometimes go days without seeing the bachelor—the release is so great that it accelerates their feelings towards him. But, just as quickly, the date ends and they go back to being part of the group. Only now, after having advanced the relationship—or, in Bachelor parlance, “getting that one-on-one time”—they are left wanting even more, forever in the uncritical honeymoon phase.

Inevitably, this type of dynamic breeds a sort of inferiority complex. Something that’s amazing about the show (which you can easily become conditioned to as a viewer) is how quickly the contestants become grateful for things that they would normally expect when it comes to a relationship. When the lucky woman is informed that she will be taken on a one-on-one date—via a “date card” delivered by the show’s host (once again, the bachelor doesn’t appear more than he has to)—she feels fortunate to have the bachelor’s undivided attention for a few hours, and the other women feel as though they’ve been rejected. As a result, the bachelor’s position as the prize of the show is further reinforced and unquestioned, and the power differential grows. Of course, just about everyone who signs up to go on a reality/game show has to expect that there will be a few differences between the show and everyday life. But unlike other shows of its kind that also create a distorted reality, like Big Brother or Jersey Shore, the stakes in The Bachelor are serious—the only prize for winning is marriage, and the only goal is love—and the contestants are making decisions that will, hopefully, drastically affect their real lives.

Photo Courtesy ABC/Matthew Putney

How the show reminds the contestants that they are “there to find love” and correspondingly “there for the right reasons” (two quotes you’ll hear almost every episode) is perhaps the most important part of the Bachelor Experiment. From the moment the contestants step out of the limo, they are surrounded by extraordinary luxury, most likely completely unknown to them. The swanky hotels and the paradisiac destinations are just the beginning—it’s the access that’s nearly unparalleled. Any given date might include scaling a 40-story building, taking a helicopter to a private island for the day, having dinner in a castle, or performing onstage with a popular band—all things that happened this and pretty much every season, and aren’t even really “for sale” normally. But so intertwined are the extravagance and the idea of falling in love that they become one and the same. To partake in the decadence of the experience (and it’s impossible not to) is to at the same time believe that it’s also the narrative of your own love story.

The show doesn’t just rely on a fairy tale narrative to make their contestants feel like they’re falling in love, though. In fact, The Bachelor relies on a healthy dose of overt contradictions to warp reality. To name a few: The bachelor is there to find his one true love, but he makes out with half a dozen women in a given night; He’s ready to get down on one knee at the end, but the woman he proposes to is probably not the last person he’s had slept with (the final three are allowed to spend one night with the bachelor in “the fantasy suite”); He wants to build a life with someone, but spends all his time getting to know the women in completely fantastical situations. Even the show’s beloved host, Chris Harrison, is at once a chaperone, always maintaining order in the house, and a pimp, constantly delivering the contestants to the bachelor and telling them they have to leave when eliminated. These contradictions are entirely out in the open, yet never acknowledged. The result is an atmosphere that’s completely mind-bending, where the realities of the situation simultaneously exist at both poles of the Madonna-whore complex. In the void of a logical reality, it’s much harder for the contestants to do anything but follow the structure of the show.

Photo Courtesy ABC/Bill Matlock

Indeed, this control is vital to the Bachelor Experiment. The producers manage nearly every detail of the show, from where they stay to how they travel to what they do on their dates. If we’ve learned anything from the Stanford Prison Experiment, it’s that after enough time in a given power structure, people will alter their behavior to comply with the rules put in place by those in charge. Obviously the contestants aren’t in a prison (far from it), but that’s the point—the manipulation is hard to notice when you’re being treated like royalty everywhere you go. What’s more, many of the trappings of the first class treatment they enjoy actually serve to disorient them further—the constant travelling from one place to the next, the perpetual flow of booze (and it is perpetual), and the disconnection from their real lives that is often viewed as a perk. Like in any good experiment, the subjects don’t know what’s being tested for.

As the show’s creator, Mike Fleiss, has admitted, the Bachelor franchise is not good at creating couples. And it’s true, only a few have gotten married and stayed together. But that’s not part of the experiment, or what makes it compelling TV—all they have to do is feel like they’re in love, or be in love for a while. What we watch when we watch The Bachelor is not someone finding their soulmate; yet, that has to be the prevailing belief in order for the Bachelor Experiment to work. 

Even so, come 8:00pm tonight, I’ll be anxiously watching to see who Andi chooses to be her husband. Social experiment or not, I’m genuinely interested to see how it ends. And that’s the second genius of the Bachelor Experiment—it’s also an experiment on us, the viewers, who watch season after season, knowing all the while that the process is flawed, the environment is artificial, and the feelings usually wear off. As soon as the show comes on, it’s the smartest one in the room.

Giancarlo T. Roma is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. Follow him on Twitter.

Photos and images provided by the author

Lucy was starting to hold back tears. We sat in her living room, my iPhone working overtime as my tape recorder, and she was so pissed off it looked like she might cry. She was telling me about our former Dungeon Master, who had exploited our Dungeons & Dragons game to live out his sad-sack fantasy after she'd already flatly rejected his advances just weeks before. "I really didn't want my character to go down that route and have fake sex with this character," Lucy explained to me on that sunny afternoon. But the adventure "didn't get anywhere else unless I let it get more and more sexualized. Once we went down that path that was the only thing that got me rewards in the game, if I kept doing those things. Or at least allowing it to happen to my character and not being like, 'fuck that shit,' and walking away." 

"Lucy" is an alias, by the way. 

Sporting a mousy face and thick-rimmed glasses, Lucy is the kind of woman simultaneously ignored, marginalized and fetishized by the prototypical geek. She's attractive but doesn't seem unattainable, that "approachable" look that seems almost tailor-made to appeal to dorky guys with gutter-dwelling self-esteems. Lucy's been a dork for most of her life: She was first introduced to D&D by friends in high school, and in college she was an officer in a video game club where she coordinated events.

"Lucy"

I first met Lucy when we both responded to a Reddit advertisement looking for players for a new D&D campaign in Williamsburg at the beginning of this year. Besides my wife, Lucy was the only woman in the party, and I was glad to see her there. I'd braced myself for the worst stereotypes of other players—a bunch of neckbeards with glandular problems. I was happy that I wouldn't be playing in a group like that.

At its best, Dungeons & Dragons is a game without limits, where even the rules themselves can be subsumed by the logic and necessity of shared storytelling. D&D lets players take on different identities, different roles—even wildly different moral systems. It is an elaborate system of wish fulfillment, where scrawny, socially awkward teenagers can become bruising hulks who wield massive great axes and slay dragons singe-handedly. The game's boundaries are limited only by the players—what they want to accomplish and what they are willing to attempt. And like any game that encourages the wish fulfillment of (primarily) teenage boys, sometimes these impulses will take a dark and ugly turn.

The leader of our group—let's call him Jason (because, well, that's his name)—had a thing for Lucy from the start, as he confessed to my wife and I soon after we first met. Months later he finally gathered the courage to ask her out, but she firmly rejected him. And that should have been the end of it. 

My wife and I missed a session for the first time, and Jason made his move. He introduced a new character that he would get to control. The character, "Mercurios," was rugged and handsome, with "red wavy hair that seems to move like a flame covers a slightly tan face of man," as Jason would later write. All the "ladies" in the "town" fawned over Mercurios relentlessly, a weird piece of auto-erotic exhibitionism when one considers the fact that both the ladies and the man depicted were being controlled by Jason himself. In any case—the party needed this character's help, and Jason made it very clear that the only way to get it would be if Lucy's character made like she wanted to do the nasty. Lucy didn't like this idea. But when she tried other techniques to advance the story, they invariably failed. Eventually Jason—er, the character—suggested that they go somewhere more comfortable, somewhere more private. 

"It was just kind of guided in that direction."

Nothing else explicitly happened between these two quasi-fictional people, but that was Lucy's last session with our group all the same. For myself, it would be months before the real story of what happened became fully clear.

And now that it is, I need to find a new D&D group.

Is this a problem, though, or just one ugly circumstance? When the question of harassment in role-playing games comes up in online communities, stories abound. But no form of harassment or exploitation is more controversial than fictional rape, particularly as it is always at the hands of either another party members or a character controlled by the Dungeon Master. In a game where the character is of your own invention, where you play-act what they say, how they act, and what they desire, it can be a truly traumatic experience. "I have had characters raped," one poster noted on an internet forum that discussed the topic at some length all the way back in 1999. "I can say from experience that even though I know I am not my character, it is very traumatic. The GM in question did not give me an out."

One woman I spoke with online (who asked not to be quoted) recently had her character put into a "gimp suit" by her Dungeon Master—against her strong protestations, and in front of her younger sister. She left the game in disgust. Fortunately, the rest of the party was similarly offended and never invited that player back. (#NotAllRoleplayers, after all.)

According to a dissertation on gender in role-playing games from 2006, more than 55 percent of female gamers had been "made to feel uncomfortable, judged or harassed because of their gender," compared with 5.4 percent of male players. Similarly, 40 percent of women witnessed such an incident, as did 32 percent of men. Not all of these instances signify something as egregious as fictional rape, but the numbers are disappointing all the same.

Dungeons & Dragons bubbles up in our cultural consciousness every decade or two before receding back to the depths of niche weirdness, and it seems to be having one of its signature moments once again. A recent New York Times article highlighted the game's incredible influence on a generation of writers and artists, while other mainstream outlets have noted the admirable efforts made in this new edition towards inclusiveness of all races, genders and sexual identities.

This year, Dungeons & Dragons celebrates its 40th birthday with the release of a new 5th Edition that takes the game fully into the 21st Century. Early in the new edition's rulebook, the authors suggest that players need not "be confined to binary notions of sexuality and gender." Dungeons & Dragons is a game arguably most famous as a shorthand for the deepest depths of geek culture. That it added this stipulation to its newest rules is refreshing—and more than a little surprising. An uncomfortable legacy remains deeply ingrained in the DNA of Dungeons & Dragons, a legacy that stretches all the way back to the origins of the game itself.

Originally created by Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter, high school dropout and avid gun collector, D&D is the child of a self-described "biological determinist." Gygax believed that while "It isn't that gaming is designed to exclude women," there's "no question that male and female brains are different" and that "females do not derive the same inner satisfaction from playing games" as men do. This, explained Gygax, was why "Everybody who's tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed." These opinions, while fairly in line with the overwhelmingly-male niche culture of war games that laid the groundwork for D&D in the early 1970s, have helped enshrine a legacy that the game has had difficulty leaving behind. 

In the first edition of the Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979, Gygax provided Dungeon Masters with a "Random Harlot Encounter Table." 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, surveys at the time pegged the number of female players somewhere between 0.4 and 2.3 percent. Still, it's impossible to say how much the attitudes displayed by the game's creator were a function of this gender gap rather than its cause. Regardless, it would be decades before the game's publisher—or its players—made serious efforts to recruit outside this cloistered circle.

In 1983, not ten years after the game's creation, the first truly comprehensive study of tabletop role-playing games was conducted. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games As Social Worlds by Gary Alan Fine was a study on the habits, attitudes and demographic breakdowns of the practitioners of this new, weird hobby called "role playing." And his results were far from flattering. The book painted the picture of an insular boy's club consisting of social cast-offs and introverts, entrenching a perception that largely remains intact to this day. According to Fine, only between 5 and 10 percent of players at the time were women. But beyond noting this massive gender gap, Fine asked what accounted for this disparity.

"Girls don't have enough imagination," one woman quoted in the study explained. The games were just "too complicated." Some men surveyed for the study helpfully suggested that "females' greater commitment to social reality" was to blame for their lack of representation. The report also highlights a deep anxiety and violence towards women in the men he surveyed and observed. "It is striking," Fine notes at one point, "that players consider inhibitions that prevent characters from engaging in fantasy rape to be a problem, but such is male informal interaction." He also writes, "While it is not inevitable that the games will express male sexual fears and fantasies, they are structured so that these expressions are legitimate."

A number of the players he surveyed agreed. When Fine asked one individual whether women were accepted in his group, his answer was more than a little revealing: "Yeah, they're accepted. They're accepted and they're sort of treated special. I mean people make a little joke about them, or talk to them in kind of a kidding way.[...] You know, they're making sexual remarks to the girls and teasing her about sex and so on. It's considered standard, no big deal."

Fine cautions, "The absence of females is not an accident of fate, nor is it something that will likely change rapidly." He also writes, "Females will not constitute a large percentage of the gaming world in the near future." When D&D's publisher, Wizards of the Coast, conducted a market research survey in 2000, they found that 20 percent of all players were women—a paltry number, but an appreciable rise from the early eighties. 

As countless players and industry professionals I spoke with—both male and female—were eager to note, Anna Kreider, who runs the blog, "Go Make Me a Sandwich," is a vocal critic of much of the artwork and outreach that the industry attempts (or fails to attempt). Yet she noted over email that, "As much as I write about the ugly side of game culture, I am lucky to be part of a community of game designers who are some of the best, most amazing human beings I know. Games are an amazing medium and can be a powerful tool of self-examination and social change [...] overall I'm very hopeful for the future of the hobby."

Follow Tim Donovan on Twitter

No Class is a DIY tattoo parlor run by skater Jesse Brocato from his living room in Fairplay, Colorado. Every tattoo from No Class is free, provided you're at least halfway tanked when you start laying in the ink on yourself. Which I think explains why the place is starting to pick up some steam among the skating community.

On a recent skate trip to Colorado, I visited No Class and had a chat with Jesse.

VICE: How did you guys get started?
Jesse Brocato: It all started one night when we found out that our friend Shane had a tattoo gun. We told him to bring it over and he thought he was going to tattoo us, but we were like, "Fuck, give us that,” and we started tattooing ourselves.

That night I fell in love. I was like, “I’m never paying for a tattoo again.” Everyone pays thousands of bucks to get these fancy tattoos. The idea behind No Class is, why would you want a fancy tattoo when you could have a shitty ghetto tattoo?

And it took off from there?
Well, I used to make moonshine, so we’d get drunk on moonshine and then just start tattooing ourselves. Then we started buying more equipment online. Now we have three set-ups. People see our work and they want a shitty tattoo too. I tell them they have to do it themselves. That’s what No Class is all about.

Is it hard to get the hang of it?
It took us a little while. In the beginning, we’d have the needle set way too far out, like a quarter inch, and I was going so deep it stopped the machine like a lawnmower in thick grass. It just destroyed the bone and took forever to heal. You start digging and it ends up looking like hamburger meat. You lay in all that ink and then it heals up scarred white, back to skin colour.

Anything else you had to learn?
Pick the cat hair off the needle.

Does that “sterilize” it?
I mean maybe I would have to read a little on bacteria and all that but whatever, what we do is just hook it up and do it. We don't share needles or anything like that. I mean, it’s happened, but you really shouldn't do that. You think you’re clean but you never know what you have. Somebody that actually tattoos would probably freak out if they came up here, but that’s part of it, part of the "fuck it" attitude of No Class. None of us has swelled up yet.

Word spreads quickly. No Class has picked up some steam.
It’s a small thing but it gets around. We get a lot of shitneck skaters and their crews that come through asking for tattoos. A few kids have gotten their first ever tattoos here. To me that’s awesome.

People wonder what we do up here; We just skate and tattoo. We’re mountain rednecks, I guess. We just get bored. You get a couple grinds in you, and a couple beers in you and then you’re like, “Alright, let’s go tattoo!” Grinds, beers, music, doobies, mosquitos, DEET, and that makes it.

How much does a session at No Class cost?
Nothing. If people want to come tattoo themselves, come on by. If they want to kick down, that’s awesome too. People bring food and beer so we collect donations in that way. I buy the needles and ink. I don’t mind—I’m a generous person. A $100 bottle of ink will last us at least a year. Needles come out to be like 80 cents each—they’re real cheap.

Best or worst tat?
Our friend Dewey did a cheeseburger train on his leg. That one’s pretty great. They’re all great. The worst is one I did on myself, “breakin’ hearts since ‘75.”

Where do these ideas come from?
I don’t know, we just think of stuff. Sometimes it changes halfway through. One time Dana was drawing an upside-down cross but it was getting really messed up so someone had an idea to put balls on it. So he put balls on it, and then someone said it was starting to look like Cartman, so it ended up turning fully into Cartman. From an upside-down cross to Cartman. You just never know what you’re going to get.

Any plans for the future of No Class?
I’m building a pool here and people already know there’s a bunch of stuff to skate up here in Fairplay, so it’ll grow. I don’t want to make money off it or anything. I just want to see shitty tattoos and good ones too. You never know when you’re going to die. You just gotta live. Tattoo yourself. It’s fun.

See more of Peter's photos here.

Tony Clement, presumably discussing open-source, hyper-connected idea dialogues for technologists and data scientists alike. via Flickr user icannphotos.

At a time when transparency within the Canadian government feels as if it’s reached an all-time low—given that access to information policies have been further softened, scientists are being muzzled, politicians are redacting the truth from Wikipedia, and our ever-mysterious spy agency CSEC is getting more and more federal cash while continuing an opaque relationship with the NSA—I for one am not impressed with the increasingly secretive government that seems to have little regard for transparency.

That’s why, I guess, the Canadian government launched an online “idea dialogue” for Canadians to suggest ways in which the government can reach a coveted “2.0” status; as if this is 2004, and people are excited about the next frontier of websites that have streamlined, social, multimedia remixability. Corny terminology aside, the idea dialogue’s stated purpose is for you, the Canadian internet user, “to share your ideas on ways the Government of Canada could focus its efforts toward increased openness and transparency.” These suggestions will become the basis of a brand new “Action Plan” that will inform a futuristic government that will hopefully make The Jetsons look like The Flinstones.

This good idea-generating, worldwide web cyberforum is the brainchild of Tony Clement, who has established himself as an internet-friendly politician over the years with such initiatives as a “National Open Data Appathon” at University of Toronto. He was also proven wrong by a recent report on Motherboard regarding the government’s interest in monitoring social media, a practice he said is done simply to aggregate citizen reactions to policies in a way that is “not personal to an individual,” but in reality, in at least one case, is a way for the government to collect information on specific individuals who post dissenting messages about government decisions.

So, while Tony has certainly crafted himself as a man-of-the-future who purports to see the Canadian economy moving towards data openness and increased transparency, it’s hard to really believe it.

Even still, the Canadian government’s latest idea dialogue is a functioning forum for Canadians to suggest new policies to the feds, and there are some very solid suggestions up there. For example, Sean Michael Holman, director of the Canadian Association of Journalists, wrote a letter calling for greater access to information privileges.

In the letter, he points out that there have been numerous suggestions from information commissioners to modernize Canada’s Access to Information laws. He stresses “civil servants [must be able] to freely speak to members of the media without interference or involvement from communications staff,” which is a major issue in the government today, and there is precedent for such restrictions being akin to censorship:

“In the United States, the presidents of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club recently described limitations on that freedom as having ‘the same effect as censorship. It hides problems that need to be exposed.’”

As a journalist who regularly tries to get comment from government agencies and representatives, more often than not, I expect to be ignored, deflected, or fed generic responses that have been copy-pasted from press releases and highly manicured official statements. And this is an experience that is shared throughout the industry of Canadian journalism.

Beyond simply trying to get a comment from a politician, our Access to Information system, wherein any citizen or journalist can request specific information from government bodies, is in a state of disrepair. Writing for Maclean’s in April, Jennifer Ditchburn reported on “systemic interference” from Conservative staffers who tried to “thwart” requests for information on various topics, including a “sensitive asbestos file” and “Barack Obama’s visit to Canada.”

Plus, as the Toronto Star reported just a few days ago, a third of all Access to Information requests take at least four months to process, which makes the whole idea of government accountability a sluggish and ineffective ideal that, in reality, is not very useful. In fact, according to the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, government departments have 30 days to respond once they receive a request, with additional days only granted for specific circumstances. On top of that, when requests are fulfilled, journalists often receive highly redacted documents that essentially defeat the purpose of an Access to Information system in the first place.

Beyond our sloppy Access to Information system, another suggestion pertains to the amount of customized software that the Government of Canada produces. A citizen who goes by “Gray OB” suggests that much of that software should be made to be open source:

“The government of Canada (GOC) produces more software (aka. applications, code, computer programs, scripts…) than you might think... If more of the software produced in the GOC was open source software (OSS) Canadians would have a larger say in the data produced, citizens and business would be able to use the software to be more efficient in their work and the GOC would get to improve its software by receiving feedback and contributions from the public.”

Given Revenue Canada’s recent failure to identify the Heartbleed bug, which led to the arrest of a teenager who exploited it by allegedly stealing 900 social insurance numbers, Canadians probably would be better off if the software that houses our most private government data could be examined by the country-at-large, so gaping security holes could be noticed faster, without compromising any private data in the process.

At the time of this writing, the open source suggestion is the “most popular” idea in Tony Clement’s idea dialogue matrix.

The second most popular suggestion is for “Open Science,” which is a one-line suggestion: “Provide free online public access to federally funded scientific research.” Given that this research is funded by public money anyhow, you would think this would be a no-brainer—but given the poor state of scientific transparency our government has established, this sounds more like a little kid’s dream to have a pet unicorn one day rather than a policy that the government would actually implement.

Ultimately, it’s a nice gesture to see a government create a message board for citizens to publish their deepest, transparency-producing desires, but there are so many examples of the Canadian government choosing to abandon transparency that this whole system feels like a bit of a fuck-you.

While the Canadian government has made some progress in the past couple of years when it comes to transparency—like publishing summaries of all successful Access to Information requests on government websites, or the launch of the Open Data Portal “which now has more than 272,000 datasets from 20 departments”—there is a lot of room for improvement, particularly when it comes to government accountability to journalists, access to scientific research, and better government software.

I can’t imagine that Clement's online idea dialogue is going to remedy transparency problems that have been obvious for quite some time. And to be fair, the Harper government is the first Canadian administration to truly deal with the social media age and the whirlwind of data available, so this is a new challenge, and it’s not as if the Americans are doing a great job with transparency either, what with their domestic mass surveillance and blocking of journalist information requests and all. But it’s certainly time to take the lead, and create a functional system of accountability and transparency that actually works.

So, prove me wrong, Canadian government! Prove me wrong.

@patrickmcguire

Would you feel safer if Buffy was patrolling your neighbourhood instead of the police? Andrew Lamb says, why not?

If you live in the city, you've probably seen his work: Lamb recently rejigged over 70 Neighbourhood Watch signs to feature 80s and 90s icons from morning cartoons, cult shows, and comic books. Thanks to Lamb, my neighbourhood is being presided over by Mulder and Scully, and I've never felt safer. The 30 year-old, Toronto-based artist makes his living creating puppets and has been working for the past few years on the technology required for a big planned project involving covertly painting Toronto bike lanes. 

We caught up with him to chat about this project, public art, and whether or not this entire thing is technically illegal. 

VICE: When did the Neighbourhood Watch project start?
Andrew Lamb: The project started in the summer of 2012, after noticing the red centre graphic used on old Neighbourhood Watch signs fade away after years of sun exposure—but the black lettering stays perfectly sharp. So there are all these signs that have become little blank canvases framed with a title, but there is no content. So I started wheat-pasting images of fictional super heroes, crime fighters and do-gooders from my childhood on them. 

How many signs do you have up now? Is it exclusive to Toronto?
As of now, there are 61 unique signs, five duplicates, and two that are kind of non-canon to the project. 

What do you mean by non-canon signs?
The "non-canon" signs have a graphic that are close to the original icons, except the houses are hot rods and look like Ed Roth characters with their tongues hanging out. Not really superheroes or crime fighters. 

Do you have a favourite one?
I'm a big fan of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley from Aliens and the Leslie Nielson/Lt. Frank Drebin character from Naked Gun is a favorite too. Screwball comedies were big in my house when I was a kid. 

Is this technically illegal? Have you gotten in trouble at all?
I think it may fall under postering. Someone started yelling at me when I was putting up an image of Judge Dredd that I was in violation of the highway traffic act. I wanted to yell back "I AM THE HIGHWAY TRAFFIC ACT," but I thought it would have been lost on them. 

What is the project about, for you? Does it mean anything or does it just rule? Where did the idea come from?
I like the concept of a public fountain of youth as municipal infrastructure, something that invokes nostalgic memories, like it's the city’s business to make you happy. 

What have your past projects been like? How does this current one relate? 
I have made a couple "public zen" gardens when the city occasionally pulls up sidewalk stones. Sometimes there is some nice sand under there. I pick out the cigarette butts, find some nice rocks, and put a rake nearby so passersby can make patterns in the sand. The same summer I found a large mound of poured concrete, which I painted to look like a breast. I suppose I am just pushing things that are already halfway done. 

What appeals to you about working the city's existing infrastructure to create art?
Working with city infrastructure is a way to take something that can be perceived as cold and formidable, and bring it to a more personal level, taking something structured and making it into something whimsical. The appeal to me is making people happy. 

@monicaheisey

VICE and Jim Norton have teamed up to put a weird twist on the traditional late-night talk show.

The show will be a loose mix of stand-up comedy, debates, and interviews with guests like Mike Tyson, UFC President Dana White, and notorious drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross. To keep things really unpredictable, we'll be filming everything before a live audience. 

In Norton's words, "VICE didn’t censor any language or ideas at all; they were amazing creatively. I got to do exactly the show I wanted to do. Which also sucks, because if it fails, it’s completely my fault.” We think you'll like it.

Hamilton Harris (right) with the late Harold Hunter (centre) and pro skater Jeff Pang, around the time Kids was filmed. Photos by Gunars Elmuts

Hamilton Harris is the guy in Kids who taught every suburban teenager watching Larry Clark’s film debut how to roll a blunt. He’s also the man behind an upcoming documentary—The Kids—that charts the real stories of the individuals in the movie. Which, if you've never ended up watching it as a house party turns into a bunkhouse, is a fictional story revolving around drugs, sex, youth and Aids in 1990s New York, inspired by and starring a bunch of real Manhattan skate kids whose lives weren't that far removed from the characters they were playing.

It's that distinction that inspired Hamilton's documentary. While a couple of the first-time actors ended up front page famous, some cast members resented the way their group of friends had been portrayed, and many were left feeling just as marginalised as they had before tourists were handing them boards to sign and asking to take their photos outside the newly opened Supreme store. I called Hamilton, who now lives in the Netherlands, to talk about the legacy left by Kids.

Hamilton (center-left, in the open shirt) and others during the filming of Kids

VICE: Hey Hamilton. So in your film’s press release it talks about how, growing up, you guys created your own reality. In Roger Ebert’s review of Kids he talks about that reality being a world where “adults simply do not exist." Is that a fair assessment?
Hamilton Harris: No, I don’t think so, actually. Maybe it’s because I’m four days off my 40th birthday, but I’m coming to the realisation that there’s a lot of crossover between children and adults—some children can be just as psychologically and emotionally advanced as an adult, and vice versa.

So what was the reality?
Oh, it was, uh [laughs]... as raw as it seemed, it was still a fun experience. And as fun an experience it was, there was still a lot of pain and trauma. You know, growing up in America—this is global, but I say America because that’s where I was in the 90s—you’re dealing with stuff like crack, Aids and full-blown racism. People don’t like other people because they look "different" [laughs]. It’s fucking hilarious, but it’s real! So we had all those issues around us, but because we were a group of individuals who had different racial, ethnic and social backgrounds—but the same traumatic situations at home—our experience went beyond race, creed and background.

It seemed like skating helped with that transcending of race and background.
Yeah, definitely. What’s cool about skating is that you’re always in motion. And when you’re on the board, even if you’re with a group of homies, skating isn’t a team thing—you’re not gonna get the assist to jump a garbage can; it’s all on you. When you fall on your ass, it’s on you to get up and deal with it. It gives you a sense of responsibility—you’re being your own therapist, which I think is especially helpful if you come from a dysfunctional home, you know? Skateboarding is therapy.

It is a pretty isolated thing in that way. But it also seemed like—in your case, at least—it gave all you individuals a collective identity.
Yeah, it’s that thing of something being so abstract but so tangible. See, that’s what Larry captured in the film, man. I don’t care how fabricated the story was—us bashing gay dudes, all that shit. It was Larry's story and vision; let it be what it is. But he did capture that primal essence of this reality we were living—that energy, which is spiritual, as far as I see it.

It was a pretty pivotal turning point in street skating, too—the early days of Zoo York and Supreme, and the first wave of New York skaters starting to go pro.
It was. Kids brought that skateboarding subculture into pop culture. Kids made Supreme pop, because skating in New York was a far cry from cool before the film came out. Growing up in housing projects where only black, Puerto Rican or possibly poor white families lived, it wasn’t hip to ride a skateboard. And within our group of dudes—white dudes, Spanish dudes, Indian dudes, Chinese dudes, Albanian, Muslim, Christian, atheist, alcoholic, whatever—skateboarding was a gateway to bringing people together. Others witnessed this and appreciated it.

Who carried on skating, besides you, Harold Hunter, Justin Pierce, and Javier Nunez?
Well, you know, everybody on and off screen always skated. When we think of Kids, we think of Justin, we think of Harold and even Leo Fitzpatrick skating, as well as Rosario [Dawson] and Chloe [Sevigny], obviously. Kids was based on skate culture, but that side wasn’t portrayed in the movie, because skating—and the kids who inspired Larry—wasn’t the story being told.

Hamilton and Justin Pierce's sections from the Zoo York Mixtape (1997)

How did that go down?
After the movie happened, people who weren’t in it—but who were a part of the group—had gripes with this intrusion into our lives and people making money off it, while we’re still struggling, starving and finding our way through life, alone. That’s not to say [the filmmakers] did us wrong on that, because those of us who were in the movie chose to be. But there was a lot of dysfunction both prior to and after the film's release—people going from being in this little subculture, dealing with these complex situations in a sleepless city, to being a part of this new pop culture, with all that dysfunction and trauma squared. It’s still a very sensitive topic—there’s a lot of resentment. So this documentary is quite a responsibility on me, you know what I mean? I had to do a lot of reflecting on myself first to get to the point of even doing this interview, 20 years later. 

What was the spark that made you decide to go ahead with it?
It started in 2006, a few months after Harold died. At that time, people were doing all kinds of documentaries and books on our lives growing up, which was great, but nobody from the group ever told it themselves. We were all still dealing with various levels of mental and emotional trauma, and then Harold passes and it’s like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” But the thought of doing something kept haunting me. I got talking about the idea to one of the producers—writer, playwright and actor Peter Welch—while working at a restaurant two blocks away from Rosario and Harold's hood. This was in 2008, after years of self-doubt and fear of taking on this this responsibility. It wasn’t until then that I actually sat down and got started.

Because there was still stuff you didn’t want to address yourself?
Yeah—I’m still running from myself at this point. But in 2010 we shot some footage with Tobin Yelland, who’s one of the premier skate photographer and videographers—top of the line dude, a part of skate history. And then I got talking to Chloe about it, so we filmed some interviews with her and some of the skaters, but we still didn’t have it all together at this point. Peter was like, “Yo Ham, the only person who can write this story—give it a message and a purpose—is you.” I was like, "Oh shit, nowhere to run and no rock to hide under now."

Harold Hunter

Yeah.
Then, in 2013, writer and performer Caroline Rothstein—who’s also a producer on the movie and wrote this article [about the legacy of Kids]—got on board. She was followed by Harold Hunter Foundation board member and Harold's surrogate sister Jessica Forsyth, then NYC skate native—now firefighter—Peter Bici. He got involved maybe a month and a half ago because I needed somebody who I'd grown up with in the New York skating scene who'd gone through a certain amount of evolution in themselves—someone I shared those high and incredibly low moments with, on a soul level. That's not taking anything away from anyone else and their experiences, of course.

I read that article. There’s a quote where you’re talking about how Kids gave skaters this cool, grimy image, but that the circumstances behind all that griminess were never really touched upon. Is that something you want to address in the documentary?  
We have to, yeah, because that’s where the essence of that energy comes from—the inner struggle. If we don’t talk about that struggle, then the inside story makes no sense. The evolution to now makes no sense.

Agreed. Larry Clark’s involved now, too, right?
Yeah, I went to see him in New York this April, and yo, the conversation we had was just, like, full circle. I was able to talk freely about the resentments I, and others, had in the past.

The late Justin Pierce (far left) and others on the set of Kids

Resentments about how your group of friends were portrayed in Kids?
About how we were portrayed, about people making money off us, about people getting… I was able to say all that freely. And Larry starts telling me stuff that I’m like, Man, he’s telling me shit I thought he'd take to the grave. And I’ve got to tell you this other bit, because it’s funny but it’s honest; so I don’t smoke weed no more, right? But I had this bad ass toothache that wouldn’t go away while I was back in New York, so a friend was like, “Yo, I’ll get you some weed!” And I was like, “Fuck it, I’ll smoke weed before I take a Percocet.”

Right, natural medicine.
Medicinal. Straight up. So I’m at Larry’s house and my tooth started kicking up. I’ve got my stash on me. I go, “Larry, I got this crazy toothache and this shit is about to start kicking up, I need to have a little smoke.” So I’m sitting in his window, smoking, and we’re having this conversation, and I was at that threshold before you cross over to being really stoned, where instead you’re super subconsciously aware.

Yeah, I hear you.
And man, to be sitting with Larry, and for he and I to be speaking from our hearts like that—me being the one who showed the world how a blunt is rolled in his directorial debut, and after knowing him for, like, 23 years, we’d gone completely full circle. It was then I felt it was officially the right moment to make this film. It’s time to share some insight into that group within the subculture behind this movie, which had such an impact at that particular time... how what we were experiencing in our collective history not only affected but shaped so much of the society we know today.

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