A drone control station. (Photo via)

No one likes drones. The unmanned death machines float above Pakistani towns and Yemeni mountain ranges like hateful mechanised pterodactyls, seeming to destroy innocent civilians more often than they do their intended targets.

But it's not just killer war drones making us uncomfortable; this year has seen vast advances in the domestic use of surveillance drones, with the UK spending £2 million to police the skies above the G8 conference and the US approving their use for commercial purposes. In the post-Snowden landscape, many are understandably pissed off at the idea of their government flying cameras above their homes whenever they like, and some have decided to do something about it. One of those people is Philip Steel, from the town of Deer Trail, Colorado.      

Philip has drafted an ordinance that aims to allow Deer Trail residents to shoot down drones, and actively reward them for doing so. The ordinance first came before the town committee in August and was stalled at a vote of 3-3 for and against. With a new vote set for October the 8th, the story has since gone viral, not least because the town clerk Kim Oldfield has said that she expects the ordinance to pass at the second election.

Even if Steel's calls for civil war, love of killer weapons and anti-Obama rhetoric make him seem like the kind of NRA-loving right-winger whose views would usually infuriate me, the prospect of a bunch of guys chasing drones around the Wild West with shotguns is kind of romantic. I gave Philip a call to learn more about his proposals.

Philip Steel.

VICE: Hey Philip. So, before we get into the specifics of drone hunting, can you give me some background on how this all came about?
Philip Steel: Well, in September of 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FFA) will implement new guidelines to extend what they call “navigable airspace” all the way down to ground level. That’s a vey big problem. Basically, it means the federal government will have jurisdiction over everything that travels through this airspace – not just regular aircraft. If someone wants to go shooting, or even play baseball, all those things will be travelling through navigable airspace under their definition. If you want to put up a building, you’ll need to get permission from the state government. It completely tramples over state rights.

And this drone-hunting ordinance is a reaction to that?
What this ordinance does, first and foremost, is declare complete sovereignty and supremacy of the airspace over the town of Deer Trail, Colorado. Which is about a one square mile town with around 500 people in it. We’re declaring sovereignty over that airspace, up to a 1,000-foot ceiling.

So how do drones play into all this?
Our motto is, “If you don’t want your drone to go down, don’t fly it in town." We are issuing drone-hunting licenses. If there are any drones, we’ll shoot them down with shotguns. These are not the big $25 million Predator drones – they fly above 1,000-feet anyway. These are the little ones, the size of birds. They fly low to the ground. Their purpose is to conduct surveillance. They’re fitted with thermal technology and can practically see through walls.

A promotional video from the US Air Force Research Laboratory showing the kind of drone surveillance kit that Philip fears will become ubiquitous.

And you’re worried this kind of surveillance will become widespread?
Here’s the problem: Even if we trusted our government, which we do not, criminals can fly drones to case out a neighbourhood. Paedophiles can use them to take pictures of children. Even terrorists could use them for reconnaissance or for chemical or biological attacks. Corporations can and will use them to collect data on their customers. So the ordinance sets forth very specific guidelines on the types of weapons and ammunition that may be used to stop these drones, along with the method of engagement.

Okay, got it. And how does the bounty work?
If you bring in parts of a drone, you get a $25 bounty. If you bring in a whole drone, you get a $100 bounty. These are referred to as “trophies” in the ordinance, and the town can use those trophies for marketing purposes.

The ordinance legalises and even provides financial reward for shooting down unmanned aircraft flying under 1,000-feet in Deer Trail?
Yes, and it makes sport of it. It actually creates a new sporting event. We’re going to hold shooting events where we have mock drones and we’re gonna shoot ‘em down. It’s amazing the attraction that this has got. It’s in every newspaper and TV outlet in the country. I even pissed off the FAA. They came out with a statement saying that the penalties for shooting down an unmanned aerial vehicle will be the same if you shoot down a manned one – you’ll go to prison and all that.

Aren’t you at all worried about that?
So it’s OK to have a drone flying above your house conducting surveillance? That’s OK? We’re just supposed to accept that? We started our revolution originally over a miniscule tax on tea and this is a lot more than that.

The drone hunter licence. (Click to enlarge)

Sure, but it’s a federal offence to damage government property; you can get jail time for inflicting more than $10,000 worth of damage. How do you plan to get around that?
You can get prison time for anything in this country now. Here’s the problem: President Obama has declared war on his own people. He’s assassinated four of his own citizens [in drone attacks] without the benefit of a trial, no right of habeas corpus. He just decided, on his own, to use drones to kill these people. Alright, they weren’t on US soil, but guess what – the US constitution applies to American citizens whether they are on US soil or not.

You feel the government are breaking the law, so why shouldn’t you, basically?
He declared war on us, so we’re fighting back. He fired the first volleys. Our second amendment is in place so we can fight against a tyrannical government. Obama is a tyrant, he’s an enemy to freedom, he’s an enemy to free people across the world. I’m saying this from a very specific standpoint. Three years ago, my house got destroyed. The government raided my house and I was never charged, but it was completely illegal.

What happened in the raid?
Around 100 enforcement officers arrived at my house. They brought three snipers and a machine gun. They were looking for something called the Anarchist Cookbook – something I don’t have and have never had. They caused around $15,000 of damage to the house. There were no charges or anything like that, but I can’t sue for damages because they have the Patriot Act so they can do whatever they want.

Wow, that sucks. Has Deer Trail had a problem with drones historically, or is this a sort of countermeasure to prevent a problem in the future?
We’re making a statement. It’s a very symbolic statement, but what a statement! I only spent four hours on a Saturday night writing this ordinance, and – all of a sudden, a week later – it’s spread to you in London. That’s powerful – that means there’s something behind this. There are no drones yet, but there will be, by the millions, across this country.

In anticipation of the ordinance passing, Philip has already set up dronesshooters.com.

Are you expecting other towns to take up drone-hunting, too?
Oh yeah. About a dozen different cities have already asked me about it. This is enormous and I want to try to wake people up. Edward Snowden gave up his entire life to tell everybody in the whole world that America will spy on everyone and anyone, including its own citizens. I don’t want the government spying on me. I don’t want corporations spying on me. We have a right to our own privacy.

Has it just been residents of Deer Trail applying for the licences?
Oh, we have hundreds of people from out of state – thousands, actually – who are signing up to get licences. It’s going to make the town a lot of money, at $25 a licence. People want them just to put them on the wall, you know? It’s a spirit of rebellion.

Buying something to put on your wall is one thing, but if you start shooting government property out of the sky, surely there’ll be repercussions?
Bring it on! I didn’t get my day in court after they raided my house. I will tell the government, with a straight face, that – as far as I’m concerned – they started a civil war. If they want to start a civil war, I fully intend to fight on the other side.

Okay. Thanks Philip, and good luck with your civil war.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @matthewfrancey

More stuff about drones:

Are BT Helping Obama Wage His Secret Yemeni Drone War?

The Drone Ranger: Obama's Dirty Wars

I Built a Stealth Drone in My Dormroom

Are Surveillance Drones the Future of CCTV?

As the climate change effects in the Third World worsen, developing nations may soon face a massive influx of climate change refugees. via Flickr.

About 500 years ago, capitalism started to displace feudalism as the dominant socio-economic system on this planet. There were about half a billion humans wandering around then, and about 80% of them were living hand-to-mouth through subsistence agriculture. It wasn’t until the replacement of animate energy (biomass) with inanimate energy (fossil fuels) in the West during the 19^th century that the global population started to grow exponentially, ballooning to its current level of over 7 billion. This transition from diffuse/currently available solar energy to stored/concentrated solar energy transformed every aspect of society, from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation to life expectancy. For perspective—a teaspoon of diesel fuel contains as much energy as a human can expend in a day. Basically, the last 200 years of exponential industrial (and population) growth have been subsidized by ancient, compacted sunlight.

It took about 200,000 years for the human population to reach 1 billion (~1800 CE), 130 years to reach 2 billion, 30 years for 3 billion, 15 years for 4 billion, and around 13 years each for 5, 6, and 7 billion. The UN is predicting that reaching 8 and 9 billion will take 16 and 19 years respectively, meaning the rate of population growth might have peaked around the year 2000.  It’s probably not a coincidence that human population growth corresponds pretty closely with the easy availability of ancient stores of fossilized energy. It has been argued that without fossil fuels, the carrying capacity of the Earth using only current sunlight is around 1 to 2 billion humans.

To put it bluntly, we’re reaching peak everything. We’ve blown through our one-time inheritance of natural capital (fossil fuels, topsoil, groundwater, biodiversity) like the crazy, hairless apes we are.

In 1896, Swedish polymath, future Nobel Prize winner, and founder of physical chemistry, Svante Arrhenius, was the first to propose the idea that burning fossil fuels could raise our planet’s temperature. After doing a bunch of “tedious” calculations, he concluded that by “evaporating our coal mines into the air,” humans could raise the temperature of the planet by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius. This is eerily close to modern predictions made by super-computed climate models.

In the last few decades, humans have finally started to understand and accept that industrialization and infinite-growth capitalism—those systems that have given some of us in the developed nations the luxuries of modernity—have also increased atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to the point where we’re all headed toward a hotter, more unstable home planet.

The shittiest, most ironic thing about it all is that in the next few decades, as our oil-soaked socio-economic systems continue to unravel, the poorest and least developed populations with the lowest CO₂ emissions will face the most dire consequences of human-induced climate change.

Enter the era of justifiable Climate Rage.  

Poor countries in Latin America, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia are demanding rich countries that have benefitted from 150 years of unabated carbon dioxide emissions pay their rightful dues. They claim that if the developed nations want to restrict the emissions of the developing nations, they need to pay for the technological leap to bypass the early, dirty stages of modernization and energy production as well as provide funding to deal with the current and future effects of climate change.

This aptly named “climate debt” was discussed at the failed UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2009.  In 2010, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established something called the Green Climate Fund, in order to facilitate the transfer of money from rich nations to poor nations, in order to assist with climate change adaption and mitigation.

Currently, the richest nations have agreed to contribute up to $100 billion a year by 2020. This is not an official agreement however, and disputes still remain as to exactly how this money will be collected and distributed (private vs. public). So far, only a fraction of the money has been pledged, mainly to cover start-up costs. It’s a whole lot of high-risk money to organize and facilitate during high-risk times—but it’s also extremely necessary.

A 2013 report on the global vulnerability of cities due to climate change shows Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, facing the most immediate and extreme effects of climate change. Dhaka has one of the lowest per capita CO₂ emissions of any major city in the world coming in at just 0.6 tons per person. Almost half of the 13 million people of Dhaka live in low-lying, crowded slums and rarely have access to clean water—let alone electricity or personal vehicles. If you compare their annual emissions with the US (18 tons per person) or Canadian average (16 tons per person), you can start to see exactly how unfair the situation is. The same is true for the majority of the cities most threatened by climate change this year—as they have the lowest per capita GDP and CO₂ emissions in the world.

If we look historically at the total global human emissions of carbon dioxide since the mid 1800’s, the United States is responsible for 29% of all of them—or 328,000,000,000 metric tons of CO₂. In fact, 70% of all the global emissions have been produced by the richest 20% of the population, plus, the World Bank has estimated 75-80% of the effects of climate change are already being felt by the least developed populations.

Climate change is real, it is happening, and it is affecting the poorest, most vulnerable humans most directly. If our species wants to avoid widespread suffering and massive battles over resources due to millions or billions of climate refugees, we’re going to have to come together to work on solutions that aren’t based on the logic of return on investment. The return on this investment is survival.

In 1992, at the UN Earth Summit in Rio, Fidel Castro gave an impassioned speech about the ecological debts owed to the global poor. His words remain hauntingly prescient.

“An important biological species is in danger of disappearing due to the fast and progressive destruction of its natural living conditions: mankind. Wehave now become aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.

It is necessary to point out that consumer societies are fundamentally responsible for the brutal destruction of the environment. They arose from the old colonial powers and from imperialist policies which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty which today afflicts the vast majority of mankind. With only 20 percent of the world's population, these societies consume two-thirds of the metals and three-fourths of the energy produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and rivers, polluted the air, weakened and punctured the ozone layer, saturated the atmosphere with gases which are changing weather conditions with a catastrophic effect we are already beginning to experience.

The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding.  Every year thousands of millions of tons of fertile soil end up in the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct. Population pressures and poverty trigger frenzied efforts to survive even when it is at the expense of the environment. It is not possible to blame the Third World countries for this. Yesterday, they were colonies; today, they are nations exploited and pillaged by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it most. The reality is that anything that nowadays contributes to underdevelopment and poverty constitutes a flagrant violation of ecology. Tens of millions of men, women, and children die every year in the Third World as a result of this, more than in each of the two world wars.  Unequal terms of trade, protectionism, and the foreign debt assault the ecology and promote the destruction of the environment. If we want to save mankind from this self-destruction, we have to better distribute the wealth and technologies available in the world. Less luxury and less waste by a few countries is needed so there is less poverty and less hunger on a large part of the Earth. We do not need any more transferring to the Third World of lifestyles and consumption habits that ruin the environment. Let human life become more rational. Let us implement a just international economic order. Let us use all the science necessary for pollution-free, sustained development. Let us pay the ecological debt, and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear, and not mankind.

Now that the alleged threat of communism has disappeared and there are no longer any more excuses for cold wars, arms races, and military spending, what is blocking the immediate use of these resources to promote the development of the Third World and fight the threat of the ecological destruction of the planet? Let selfishness end. Let hegemonies end. Let insensitivity, irresponsibility, and deceit end. Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago. Thank you.”

 

Previously:

Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Irreparably Close to Destruction

This Wall-E wannabe is a threat to Canadian democracy. via Flickr.

You may remember when we first told you about the Conservative party’s robocall scandal being a pretty big deal, but you certainly wouldn’t be alone if you’ve kinda forgotten about it since then. That’s what happens when Federal investigations take well over two years.

That said, new information has revealed additional details from the Election Canada investigation, and now we know that Michael Sona, a controversial Conservative staffer from the 2011 Marty Burke campaign in Guelph is—drum roll please—probably, most likely, maybe the robocalls culprit, “Pierre Poutine!” Even if he’s not P.P. himself, he’s at least makes up a good chunk of the cheese curds and gravy, according to a sworn affidavit by the lead Elections Canada investigator Allan Matthews. Matthews says that Sona admitted to being involved in the scandal, but also suggested he wasn’t acting alone.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you any more details from the Elections Canada investigation because of a publication ban. What a tease.

This all relates back to the 2011 Election robocall scandal where up to 7,000 non-Conservative voters were told to go to the wrong polling station by an automated phone call, that has been linked to the campaign headquarters of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke.

In case you missed it, here’s a refresher on what happened in Guelph leading up to the 2011 Election:

On the night before Election Day, a disposable “burner” phone—like the one your drug dealer uses—was bought and registered under the name Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street, Joliette, Quebec, which incase you didn’t get the nuance is obviously a fake name and address. Logged in to the campaign staffer Andrew Prescott’s account at Burke headquarters, “Pierre Poutine” contacted RackNine Inc., a company of robots people that call voters on that ancient thing called a home telephone. Through a spooky Conservative voting identity gathering service called Constituent Information Management Service (CIMS), Pierre provided them with the names and phone numbers of the 7,000 non-Conservative voters who were told to go to a different voting station.

How did they know they were non-Conservative voters? Well since 1997, Elections Canada has been assigning every voter a number, and that number is connected to a name, address and gender. They then give it to the parties who use it for campaigns and essentially to profile you. Yikes!

Anyways, at 10am on Election Day, the calls were made and subsequently diverted hundreds of voters from their proper voting station. Despite this dirty (a.k.a. illegal) trick that everyone, including Burke, denies knowing about, he still lost the election to Liberal Frank Valeriote. Smooth moves, Burke.

40,000 other complaints were made about robocalls across the country during the 2011 Election, but when 800 specific complaints were identified, a Federal judge ruled that the robocalls weren’t influential enough to overturn the election results. While this may be true, many of the ridings did seem very close, and isn’t even a little bit of election fraud a bad thing?

Amongst this nationwide scandal of dirty phone call tricks, Guelph is the only place where there is any hope of actually finding a culprit. And that suspect, Mikey Sona, didn’t say anything until October 2012, eight months after being named Pierre Poutine, when he appeared on CBC’s Power and Politics. On the show, Sona vehemently—albeit noticeably nervous—denied allegations. His strongest point was that at 22 years old, he couldn’t possibly have masterminded such a complex plan—but then he fucked up his story. Sona said first that he resigned from a job on Parliament Hill because of the media attention, but later in the interview admitted he resigned before Sun News outed him as the man responsible. If he really was “shocked” to see the news story, he wouldn’t have resigned before the Sun report came out. Right?

Now, this Elections Canada report is saying he lied in that interview. Fair enough, but publicly Sona still maintains his innocence. He even dressed up as Pierre Poutine for Halloween. What kind of guy commits a crime, denies it, then dresses up in the identity that could have him fined $5,000 and in jail for up to five years? A guilty one? Kinda reminds me of that book OJ wanted to publish.

Anyway, less than a week after Sona was accused, Conservative Minister Peter MacKay said: “I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this," so the party didn’t need to investigate any further. That is, without knowing half of the details we know today, the Conservatives went ahead and threw a young staffer under the bus without much barely any investigating. Fishy.

So what would the Conservatives really have to gain from such blatant election fraud if this was a decision from higher up? They didn’t even win that riding’s election and the risk seems way higher than the reward—unless they get away with it.

Maybe as NDP MP Pat Martin said, it was to deprive the rival parties from the $1.53 per vote subsidy that parties receive, but the Conservatives are actively against voter subsidies in the first place and have pledged to eliminate them by 2015. That doesn’t seem like a thing they’d do.

Sona is the only one accused in this case, but other Conservatives could be involved. Most obviously there is Andrew Prescott. He was the only person responsible for dealing with RackNine, and was signed in on his computer when the contact with the company was made from Burke headquarters. But, it is generally believed that someone used Prescott’s password—rather than it being Prescott who logged in himself. Other suspects could include campaign manager Ken Morgan, who suddenly now lives in Kuwait, or Chris Crawford, who told investigators he overheard Sona and Morgan talking about “making a misleading poll moving call.” Who knows?

It’s true that robocalls aren’t only a Tory thing. All parties use them, and some of them are more effective at juking the stats than others. Both the NDP and Liberals have recently pleaded guilty to making calls, without properly identifying the party who is making the call, and were subsequently charged by the CRTC.

But I’m not letting those blue sons of guns off that easily. Neither of the offences by the orange and red parties were as serious as actually telling voters to go to the wrong polling station.

The point here is that if we want to protect our reputation as being a “global democracy,” (we rank eighth out of 165!) we have to enforce the rules of free elections, and stop downplaying things as just dirty campaign tricks when they are full-blown illegal electoral violations. Let’s step up our democracy game Canada, because this lack of action against the robocalling scandal is setting an unfortunate precedent.

Tweet your favourite dirty tricks to @JoelBalsam

Previously:

Robocalls: Why You Should Give a Shit

Bodies lined up after a chemical attack in Ghouta.

Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime currently stands accused of committing one of the worst war crimes of the 21st century: dropping sarin nerve gas on the rebel-held suburbs of Damascus last month. The body of evidence against the regime is large and compelling, but—much like 9/11 truthers sharing links to HD torrents of Zeitgeist—people are still passing around misinformation like it's gospel truth.

The debate will likely rage on for years in the armchair analyst community, regardless of whether military action is taken or not. But, for now, I thought it best to contact independent munitions expert Eliot Higgins, AKA Brown Moses, who, since the conflict began, has been investigating and verifying evidence of crimes on both sides of the conflict at his blog. Eliot isn't operating on the ground in Syria. In fact, he's operating from his house in Leicestershire and if he has an armchair, I don't doubt that he's operated from it before. But where he differs from your average lonely keyboard warrior is that he's incredibly well respected among journalists and weapons experts for his forensic ability to identify munitions found on Syria's battlefields. He has written for Foreign Policy and New York Times, and been interviewed by Channel 4 News, CNN, and the Guardian. Typically, he's billed as someone who's used the internet and social media to become an "accidental arms expert."

Eliot has put forward a particularly convincing case linking the regime to the sarin attacks, which corroborates firmly with the information gathered by NGOs and the intelligence agencies of the US, UK, France, and Germany. I spoke to him to find out more about his research.

A suspected delivery device of sarin gas.

VICE: Hi, Eliot. Can you tell me how you came to know so much about munitions?
Eliot Higgins: I'm self-taught, first using resources available online, then by talking to a lot of arms specialists and learning as I went. I'd look at a video, see something new and then learn as much about it as possible. There are huge amounts of information about the Soviet weaponry used by the Syrian government and opposition online. 

You have presented a lot of evidence that firmly suggests the Syrian government is behind the recent sarin attacks. Can you talk me through your conclusions?
The one thing you expect to find after a chemical attack is the remains of the munitions used. Unlike conventional munitions, the warheads on these weapons don't explode, but disperse the chemical agent using different methods—for example, a small dispersal charge that pops it open. So instead of being blown into tiny pieces, you should find the remains of the munitions used.

In the case of the attacks in Damascus, there are two different types of munitions that have been found by activists. The first is an M14 140mm artillery rocket fired by the Soviet BM14 multiple rocket launcher. One warhead type for these munitions carries 2.2 kilograms of sarin, and the remains of the munitions recorded by activists were in very good condition, suggesting this might have been the warhead used.

What's far more interesting is the second type of munitions, several of which have been filmed at the August 21st attacks, as well as previous alleged chemical attacks. These munitions are unique to the conflict; the many arms and chemical weapons specialists I've spoken to do not recognize it as appearing anywhere else in the world.

By piecing together the evidence I've gathered, we've learned a number of things. I call these UMLACAs—unidentified munitions linked to alleged chemical attacks—and there are actually two types of UMLACAs, a high explosive type and another type loaded with an unknown substance that only appears at the sites of alleged chemical attacks.

Another suspected delivery device of sarin gas.

And these munitions appear to only be in the possession of the regime?
All the evidence I've seen has linked them to the regime. We have photos and videos of them being fired by the regime, multiple videos from activists where they claim the regime fired them and no evidence at all that the Syrian opposition has these munitions. One thing to consider is that these things are about ten to 11.5 feet long, incredibly heavy, and require large launchers to fire—not something that's easy to transport or hide.

What about evidence suggesting that these weapons were fired from regime-held areas to opposition-held areas?
Well, one thing I was able to do with one of the munitions is find the exact location of it using satellite maps, videos, and photographs, and that indicated it came from the north, the location of major government military bases. There's also a video showing one being launched from a government area from a previous attack:

The missile launchers you talk about are Iranian made. Have you, at any point in the last two years of studying the conflict, seen those particular models or the munitions they carry in the possession of anyone in this conflict besides the Syrian army?
No. The only time I've seen those munitions and rocket launchers are with the Syrian army, or after they've been fired at the opposition.

Have you ever come across any evidence that the rebels have been using chemical weapons or are in possession of them?
None. There have been claims by various parties—some "coulds" and "maybes"—but actual evidence? None I've seen. And believe me, if I saw actual evidence I'd blog it so fast my fingers would set on fire.

Have you checked your findings with other independent munitions experts?
Yes. I've spoken to a number of chemical weapons and arms specialists. These munitions appear to be unique to the conflict and unique to the Syrian government. They've been quite a mystery; we've been trying to piece together what they are using with photos and videos. "CSI: YouTube," if you will.

With all the evidence that has been gathered so far, why do you think there are still people saying "there is no evidence"?
Simply because people aren't looking at the evidence, which is why I've been working so hard to put it all together on my blog. 

Why do you think people are refusing to look at the available evidence and instead trusting speculation?
I think people have become very distrustful of the US and UK governments after Iraq. People were betrayed and this is the natural reaction. I get the feeling that people on the internet are so wound up on conspiracy theories that they don't know what to believe. I’m constantly told the opposition are faking videos. People can only come up with a handful of examples in about 500,000 videos, yet many still insist every video they see is faked, even if they can't explain why. It's one thing to wrap a bandage around someone’s head to pretend that they're injured; it's another to fake a massive chemical attack.

What do you think is the appropriate course of action from the international community?
If the UN results say it's a chemical weapon attack and no one can come up with any evidence that it was the opposition, I think the only course of action is a military response. However, I think it's important to see the response to the chemical attack as a separate thing to military intervention. If you want military intervention, it's a whole different ball game to a few days or weeks of strikes in response to the chemical weapons attack.

A mother and father mourn their child, killed by sarin.

What impact do you think Western airstrikes will have on Assad's military capabilities?
It depends on the scale and what they hit. It's pretty hard to predict anything at this stage. A limited strike might just focus on a chemical weapon-related area, which might stop future chemical attacks, but not really change anything on the ground for the opposition. If, on the other hand, they took out the air force, it would make a huge difference. Even destroying the transport helicopter fleet would be important, as it would make isolated bases holding out against the opposition even more isolated, as they rely on airdrops from helicopters for supplies.

Do you think these strikes will change the course of the war?
Sixty days of airstrikes could. I assume they'll target the air defence network first, including the airforce, then a variety of military targets. Even with that, the conflict could go on for years. But we'll have to wait to see the damage they are going to do.

Can you think of any motive behind the regime using these weapons on a Damascus suburb while chemical weapons inspectors were in the country?
There are plenty of theories, but it could have just been a fuck up. Previous attacks linked to these munitions have been on sparsely populated frontlines with not so many casualties. This time, they landed in an overpopulated area filled with refugees—a perfect storm for maximum casualties.

It seems like there were too many rounds fired across quite a wide area to suggest it was a fuck up.
Yeah, it could have been a commander going off the reservation, so to speak.

What about the theory that the rebels accidentally gassed themselves?
I don't think there's any reliable evidence for that. My question for that would be, how could one incident affect such a wide geographical area and miss locations in between those areas?

Thanks for talking to me, Eliot.

Check out more of Eliot’s work here and follow him on Twitter: @Brown_Moses

Follow Oz on Twitter: @OzKaterji

More stories about the conflict in Syria:

More and More Journalists Are Being Kidnapped in Syria

We Spent Last Night Wandering Around Parliament Hassling MPs About Syria

WATCH: Ground Zero: Syria

The author with Paris Hilton. Photo by Andrew Boyle 

First and foremost, the term “fashion week” is somewhat of a misnomer. It really should be called “fashion month.” The week bounces around from New York, London, and Paris to Milan, and since it happens twice a year, fashion week is really a two-month debacle.  

The collections debuted are meant for the following year, ensuring that by the time you’re in season, you’re already outdated. It’s such a wonderful system that it almost makes you wonder if it developed accidentally. No matter what, you’re behind the times, and if you wanna catch up, you have to pay more than attention.

It’s hard to quantify how much money ultimately gets dumped into fashion week, but judging by what I’ve seen, it’s somewhere around one quadrillion dollars. There’s a lot on the line. If you’re capable of designing the right dress that the right celebrity will wear at the right event, you’re golden. If you’re really doing well, Entertainment Weekly will ask, “Who wore it better?” Stylists style, models model, and gawkers gawk, some to be seen, others to pay witness. Dead presidents painted green are thrown around like confetti in a ticker-tape parade.     

Fashion week is a strange gold mine of potentiality. When you nail it, you nail it, and when you don’t, you’re doomed. Think about all the secondary companies that profit off of fashion week. Vogue has to be twice as thick as usual just to incorporate all the coverage of shows and ads from an array of cosmetic companies, brands, and corporate sponsors of all shapes and forms marketing themselves to the bone. Venues, clubs, retail stores, restaurants; it’s like Manhattan hosts the Super Bowl every February and September. Fashion week brings a lot of money into the community. Unfortunately, it’s a community that’s already swimming in cash.

Corporate sponsors pay to have their name attached to events in hope that the marketing will ultimately generate profits. Obviously there’s no guarantee it will work. Last year, I went to a few shows sponsored by Walgreens. Walgreens? Nothing says high-end fashion like Walgreens. It didn’t make sense, yet somehow there they were, handing out cups containing their new line of fresh ready-to-eat fruit-yogurt things. Have you had one recently? Neither have I.

Designers aren’t guaranteed financial success by being there either. They dump a significant amount of their own money into presentations and runways shows, hoping to gain exposure and buyers for their line. For smaller designers, this can be a make or break moment. Michael Kors can afford to drop $500,000-plus on a 15-minute show, but unlike most designers, his name (i.e. corporation) is traded openly on Wall Street. He’s loaded. Smaller designers often spend every last dime to put together their shows. They have to privately fund studio time, models, stylists, etc.—all with no guarantee that they’ll receive any worthwhile press. Of course, even if they do create buzz, it doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. Fashion week is like a glamorous game of Russian roulette, where winning is purely survival.

Of course, they have no choice but to play by the rules. Conspicuous consumption is more than just the norm. It is the game itself. No one will take you seriously if you appear frugal. Here’s the thing—New York fashion week is actually a very unprofitable event. Sponsors, designers, venues; nearly all of them use fashion week as a marketing tool, investing million upon millions of dollars just to get their names attached.

It appears the old adage “it costs money to make money” rings true. Money gets thrown around during fashion week necessarily—there is nothing more vogue than conspicuously wasting as much money as you can.

Like everything, the fashion world has a distinct hierarchy that is impossible to avoid. Class distinctions in the industry are rather acute in general, but it’s never more on display than during fashion week. Status is vigorously observed. On one hand, you have the people who work around the clock to make sure everything comes together on time. These people are seldom, if ever, invited to any of the ridiculous parties that are thrown to celebrate their achievement. On the other hand, there are a slew of entitled celebrities and aristocrats who do nothing more than show up to be seen. For those who can afford it, everything is free.

Fashion week's upper class doesn’t have to do anything other than show up and get their photo taken. It’s true that going to exclusive events could potentially be a taxing form of work, but for those who are willing to take the challenge, it’s worth it. It’s going to be hard explaining that to the crews cleaning up the mess at night’s end. Of course, the latter isn’t really doing anything honorable, not like those who have the misfortune of sipping free cocktails as elegantly garnished as they are. This occupation is an expression of their rank. The people doing the least matter the most. If you can manage to pull off doing absolutely nothing other than standing there with a manicured smile (like my girl Paris), you’ve made it.

The cult of personality is very clear here. A-list celebrities constitute the highest tier of attendees. They are the true nobility. Their status is given regardless of artistic credibility or the lack there of. They stand above the rest. On their heels are the up-and-comers, the next wave, followed by a succession of lesser and lesser waves.

There are secondary occupations that lesser classes can participate in (that are still subordinate to the highest class), like styling the models, production, photography, etc., but these people aren’t nearly as affluent as the highest class. 

I’d talk about all the people who are responsible for the buildup and tear downs, but there’s really no point. I’ll put it like this—manual labor is a clear-cut sign of class inferiority. These people don’t matter unless they’ve done something wrong.

Strangely enough, there seems to be an anomaly in the class system that represents a more affluent group being treated like dirt—the interns. These slaves amount to less than nothing during fashion week, a thousand times lower on the totem pole than the guy pressing the buttons on the elevator.

I had the random opportunity to sit through an intern orientation for a major fashion venue last year, and witnessed a room full of excited 18-year-olds about to work for free. For whatever reason, I didn’t get the impression that they would have been as excited to volunteer at the Food Bank or something like that. They were enamored by fashion, and by doing whatever menial task they were assigned, they were part of something bigger than themselves. They had the idea that they were going to be part of something, part of fashion, and I half-wondered how many of them were dreaming about being randomly discovered by somebody famous. They didn’t realize that they were about to be ignored by everyone except for the people with unmanageable tempers.

“I don’t even bother trying to remember any of their names,” one producer told me, “I just yell, ‘Intern!’ and if they don’t do exactly what I say, I fire them on the spot.”

Of course, “hiring” interns is not something unique to fashion week. Exploiting people is the purest form of capitalism—why pay somebody when you don’t have to? It’s economic slavery.

I had the crazy experience to attend Kanye West’s fashion show in Paris a year and change ago. Surrounded by celebrities who had no intention of talking to me, I had nothing better to do than suck down free cocktails and examine the flower arrangements. Two arrangements particularly stood out to me: fluffy cotton pulled right off the plant and pinned onto a Styrofoam ball (i.e., a cotton ball) and a stalk of cotton standing unadulterated in a planter. They were both provocative and political. I imagined Kanye (or whoever makes these decisions for Kanye) came up with the concept as a poignant statement, one that reminded everyone there that it wasn’t very long ago that black people were excluded from high-end fashion. It was a serious statement and one that I appreciated. Only one thing bothered me about it. What he sings about, what he represents—the bling, the bullshit, the money, and all that—actively supports economic slavery. What’s the difference? Where’s Chuck D when you need him?

Like I said, money gets thrown around during Fashion Week necessarily; there is nothing more vogue than conspicuous consumption.

There was this French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, who thought that all meaning came from relative comparisons. For instance, you’re only good at basketball in comparison to somebody who sucks. Baudrillard was really into the concept of signs or signifiers. You can think of it in terms of a traffic light. When you pull up to an intersection, we know red means stop, green means go, and yellow means really go or else you’ll have to stop. The lights are colors, but the colors have meanings attributed to them within a system we’ve created. It’s all part of our collective understanding that helps bring order to the world. Human beings love order, or the perception of order. That’s why we generalize so much. It makes things easier. And if we’re faced with a scenario where we don’t know what’s going on, it’s helpful to have a proverbial roadmap, signs that lead the way. Such are traffic lights, and such is clothing.

What we wear is a signal to others. A stick-and-poke Black Flag tattoo says something and a Dolce & Gabbana handbag says another. Combining the two says something I’ve yet to see. It’d probably say something like, “I sold out.”   

Now, there was another guy, an American economist named Thorstein Veblen, who tried to tackle this from an economic perspective. In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen summed up the motive for much of societal interaction with the term “invidious comparison.” Without getting too much into detail, that means people look at themselves in relation to the rest of the world along the lines of a simple comparison: Is it better than me, or worse than me?

In a society where worth is so often measured in economic terms, invidious comparison is expressed in money. Having the ability to spend lavishly with seemingly no care in the world means you’re doing better than someone struggling to pay the rent. It’s not enough just to have money. If you don’t spend it conspicuously, how will anyone know how good you’re doing? Similarly, if you’re working two jobs just to afford designer jeans, you’ll look better than if you were wearing something bought at the Gap. As Joseph Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man, would say, “It’s all about appearance.”

Clothes make up part of our immediate identity. Inexpensive clothes are seen to be cheap regardless of durability, whereas expensive clothes are held to be the opposite. Counterfeit pieces might look and function the same, but as soon as they’re identified as being “less-than-real,” their aesthetic and commercial value declines dramatically. An Alexander Wang shirt is only worth the money if Alexander Wang approves the tag that says “Alexander Wang.” It doesn’t matter if the copy is an exact replica—it’s nothing like the real thing.

Speaking of real, it’s odd to think that a designer who stitches their clothes by hand is given significant credit while those who sew up garments in sweatshops might as well not even exist. I guess it’s because sweatshop gear is inherently inferior. You could make the argument that designing high-end clothing is markedly different, as the true artistic genius of the designer is justification enough for superior treatment. After all, they did go to Parsons. Luckily enough, no one has to justify anything during fashion week. The artistic genius of the designers in the eyes of the aristocratic class is all that matters and bringing up sweatshops is an exercise in futility.

If I were ever to have my own fashion show, I know exactly what I would do. I’d have a presentation, not a runway show, so people could walk into the room and look at my collection of dirty old T-shirts on mannequins at their leisure. Also on the floor would be 40 old ladies of various ethnicities sewing up replicas of my shirts on outdated sewing machines. They’d never engage anybody there and would just sew shirt after shirt, looking tired as hell. Then at the front of the room I’d have a big, fat, greasy looking guy in a pinstriped suit laughing to himself, repeatedly counting stacks of hundred-dollar bills and puffing on a cigar. I’d have to make sure they allowed smoking indoors.

Think about how incredibly uncomfortable it would make everyone. Even more ridiculously, they’d probably think it was edgy and cool. I can see it now: “Designer Mike Abu Shocks NYFW with a Conceptual Apropos Modulation.”

The world loves a bastard. 

To be fair, not everybody who cares about fashion week is completely oblivious to what it is. There are many people in every class who actively care about this shit. I’ve made a lot of friends through the fashion industry and I don’t regret having written dumb fashion articles many times over. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t stupid.

mikeabu.com

@countslackula

More fashion week from VICE:

Don't Do This at NYFW

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

'Kingdom' by Rochambeau

This is an alleged drug and human trafficking hotspot, according to the Feds. Photo via Flickr user Arthur Chapman

Last month, miners who were digging for gold in the remote wilderness near Chicken, Alaska, (population 17) were alarmed by the sudden arrival of a group of armed men. The eight dudes in body armor were from the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force, which is led by the Environmental Protection Agency and was there to check 30 or so small mining claims for violations of the Clean Water Act and other environmental no-nos. That doesn’t seem like it would require the use of much force, but the squad who showed up in Chicken included armed FBI and Department of Defense agents and even a plane for “air support.”

Though they expect environmental oversight, some of the miners were unnerved when the men showed up with little or no warning—though their jackets said “POLICE” in big letters, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume that the cops were gold-hungry robbers in disguise. “Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say POLICE emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” miner C.R. “Dick” Hammond, told the Alaska Dispatch. “You would be wondering, ‘My God, what have I done now?’”

A law enforcement agency using paramilitary tactics for seemingly no cause is not unique. Even when they're only checking occupational licenses or enforcing bans on keeping wildlife, cops all over the country seem more and more willing to Rambo up now and ask questions later. They often have excuses for their heavy gear—in this case, the EPA force told one of Alaska’s senators, Lisa Murkowski, that Alaskan state troopers had reported “rampant drug and human trafficking going on in the area.” But state troopers said no such thing, and Murkowski said that the line sounded “wholly concocted.” What's more, not a single arrest or citation has been filed against any of the miners—not only was no one running a drug and slaving empire in the woods, nobody was violating the Clean Water Act.

Reports of the Chicken raids outraged right-wing outlets ranging from Alex Jones’s Infowars to National Review, and now the state government, including Governor Sean Parnell, is getting involved. That's a welcome development. Alaska is as good a place as any to start pushing back the mission creep of federal regulatory agencies—the nice thing about the EPA’s job is that it shouldn’t involve pointing a gun at anyone, especially not some miners in the middle of nowhere.

More bad cops of the week:

- An officer with the Seattle Police Department who threatened a handcuffed man was given a 30-day suspension instead of being fired. Clayton Powell “engaged in multiple acts of misconduct” in an incident during August of last year, which is putting it nicely. He got in trouble while he was investigating the shooting of a nine-year-old with a pellet gun and confronted 18-year-old Ismail Abdella, who made threatening comments about wanting to fight Powell. The officer shoved Abdella several times during their argument, then arrested him while grabbing his hair and throwing him onto the hood of the police cruiser. A little later, after Abdella was in cuffs and alone in a holding cell, Powell was caught on tape moving towards him, waving his finger, and pretending to punch him.

- Speaking of the SPD (which is a complete mess), on Wednesday a Seattle cop accidentally shot an unarmed suspect in the leg. The injured woman was in a fight when the police coincidentally rolled by, and she took off running when they spotted her. The unidentified officer was chasing her when he took out his gun to “cover himself,” which seems like a bad idea seeing as how it’s easy for a gun to go off when you’re running. The good news is that the woman—who was wanted on multiple felony warrants—is fine, and the cop is on administrative leave pending an investigation.   

- On September 3 in Long Beach, California, witnesses captured footage of four officers trying to arrest 46-year-old Porfirio Santos-Lopez. One officer repeatedly hit Santos-Lopez with his baton, and at least one other officer used his Taser what appears to be multiple times. The reason for such violence was that Santos-Lopez was drunk and on meth—his family says he is also mentally ill—and had started a fight. Officers claim they hit the man because he was kicking and punching at cops and refusing to obey commands. That may be true, and Santos-Lopez likely deserved to be arrested, but the video uploaded to YouTube seems to show Santos-Lopez on his back in the road—apparently after an initial Tasering—kicking his legs as a defensive measure when cops hit him again and again with the baton. Bystanders thought he should be arrested, but that the police used excessive force. Santo-Lopez’s family said he was hospitalized for a collapsed lung and broken bones.

- A woman who has been on Arizona death row for over 20 years after being convicted of her child’s murder is free for now, thanks to an untrustworthy police detective. In 1989, Debra Mike supposedly gave her four-year-old son up to two men who killed him so that Mike could collect on a paltry $5,000 life-insurance policy. Those men confessed to the crime, while Mike denied her involvement—but during her trial detective Armando Saldate Jr. swore she confessed, even though there was no recording of her statement. After years of legal battles, a federal appeals court ruled that jurors should have been told about Saldate’s dodgy history of lying under oath, violating suspects’ constitutional rights, and receiving sexual favors from a woman he pulled over. Mike has not been exonerated for the death of her child, and she will probably be retried. But after two decades, it’s comforting that the authorities thought a man like Saldate, now retired, probably wasn’t trustworthy.

- Motivated by the supposed need for beefed-up security on the Mexican border, the Border Patrol (part of the Department of Homeland Security) is using eminent domain to acquire land in order to place surveillance towers. A local TV report from August 27 said that property owners are furious that not only is their land being taken, but the compensation offered is much lower than market value.

- For our Good Cop(s) of the Week, we offer sergeant Steven Sandusky and officer Jason Rains of the Kansas City Police Department, who on September 1 escorted an extremely freaked-out young deer off of a high bridge. The deer was so tired from its thunderstorm and traffic-induced panic that Sandusky only needed to gently touch it with his baton and it followed him to safety. AWWWWWWWW.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

Previously: The DEA Is Monitoring Your Phone Calls

New York Fashion Week is a mindfuck that can't be described by words, so instead here are some pictures. Keep up with this column throughout the week for more NYFW photo updates!

ISAORA
Sunday, September 8, 2013

HOOD BY AIR
Sunday, September 8, 2013

MARK MCNAIRY NEW AMSTERDAM
Sunday, September 8, 2013

TELFAR
Sunday, September 8, 2013

OPENING CEREMONY
Sunday, September 8, 2013

MARA HOFFMAN
Saturday, September 7, 2013

CHRISTIAN SIRIANO
Saturday, September 7, 2013

ALEXANDRE HERCHCOVITCH
Saturday, September 7, 2013

ROBERT GELLER
Saturday, September 7, 2013

CUSHNIE ET OCHS
Friday, September 6, 2013

DUCKIE BROWN
Friday, September 6, 2013

GENERAL IDEA
Friday, September 6, 2013

HARLEM'S FASHION ROW
Friday, September 6, 2013

Conor Lamb is a freelance photographer who hails from the Midwest where he studied lightning and photography. He's exhausted from all the shitty parties he used to document when night-life photography was still a thing. He has a penchant for shooting hip-hop artists, and he's covered fashion stuff for us in the past. He has a Joy Division tattoo and, according to a very good source, he and his girlfriend like to dress up as juggalos. His work can be found here.

Previously - Day Two: Tocca, Tadashi Shoji, and the Fashion Palette Australian Showcase

Want more stuff about NYFW? Check these out: 

NYFW Reviews: Nautica, You Disgust Us

Don't Do This at NYFW

'Kingdom' by Rochambeau

We are pleased to present to you a new short story by Barry Gifford, one of the shrewdest and most authentically American authors to ever put words on a page. We have featured his writing several times in VICE, so we’re not going to clog up the works and get all granular over here. Suffice it to say that if you see his name on the cover of a book, read it and you won’t be disappointed. This short and sweet one below is from his forthcoming collection The Roy Stories, due out in October from Seven Stories Press. It’s about a pedophile barber named Rocco. 

Roy overheard his mother telling her friend Kay that Rocco the barber, who lived next door, had molested her on the front steps of her house. Kay and his mother were sitting in the living room and Roy, who was nine years old, was standing in the front hallway where the women could not see him.

“He was very nice at first,” said Roy’s mother, “just making conversation, then all of a sudden he tried to kiss me on the mouth. I turned my head away but he kept trying, pushing himself at me and putting his hands on my breasts. I pushed him away and yelled, ‘Rape!’ I called him a whoremaster because his wife, Maria, told me he’d been a pimp in Naples during the war. She was probably one of his girls.” 

Kay was an on-and-off girlfriend of Roy’s Uncle Buck, his mother’s brother. She was a glamorous woman, a redhead who looked like Rita Hayworth and wore wonderful perfume. Roy was always glad to see her because Kay would kiss and hug him and he could smell her. She was married to a rich lawyer but she always went out with Buck when he visited Chicago. Once Roy had asked his uncle why he hadn’t married Kay and Buck said, “Well, Roy, there are some girls you marry and some you’re happy to see marry someone else, which doesn’t mean you can’t still see them sometimes.”

“Are you going to tell Rudy?” Kay asked Roy’s mother.

“I’m thinking about it. Rudy would have his legs broken.”

Rudy was Roy’s father. He and Roy’s mother had divorced when Roy was five but they were very friendly and always spoke well of one another around Roy. Often when his mother needed a favor or money in a hurry she called Rudy.

“He deserves it, the pig,” said Kay. “Rudy’s had worse things done to guys.”

Roy left the house quietly, closing the front door without letting the women hear him go. On his way to the park to play baseball, Roy could not help but picture in his mind Rocco the barber attacking his mother. He did not say anything about it to anyone at the park but later that afternoon, after his game had ended, Roy walked up to Ojibway Boulevard to where Rocco’s barbershop was and stood across the street.

It was late August and the air was heavy. As the sky darkened, a few raindrops fell and a weak wind began to blow. Rocco’s dog, a three-legged Doberman pinscher named Smoky, was chained, as usual, to a pole in front of the barbershop. One story was that Smoky had lost his left rear leg in a fight to the death with a wolverine when Rocco had taken the dog with him on a hunting trip to Michigan or Wisconsin. Tommy Cunningham told Roy that Rocco’s son, Amelio, who was six years older than Roy and Tommy, said Smoky had killed the wolverine by biting it in the throat but that the wolverine had attacked Smoky first and torn off the dog’s leg. Another story was that Smoky had been hit by a bus and run over on Ojibway Boulevard while he was chasing a kid and trying to bite him, which is the one Roy believed because Smoky tried to bite any kid who came close to him.

Roy took out his Davy Crockett pocket knife and opened it. He crossed the street and waited until there were no passersby watching. Just at a moment when Smoky had his big dark brown head turned to lick the stub of his missing leg, Roy darted at the dog and plunged the blade into Smoky’s right eye. The animal howled and whipped his head around, dislodging the knife, which clattered to the sidewalk. Roy quickly picked it up and ran. He did not wait to see Rocco and other men come out of the barbershop to see what Smoky was howling and whimpering about. 

When Roy got home, his mother and Kay were not there. He rinsed the blood off his knife at the kitchen sink, wiped it clean with a dish towel, then went into his room and buried it at the bottom of his toy chest. He went back into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of chocolate milk, carried it onto the back porch and sat down on the top step. The rain started coming down harder. 

The next time Roy passed Rocco’s barbershop, Smoky was not chained in front. Roy would go to Arturo’s Barber College to get his hair cut, even though it was farther from his house. The guys learning to cut hair there were butchers but they only charged a quarter. Roy hated to go to the barber’s anyway. He wished he never had to get a haircut again. 

More fiction from VICE: 

Malibu

White Trash

Werewolf

A pro-weed march in Montevideo. (Photo by Santiago Mazzarovich)

It seems almost guaranteed that, this November, weed will be legalised in Uruguay. The move – hailed as an "experiment" that could make a "contribution to humanity" by Uruguayan president Jose Mujica – would be completely unique, in that it will be the first programme in the world to establish government control over the entire marijuana industry, including the cultivation, trafficking and sale of the drug.

Even though the use of all drugs has been decriminalised in Uruguay for over 30 years, users have had to buy their weed from street dealers. However, when the law comes into force, the stuff on sale will be bought from legitimate and, more importantly, heavily regulated sources. At an estimated $2.50 per gram, it's being priced in direct competition with the black market – the rationale being that people won’t want to buy a sub-standard product from a drug dealer when they can get a quality-controlled drug from the state for exactly the same price.

After registering with the state, citizens will be able to purchase up to 40 grams of marijuana a month, as well as being allowed to grow their own personal stashes. For the more entrepreneurial amateur botanists, private companies and cooperatives will be permitted to cultivate their own product, just as long as they stay within certain limits and only sell their crop through government-run pharmacies.

But as jubilant as the country’s smokers may be, this law isn’t just being passed to improve their access to Cannabis Cup-worthy weed. Instead, as part of a 15-point government programme called "Strategy for Life and Coexistence", it's a move to hopefully make the country a safer place to live, freeing up more time for authorities to deal with organised crime rather than frittering away their time on marijuana arrests.

Unsurprisingly, this step towards legalisation didn't happen overnight. The move is the culmination of years of campaigning by citizens, NGOs and politicians. Clara Musto from the Uruguayan activist group Pro Derechos – or Pro Rights -- told me all about the obstacles her organisation has faced in the lead-up to this historic change in legislature.

A pro-weed march in Montevideo. (Photo by Santiago Mazzarovich)

It turns out that the main issue was convincing people that the debate wasn’t really about drugs at all. It has taken a long time “to reach a turning point in the public debate, where people don’t see this as a discussion about marijuana and whether [it] is harmful for your health", Clara told me. "Or if it is good or bad to use marijuana, but about the marijuana laws [themselves]."

The mass media haven’t been particularly helpful at getting this message across, either: "Marijuana is a subject that is really stigmatised,” Clara continued, “and the pictures that you see in the papers and on the television will be of a boy smoking a huge joint […] because that’s how they see this issue, and that is not helping us deconstruct this stigma."

Supporters of the Pro Derechos' campaign defy the typical image of a pro-marijuana group; instead of a disorganised, dreadlocked mass, moving as one in a confused haze of cries about weed just being a plant, they are men and women from all walks of life – the young and the old, stay-at-home mums and businessmen, and people who don't even smoke marijuana themselves.   

The campaign has picked up this kind of support by producing graphics emphasising the social benefits of legalisation: from a boost in the economy to how hard drug use may decrease.

A campaign poster from Pro Derechos featuring a picture of the Uruguayan President. (Image courtesy of Pro Derechos)

But most important to the push for the government's big weed takeover is the perception that insecurity and crime have risen over the past decade in the previously sleepy country. Despite the fact Montevideo is nothing like Colombia’s murderous battlefields of Bogota and Medellin (which see roughly ten times as many murders), those living in Uruguay’s capital are more likely to label their home as “highly unsafe” than anyone living in either of Colombia’s two most violent cities.

Their opinions might appear a little exaggerated, but crime has indeed risen over the past ten years. This is, according to police and drug officials, due to the influx of cocaine paste, which flooded the country after the precursor chemicals used to make cocaine were regulated in Colombia and Peru, meaning that traffickers had to find a new market in which to sell their product. The combination of the 2002 economic crisis, waves of unemployment and a new cheap drug led to an increase in criminal gang activity in the country.

When I called Geoff Ramsey, an Open Societies Foundation researcher, he told me that legalising marijuana – although certainly not being a silver-bullet policy – could help undermine local gangs that also deal in prostitution and small-scale crime. "In Uruguay, there are actually Peruvian and Colombian transnational crime organisations that take advantage of the Montevideo port to ship cocaine to a mostly European market," he told me, "and they will probably not be affected by this. However, the local, urban, prototypical gangs that do exist will take a big hit."

A pro-weed march in Montevideo. (Photo by Santiago Mazzarovich)

While it might not be the most profitable of drugs to sell, the market for marijuana is the most popular in Uruguay, with 20 percent of the population smoking it at some point in their lives. If that trade is taken out of the hands of local criminals – criminals who contribute to the insecurity in the country – their wallets are going to start to feel a whole lot lighter.

Of course, this being the first experiment of its kind in the world, it could backfire. Criminals aren’t likely to just drop everything and queue up at the job centre in the search for a straight life of work. Luckily, the President of Uruguay, José Mujica, seems aware of this, as he has also ramped up spending on law enforcement. Money that will presumably be generated by the sale of government marijuana will be targeted at curbing the hard drug trafficking that criminals may divert to, as well as making sure that any new marijuana growers don’t go over the determined limits. If these possible outcomes are dealt with, the legalisation of marijuana in Uruguay – according to Geoff, at least – "stands a good chance of reducing homicides and other violent crime".

This could potentially set a precedent for other countries in Latin America and all over the world when it comes to drug policy, or at least inspire them to act against the prohibitionist status-quo. In fact, some of them are already doing just that, with Ecuador recently decriminalising personal drug use and the presidents of both Colombia and Guatemala stating they want to research alternatives to the destructive US-led War on Drugs.

Of course, hasty excitement must be managed, because – at this stage – the scheme is merely an "experiment", and one that the world will be keeping a very close eye on. However, if it is a success and manages to produce all the benefits that the Uruguayan government is claiming, then who knows which country will next install its political leader at the head of its marijuana industry.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More stuff about drug policy:

The Feds Will Let the States Legalise Pot… Maybe

Will Laughing Gas Be the Next Casualty in the Government's War On Legal Highs?

This Is What Happens When You Try to Smuggle Two Wheelie Bins Full of Khat into America

New York Fashion Week attracts a well-groomed crowd that takes pride in all their appendages, and it shows. Throughout the week we approached people who had some nice pie holes, had Conor take their portrait for safe record keeping, and asked a few them some questions about their soup coolers.

Josh, 27, Opening Ceremony Buyer

VICE: In three words, describe your lips to me.
Josh: Big League Chew

What if they were a song?
"Suck My Kiss" by Red Hot Chili Peppers. For the record, I don't like this band. I only like Anthony in Point Break and Flea in Back to the Future.

Yeah, they should of totally went the acting route. Do your lips remind you of any actors or other celebrities?
Yeah, they remind me of LL Cool J, because we lick our lips the same way. 
 

Colette, 25, Make-up Artist

How do you keep your lips looking like that?
Colette: Intense moisturization. Constant lip balms and chap-sticks.

Are they real?
Yeah, they're all natural. At first when I was younger I didn't really like them, and kids would make fun of them, but I grew into them eventually.

If they were a car, what would they be?
A red 1971 Dodge Charger. American muscle.
 

CB, 25, HNIC at Carson Clothiers

In three words, describe your lips.
CB: Big, masculine, and black. But not like smoker black.

If your lips could, who would they admire?
Probably Will Smith. Some girls say he has the perfect lips.

I can't necessarily disagree. What if they were an animal?
Probably a polar bear cause they look soft but can fuck you up.

Love the body parts of fashionable people? Check this out: 

Fashion Bootys 

For the second episode of our pretty much brand new food show, Matty Matheson's Hangover Cures, we took Matty out to Montreal to party with the rarely drunk, and incredibly talented, Antonio Park of Park Restaurant. Antonio is a Korean-Argentinian super genius who makes some of the best sushi we've ever had. Tasty sashimi and nigiri aside however, Matty filled him full of so much alcohol he could barely stand up in the shower the next morning. Anyway, here's how it went when we woke Matty and Antonio up early the next day, and got them to make a spicy seafood kimchi soup.

Dr. Walter Hern, one of the four remaining doctors in the country who will terminate a pregnancy after the 24th week of pregnancy.

Americans will declare war on almost anything. Like most nations in history, we declare war on other governments. But we have also made a habit of declaring war on ideologies (Communism, Islamic extremism), on broadly defined patterns of violence (terrorism, piracy), and even on abstract social ills (poverty, drugs). And then there are the “culture wars,” a lazy phrase that at one point served as a shorthand for the political agenda of the Christian right, but which has recently expanded to refer to any controversial topic that doesn’t involve tax brackets or firing cruise missiles into foreign countries. Guns, medical marijuana, zoning regulations, soda bans, physician-assisted suicide, rent-controlled apartments, Citibikes, and the Pledge of Allegiance all are part of the culture wars according to one respected commentator or another.

But there is one front in the culture war where the word “war” doesn’t seem like overheated rhetoric, where real bullets are fired and where real bombs are thrown: the struggle over the availability and scope of abortion. It's the hot-button social issue that stubbornly continues to divide Americans even as other bones of contention like recreational drug use and gay rights inch reliably towards liberalization. And the white-hot beating heart of the abortion debate—its bloodiest battlefield—is the question of late-term (i.e., third-trimester) abortions.

Late-term abortions and the forces arrayed for and against them are the subject of a wrenching new documentary, After Tiller, which opens in New York later this month. The film profiles the four remaining doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions, all of whose lives were touched in one way or another by George Tiller, the Kansas-based, late-term abortion provider gunned-down by an anti-abortion extremist while attending Sunday church services three years ago. In the aftermath of Tiller’s slaying, Randall Terry, founder of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, called Tiller a “mass murderer” who “reaped what he sowed.” Despite widespread condemnation, the killer got what he wanted: late-term abortions are no longer available in Kansas. Residents now must travel 500 miles to Denver for the procedure.

After Tiller isn’t formally inventive, and its directors, Martha Shane and Lane Wilson, don’t appear to have been tempted by the many gimmicks in the documentarian’s toolkit. The film is better for it. What the viewer gets instead is a sequence of raw and intimate portraits—filmed dead-on and without intrusive narration—of women struggling to make what will in all likelihood be the hardest decision of their lives. As with many great documentaries, After Tiller can make for excruciating viewing at times, but you’ll be glad you saw it, not least because it takes you to a place that the camera seldom visits.

In the 40 years since Roe v. Wade was decided, tens of millions of women have had some form of legal abortion, and it is a rare few months that pass without some controversy over access to abortion creating national news. Yet most films and novels and nearly all television programs depict abortion-free worlds, where unwanted pregnancies almost never occur, and if they do they are carried to term with little acknowledgement of a legal and safe alternative. Nor do our public figures seem eager to discuss the abortions in their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. After Tiller shines a gentle light onto this much-discussed but still unmentionable topic, taking us inside the consultation room, where we are given searing glimpses of the fear, anger, sadness, and self-doubt, but also relief and hope, felt by women who seek abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy.

 
Dr. Susan Robinson. Photos courtesy of Oscilliscope Laboratories.

What After Tiller makes beyond clear is that a late-term abortion is never a happy event or an easy decision. Although the camera doesn’t reveal the faces of the patients, we hear their anguished voices and see their trembling hands, which hover anxiously over swollen bellies. Each story is an intensely private tragedy, of a kind that often unfolds secretly, hidden even from friends and family. It’s hard to say which patient’s situation is most harrowing, but they will all break your heart. In one consultation, we hear a couple inform the doctor that their baby has been diagnosed with a lethal condition which will doom him to a very short and very painful life, full of shunts and seizures. “This was not an unwanted pregnancy,” the mother says, muffling sobs, “it’s guilt no matter which way you go.” In another, a woman whose fetus has been determined to be severely retarded tells the doctor she wants to be able to spend time with the body of her stillborn baby after the procedure. In a third consultation, a woman makes an unconvincing promise to her doctor to report her rapist to the police.

The gravity of the decision to abort is not lost on the doctors profiled in the movie. If there is a second lesson in After Tiller, it is that being a late-term abortion specialist carries extraordinary risks and emotional burdens that far exceed the material rewards of the profession. All of the doctors in After Tiller are animated in one way or another by a powerful belief that the work they do is vitally necessary, and that many women would come to great harm were they to give in to intimidation. The four physicians—two men, two women—continue their work despite being at or near retirement age, and despite knowing that there is little that can stop an extremist with murderous intent. Linking them all is a deep grief for Dr. Tiller, whom they all knew both as colleague and friend.

Beyond those commonalities, the four physicians profiled in the film offer a study in contrasts. At one side is LeRoy Carhart, a gruff and defiant Air Force veteran who for many years operated an abortion clinic in Nebraska despite death threats and physical attacks on his property. At the other is Shelley Sella, a soft-spoken gay woman who openly agonizes about the difficulty of her work, observing at one point that “unless people understand what’s going on for the women, it’s impossible to support” late-term abortions. Somewhere between them is Susan Robinson, Dr. Sella’s colleague (the two run a clinic in Albuquerque), whose buoyant disposition is often weighted down by the heavy decision of whether or not to accept a patient. Finally, there is Walter Hern, a former obstetrician and Peace Corps volunteer whose path to providing late-term abortions began during a stint in a Brazilian hospital, where he saw that the number of women hospitalized as a result of self-performed abortions outnumbered those in the maternity ward two-to-one. Each of these four individuals approaches his or her practice with a different mixture of resolve, resignation and fear.

After Tiller is openly sympathetic to its subjects, and makes no pretense of engaging with abortion opponents, whose presence in the film is limited to shots of praying protesters and clips of scary speeches in churches and halls of government. In that sense, the film can’t be called balanced. But After Tiller provides something more important than balance, which usually serves to placate audiences more than move them. That something is intimacy—three-dimensional portraits of individuals struggling to select the least awful choice from among a set of terrible choices. In this respect, Shane and Wilson are more peacemakers than culture warriors, and one can hope that their film will help prevent another murder like the one that took Dr. Tiller.



Related:

Talking About My Abortion

The Abortion Freedom Riders

Why Telemedical Abortions Are the Wave of the Future

 

Drawings by Molly Crabapple

On August 28, prisoner Nabil Hadjarab left Guantanamo Bay.

Miss Holly, the three-time winner of Cupcake Wars, came to visit.

Sold for a bounty during the war in Afghanistan, Nabil had languished for over a decade in the island prison. Six years after he was cleared to leave, guards threw a hood over his head, and shackled him and another detainee, and led him aboard a military plane to Algeria, a country he had not seen since he was a teenager. Despite Obama's promises to close Guantánamo, the pair were the first detainees transferred in over a year.

The next day, Gitmo guards lined up for Miss Holly's cupcakes. I had the s'mores.

                                                                      ***

After VICE published my previous piece about my first visit to Gitmo, "It Don't GITMO Better Than This," a Department of Defense spokesman phoned my editor, upset that I'd made him look like “a tool.” A former camp doctor, Monty Granger, sent me over 100 tweets calling me a “#pathetic #Islamist #apologist.” 

I first came to Gitmo to cover the military commissions. During my second trip, I was the third artist granted permission to draw the prisons. The Joint Task Force offers journalists a carefully choreographed tour—the point of which is to show that the Bad Old Gitmo of public perception is not Gitmo Now. 

Bad Old Gitmo existed from approximately 2002-2007. Its orange jumpsuits, water-boarding, detainees sleeping in what Granger, who served at Guantanamo in 2002, gleefully described as “dog kennels.” Its guards pummeling prisoners in revenge for September 11. Bad Old Gitmo, like so many icons of the Bush era, is Not Humane.

And “humane” is the catchword of Gitmo now.

                                                                        ***

Guantanamo Bay has the air of an imperial backwater. On a horseshoe of  Cuba, the United States turns its full military might to guarding 164 aging Muslim men. The president calls Gitmo a terrorist recruiting tool. In August, the Daily Mail reported that William Lietzau, the architect of Guantanamo's military commissions, told them that it should never have been built. And yet it remains, in the sun and razor wire, waiting for America to declare the war on terror over.

At its height, Guantanamo Bay's prisons held nearly 700 detainees. They are so called because no formal charges are leveled against them. They are neither criminals who can confront their accusers in court, nor POWs of any war that can end. In the words of former guard Brandon Neely, “Prisoners have rights. Detainees don't.”  

By the end of his second term, former President George W. Bush released more than 500 men—anyone from a country capable of the security measures the US demanded. Now,  164 remain, 84 of whom are OK’d to leave the base. Most are Yemenis, whom we won't repatriate for fear that they will, in a Gitmo cliché, “return to the battlefield” in a country where al Qaeda holds significant sway. The detainees' officially confirmed recidivism rate is 16.9 percent (the New America Foundation puts it at 4 percent) far below that of American criminals. But some politicians think that even one incident is too much.

Behind electrically locking doors, detainees have lived out a decade in legal limbo. They are banned from speaking to the press. Visiting journalists sign contracts saying they will ignore any attempt at communication, though detainees try. In 2009, Uighur prisoners crayoned  “America is double Hetler in injustice” [sic] on their prison-issued sketchpads. 

Gitmo spokesman Robert Durand told me that Geneva Conventions prevent me from speaking to the detainees. For them to be allowed interviews would make them a spectacle. Silencing them, it is implied, is for their own good. 

In the Bad Old Days of Gitmo, Donald Rumsfeld called detainees “the worst of the worst.”  But that was long ago. In Gitmo Now, the JTF's mission is “safe, legal, transparent humane care,” as if, instead of men, they were guarding 164 gerbils.  

Detainees may stay in Gitmo now until they die. But on the bright side, they get condiment packets with their meals: honey and olive oil! Compliant prisoners can take art classes, look at sailing magazines, and are even, if they are extremely cooperative, listen to MP3s. Gone, Gitmo officials claim, are the stress positions of former days. Now, if detainees inform on each other, interrogators reward them with pizza. 

Guantanamo guard First Lieutenant Smith told me that “here [detainees] have more opportunities to enjoy themselves than in the places where they're from.”

But though guards sign nondisclosure agreements when they leave, a few will speak about the old days. Brandon Neely, a Houston cop who served as a prison guard in 2002, told me: “We didn't get no training. Before we even left the States, we were told the Geneva Convention was not… (in effect)... Before you walked in, they would tell you, don’t forget: these guys are the worst of the worst. They’ll kill you and they’ll kill your families in a heartbeat.”

I asked Neely about the Extreme Reaction Force, which beat detainees while removing them from their cells—allegedly crippling the former university teacher Sami Allaithy. On the BBC, Neely described how, during an ERF, he had slammed an old man's head on to the floor. Neely wasn’t “on the front lines of Afghanistan like most of us wanted to be,” he said. “We were babysitting a bunch of these detainees, as we used to put it. It was our way of… seeking revenge.”

Since they usually serve nine- to 12-month tours, no current guard has ever seen Bad Old Gitmo. Every prisoner, however, has. 

                                                                     ***

In the kitchen where Jamaican contractors prepare the detainees' food, Sam, the head cook, poked at one of the six sample meals she'd prepared to show journalists. “They never say thank you,” she told me, before offering me a bite on a prison-approved spork.

During WWII, America held 6,000 German POWs in Aliceville, Alabama. Soldiers of the Thousand Year Reich enjoyed orchestras, jobs, and even doughnuts. Some liked America so much they decided to stay. 

Those were the golden days for men captured “on the battlefield.” Of Gitmo, the best the JTF can say is that it resembles a US prison—though one in which the prisoners don't know if they'll ever go home. 

Our van pulled up to the camps, sinister with barbed wire, watchtowers, and Gitmo's slogan, Honor Bound [to Defend Freedom] spelled out in block and chain. A sign tells us the JTF Value of the Week is loyalty. Next week it might be selfless service, or integrity.   

Guantanamo's “high value detainees,” (exemplified by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, USS Cole mastermind al-Nashiri, and the 9/11 conspirators) live in Camp 7, a place so secretive that the JTF denied its existence until recently.

The detainees who lived in cell blocks supposedly like the empty ones we toured are not charged with crimes. They never will be.  They are here because they are here. Since they are here, they had best “comply.”

Disobedient detainees are banished to the solitary cells of Camp 5. Each of the show cells I viewed had a sliver of window, a sleep mat, and clothes-drying hooks that flip down at 40 pounds of weight. A dead-voiced guard told me that this is to “prevent unintended consequences”. For four hours a week, detainees can watch TV with one foot shackled to the floor.  Were they not in a “humane one-point restraint,” the guard told me, they might hang themselves with the wires. 

Those who are compliant might live in Camp Six's communal housing. Their cells are windowless concrete, with no shelter from all-seeing cameras. But the doors are not locked. Detainees are free to eat, shower, or play soccer in the rec-yard on their own schedule . For over a decade, this has been the best of all possible Gitmos. A guard pointed proudly to the ceiling. Weak light came out of four slits. “Look,” he told me. “Skylights.”

Detainees have not seen their wives, parents or children in the eleven years since they were arrested.  According to Captain Durand, the JTF still hasn't figured out a protocol for visits. We ended our day with a tour of the the detainees' library.  Solzhenitsyn is banned, as are any books on prisons.  The librarian told me, “I think you know why.” I didn't. and I still don’t.

In the van back to our hotel, press officers OPSEC'ed (or looked through) my sketchbook and camera. I was not allowed to draw security cameras, multiple buildings, or almost anyone's faces.  They deleted offending photos before dropping me off. 

“I don't understand what indefinite detention is” said 09171, her pretty face expressionless.  Like most guards, she's known only by a number. According to her co-worker 09166,  since “it's only been twelve years” since the detainees were free men, they are not really indefinitely detained at all.  

The guards I asked claimed they have not beaten detainees, though, in riot-gear clad teams of six, they charge into their cells during “Forced Cell Extractions.”  But British detainee Shaker Aamer told his lawyer Ramsi Kassem that he is “often beaten and sometimes choked.” According to Kassem, another of his clients, Moath Al-Alwi, was shot during an April raid with rubber-covered steel bullets.  His bloody wounds were left untreated. 

In a letter to the US Department of Justice, Kassem wrote: “Mr. al-Alwi requested that the investigative unit be called to take pictures of his wounds to evidence the prison guard’s apparent attempt to murder him. At first, a guard intervened, refusing to honor the request and threatening to send in the riot squad because, according to him, our client has no rights.”

The guards spoke in cliches.  Working in prison was “doing the mission.” Thinking about the prison's meaning was “not in my lane.”  They claimed to have been told nothing of the imprisoned men. During pre-Gitmo briefings, guards listened to the 911 calls of New Yorkers who burned alive in the Trade Center.

Guards work 12 hours a day, with two more spent on mandatory group exercise. After that, there's little time for anything but sleep. They're surrounded by posters telling them to watch their calories and check their spiritual health. That they are on the battlefield. That the enemy is watching. They are just like the guys fighting in Afghanistan.  

Navy Chaplain Eddinger told me that in his six months working at here, not one guard has ever thought what they are doing might be wrong.

This self-satisfaction extends up the chain of command. Rear Admiral Butler is the most powerful man on Guantanamo. A former fighter pilot, he had no corrections experience before being asked to run the world's most notorious prison. Butler decorates his office with glossy photos of guards escorting handcuffed detainees. On his desk sat a binder of prisoner profiles, marked secret. He leafs through it daily.

Butler told me that were they freed, some of the detainees may “return to the battlefield.”  When I asked where the battlefield is, or even if it does or does not have a geographical location, he refused to say.  

At Gitmo, the staff kept asking me: “Are you surprised? Is this what you expected?” And silently, they seemed to be implying, We're not monsters. Please write that we're normal. 

In the guards' chow hall, NBC anchors fretted about Miley Cyrus's twerking.  What would America tell its children?

Lieutenant Commander Leonato welcomed us to the detainee hospital in Camp Delta. All medics go by Shakespearean names, rather than numbers like the guards. This is to help them bond with prisoners.

Like everyone who works at Gitmo, Leonato would not say “force-feeding”. Its enteral feeding or we'll have to change the subject. Leonato insisted that shackled prisoners consent to the feeding tube, and even become angry when their feedings aren't prompt. 

Prisoners who resist get an “involuntary enteral feed”, which is totally not force-feeding.  Leonato gave his speech next to a chair rigged with restraint straps.  Next to it, he'd laid out bags, tubing and Ensure.  Gitmo strives to be transparent.

According to medics, hunger-striking was “Being in the fight,” the same terms they used to describe  terrorism. Detainees chose tube-feeding to “look cool.”

Former detainee Adnan Latif once compared force-feeding to  “having a dagger shoved down your throat.”  But medics denied the process hurt.  To prove it, Leonato's colleague passed out the tube. He told us it is pediatric size, but it felt large and stiff.  

                                                                         ***

In 2004, courts forced the US to set up Combatant Status Review Tribunals, to figure out whether detainees had actually fought against America. Only two verdicts were allowed.  “Enemy combatant” and “no longer an enemy combatant.” There is no “innocent” at Gitmo. 

The results of these tribunals, and later Administrative Review Boards, are the basis on which we have imprisoned men for over a decade.  Hearsay and torture-induced confessions were all permitted, as was the word of unnamed Afghans to whom we paid thousands of dollars per “terrorist” caught. 

According to Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, “what Guantanamo has represented and continues to represent is indefinite detention often based on entirely unjustifiable and unreliable evidence.”  

Out of the nearly 800 men who have been held at Gitmo, only 7 have actually been convicted of crimes. Of those, 3 are now free.  Omar Khadr, (a Canadian who, at the age of 15, threw a grenade at US troops who stormed the village where he was staying in Afghanistan), is up for parole this year.  

Colonel Morris Davis, who served as Guantanamo's chief prosecutor from 2005-2007, told me “One of the jokes we used to make was that in order to win you had to lose. If you're never charged, you could spend the rest of your life there.”

The last detainee to have won his habeus corpus petition was Adnan Latif. In 2008, a US district court judge ruled there was no evidence he belonged to al Qaeda.   He committed suicide in Guantanamo 4 years later, returning to his family in a body-bag. 

                                                                      ***

During the final the hours of my visit, I finally saw the detainees.  Sergeant Packett rushed us into Camp Six. There, through a one-way mirror and two layers of fence, I saw the men SOUTHCOM Commander Kelly called “among the most violent and hateful on the planet.”

Billions of dollars have been spent to imprison these men.  The laws of war were rewritten. To the world, America will never be the same. 

Through the mirror's dark glass, the detainees seemed preserved in amber.  They were middle-aged, bearded, skinny-- joking with each other like they've had no one else to speak to for the last decade. They sat on the floor, preparing to pray. One wore headphones. One tied a white sheet around his shoulders like a shawl. 

I drew frantically.

After seven minutes, the guards kicked us out.

On a sunbaked strip of roadside, JTF units who've passed through here built sculptures. They are neither official nor required, but sincere works of art by people who do not think they are artists.

There are war pigs and obelisks—plaques painted with grim reapers, their scythes covered in blood.  In 2002, engineer corps from Puerto Rico built a mini-Trade Center, like a secular crucifix. Called the Unit Graveyard, it is the soldiers' stab at remembrance.  

Never Forget, says every 9/11 bumper sticker.  America built Guantanamo out of fear of another 9/11.  But the prison is black hole of forgetting. Guards come and go.  Contractors leave. Journalists chase other stories. 

The detainees alone preserve Gitmo's darkest memories. But JTF forbids them from communicating them to the ouside world.   

Instead of names, the detainees are assigned numbers.  To clear OPSEC, I gave them black scribbles for faces.  Detainees are unpersons- unknown men grabbed out of their lives and into cages. To the JTF, they only matter as symbols.

Faisal Islam has been travelling around Europe to investigate the debt crisis since it started way back in 2008. As the UK's Channel 4's economics editor, he's witnessed more than his fair share of the avarice, egoism, and lunacy—from the UK housing bubble to the raids on Cyprus's banks—that's dominated European financial news for the past half decade. 

Aside from his day job, Faisal has also managed to squeeze out a book called The Default Line, in which he brings together Europe's disparate crescendos into a concerto of crises and lays out the root causes of the financial meltdown. He also tells stories of planes flying cash into Greece and Cyprus to make sure the countries had physical currency in circulation, Russian oligarchs turning up in Nicosia in limos to secure their money before the banks got to it, and the politicians who refuse to tell their people what the situation really is.  

I met with Faisal last month for a quick chat about economics, politics, and the future of Europe.

A protester pushes police lines during a general strike in Athens, 2011. Photo by Henry Langston

VICE: So, let’s start with my home country—what's your view on the situation in Greece?
Faisal Islam: My account of Greece is from two perspectives. First, there's the perspective of the Greek [media]—which is formed in part by announcements from the Troika [the three organizations that have regulated finances in Europe in recent years: the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission]. Then they have the reality of day-to-day life there, which I experienced while reporting on the country, speaking to people, to politicians. I was there for some amusing moments, for instance when Evangelos Venizelos mounted a coup against [then-Prime Minister] George Papandreou.

Venizelos arrives at his ministry—[members of the press are] all waiting outside – and nobody asks any questions. I was thinking, Oh my God, if this was Britain, we’d be monstering him! We’d be like, “Have you just mounted a coup, Mr Venizelos?” I was totally taken aback. I thought, politely, that I would leave the Greek journalists to shout the first questions in Greek, because I don’t want to be one of those annoying foreign journalists who jump in there and say, “It’s our story now.” It’s clearly a Greek story.

That, for me, illustrates the overarching unaccountability in Greece. If you're using a common currency with 17 countries—all of which are very different—you need to have media accountability at full power. And they sadly don't.

What's the second perspective?
The second perspective I have of the situation in Greece is that of the German public. Just to distil it down very simply, they have to be aware of the consequences of their decisions and how their political choices affect Greek living standards. They need to be cognizant that, by choosing Angela Merkel and by backing her [policies forcing Greece to adopt austerity measures], there are going to be certain effects on the rest of Europe.

I really would like to know, for instance, how the German political system is dealing with the rise of [fascist group] the Golden Dawn. I would like to take a German politician to Greece and tell him, “This is partly a result of your policies.” Last year, when we saw those atrocious numbers on unemployment, no one ever asked [President of the European Central Bank] Mario Draghi about it.

That's one of the first things we ask Central Bank governors here in Britain. When, in Nicosia, they had to introduce capital controls, no one asked Draghi a single question about it. 

Photo by Henry Langston

No one asks the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, why he has the right to talk about morality when he quit as the leader of his party over a bribing scandal back in 2000, either.
Unfortunately, instead of that, people tend to default to historical stereotypes. People shout “Nazi!” etc. It’s kind of a waste of time, actually. When the plane filled with bailout cash arrived in Athens [when Greece was running out of physical currency], its existence was denied; when another popped up in Cyprus, it was confirmed. But nobody asks the question of why that happened. In 2009, in Greece, the cash in circulation was 8.2 percent of the GDP. By 2012, it was up to 24.8 percent. If people knew the logistics behind a huge rise of notes in circulation, they'd panic.

That influx of banknotes requires a lot of trucks and boats. It was a military-style operation. In Greece, people are sensitive about military involvement. In Cyprus, they briefed us that this did happen because they felt Cypriots would be reassured by the idea of this massive flight that dropped loads of notes, and therefore they wouldn’t run to get all their euros out from the banks.

That’s a little story; it shouldn’t mean anything, but it does. Because the loss of monetary sovereignty in any financial crisis means that you lose your last resort—printing money. And that ended very badly in Germany in the 1930s, but we’re still doing it in the UK and they’re doing it in America. 

What about Cyprus? What really happened there?
The European authorities' biggest concern in Cyprus was protecting Greece from any contagion. They were obsessed with that, and they were quite willing to let Cyprus suffer. It’s not surprising that Cypriots, who had a strong currency before they joined the euro—which was only five years ago—feel that there was a turn in the rhetoric there [inside the country] and begin to contemplate leaving the euro.

In Cyprus, the planes didn’t touch down until the parliament had agreed to certain things. I think that’s a good way of showing what reality looks like. You realize how close we are to certain dark things if, for instance, cash machines are running dry. Here in Britain, we were three to four hours from that happening back in 2008.

An anti-austerity protest in Cyprus. (Photo by Nigel O'Connor)

I find that the democratic deficit—when ostensibly democratic governments fail to fulfil the principles of democracy—is much more worrying than the financial one, especially in countries like Greece, Cyprus, and Spain.
We catch politicians in conferences saying, “Hooray, we stopped the indexing of wages, so now wages don’t follow prices.” Then, in a private chat, you ask, “Would you say that you’re celebrating cutting your people’s wages in public?” And they say, “No, no—I would never say that in public.” They never tell it straight to the people.

They need to really watch out. Because of that, they may really lose the young. What I’ve found is that young Europeans really value their purple passports—they allow them to travel anywhere. Let me put my own views aside here and say that, if their endgame here is political union [between EU states]—and it kind of has to be—then they can’t possibly lose the young or fail to deliver on their job and life opportunities.

The European authorities supported New Democracy in Greece and Mariano Rajoy in Spain, both of whom have been accused of corruption in some shape or form. How about that?
So here’s a perspective—me summarizing three years of travelling across the Eurozone and listening to people, the victims and the perpetrators. Despite the suffering—the riots, the protests—when push comes to shove, from Greece to Portugal, they all voted for center-right parties. Looking at this, I can only conclude that people in those countries are so frightened of their own political classes and their incompetence that they’d rather go with what Frankfurt and Berlin are dictating.

They haven’t defaulted on their membership in the Eurozone. They haven’t defaulted on their loans. But they are defaulting on Europe’s social model. In Germany, Merkel’s two favourite statistics are, first, that half of welfare spending globally is in Europe, despite having less than 10 percent of the world's population. That's a figure I haven’t checked, but that’s what they think.

The other is a graph showing bond yields going back 20 years [bond yields are the interest a country pays on its borrowing]. Twenty years ago, everybody was paying 10 to 15 percent, and it was fine. Why is 7 percent a crisis? It’s not, but it focuses minds. Seven percent got rid of Silvio Berlusconi. I’m sure that the Germans feel that in order to bring, say, Greece into the 21st century—to get them to do their homework—they’ll bring the situation up to the brink before they lend to Greece again [thus causing the panic that they hope will force reform in Greece].

By all accounts, this will be Merkel’s last term in office. She’ll have all the political capital in the world to come up with a grand, permanent solution.

Protesters smash the entrance to a Santander bank branch in London, 2011. Photo by Henry Langston

This would be a good point to talk about Britain. Britain's got the worst of both worlds, hasn't it? How did it get to a point where there's no euro here but the country is still tied to the Eurozone?
This is why I avoid salivating over the troubles in the Eurozone, as a lot of people are doing. We managed to cover a lot of cracks by printing a lot of money, but I don’t know how this will play out.

My worry about Britain is that people are leaving. It’s much more difficult to keep a track of this. People are leaving and emigrating because the job market is drying out and not taking on new entrants, not investing in the future. And the cost of living is out of control. If I were in my early 20s, I would think about emigrating.

A banker once told me that the most toxic financial instrument in the world is the mortgage. If you unravel that, it’s the cause [of the crisis]. Look at Spain and Ireland—they have no problem with their physical balance, it was mortgages and housing [that affected their economies]. And we’re feeding another bubble now.

I think it’s really important that this stuff is talked about and debated, because it seems that, in Britain and Europe, the leaders across all parties don’t seem to have learned the lessons on what went wrong between 2000 and 2006. And I’m not hugely hopeful that they’re going to deal with longer-term issues about how people in their 20s and 30s will create jobs, livelihoods, homes, and families.

The book is meant to communicate with these people and say that we should all start to think about what will be happening in five years. I’m not massively hopeful, but in order to set things right we have to learn lessons. It’s not a political book. I’m not espousing a particular political viewpoint, I’m trying to be quite practical and empirical and observational, and trying to say, "You didn’t do this differently." The stories speak for themselves—you don’t need to get angry about them. It’s just extraordinary.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Faisal Islam is economics editor for Channel 4. His book, The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks, and Entire Nations on the Edge, is out now through Head of Zeus.

Follow Yiannis on Twitter: @YiannisBab

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A sketch of Vijay jadhav, one of five accused rapists

At 2:30 AM on August 23, Nitin Yadav’s cellphone rang. Outside his house, a Mumbai Police jeep waited under the dim glow of a streetlight next to a man in a dusty wifebeater sleeping on a pushcart. Nitin peeked out of his door to confirm that the jeep belonged to the police and then scurried back inside to throw on a shirt. His wife Vaishali nervously followed him around in her nightgown, asking questions that her husband didn’t quite know the answers to.

Eight minutes later, he was sitting in a room with Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh and joint commissioner Sadanand Date. A young photojournalist had been gang raped while on assignment for an English-language magazine in an abandoned textile mill in south Mumbai. Her male colleague, who sat in another room at the police station, was tied with a belt and beaten while five men allegedly took turns raping the photojournalist. Nitin, a primary school art teacher, was tasked with interviewing the colleague and producing sketches that would be used to identify the perpetrators. The crime, which came months after the brutal Delhi bus gang rape (the perpetrators of which were sentenced today), was yet another horrid instance of violence against women in India. Even in the cosmopolitan media center Mumbai, once considered one of the few Indian cities where women were safe, something like this could happen. “I was determined to do good work,” Nitin told me in Hindi two weeks later. “This was a high-profile case and the accused had to be caught as soon as possible.”
 
For three hours, Nitin questioned the rape survivor’s colleague at the police station. With the help of what he calls a “software book”—a yellowing collection of sketches outlining various shapes of heads, noses, mouths, hairdos, and moustaches that Nitin has drawn over the years—he produced three of the five sketches that the Mumbai police released the morning after the attack. “Usually, victims are too traumatized to remember details,” he said. “But in this case, when the sketches were being made, the woman was in hospital. Her friend had witnessed the whole attack and the fact that he is a photographer and remembered details helped me. I went through my software notebook, asked him to point and then reworked the sketches with the information he gave me,” Nitin said.
 
The police fanned out with Nitin’s first sketch, of a man who they learned was named Chand Hussain Sheikh, at roughly 6 AM. In Jai Bhawani Nagar, a patchwork of slum dwellings covered in blue tarpaulins that sits behind the abandoned mill where the rape took place, residents said the sketch was strikingly similar to a garbage sorter who lived in a one-room structure with his siblings and grandmother. “The minute we saw it, we knew it was Chand. He had fallen into bad company,” Haseena Sheikh, a woman in an emerald-colored shalwar kameez and tightly combed hair, told me in Hindi. She lives in the same slum and helped the police identify Chand.
 
Chand was arrested the same day and he gave the police details about the other four accused. Within three days, all five of them were behind bars. As television channels flashed Nitin’s sketches, alongside breathless discourse about the status of women in Indian society, Nitin was turning into a local celebrity.


Chand Hussein Sheik, as drawn by Nitin Yadav
 
In the lane leading to his house, which is now dotted with clay idols of an assortment of Hindu deities, unfamiliar faces are greeted with: “Want Nitin Yadav?” A group of boys, led by Nitin’s son Pratik, wait for visitors outside their house so that one of them could go running in to tell Nitin to get on to his swerving maroon chair for the photographs. Last week, his appointments included being honored by the bilious leader of a right-wing political party, giving a lecture about patriotism at his primary school, and being interviewed by local papers. Next week, he has an invitation from the largest organizer of the Lord Ganesh festival in Mumbai. “People tell me I’ve worked for my country. When I look at photographs of the accused men on TV and compare them to my sketches, I can’t believe it myself,” he said, sitting in his swerving maroon chair.
 
Nitin, a man in his late 40s with a penchant for thick gold chains and a square moustache, has been helping the police for more than two decades. After his father, who worked at a textile mill, joined a mass strike when the industry struggled in the last 1980s, the responsibility to bring home money fell on the family’s youngest son, Nitin. Then, between painting signboards, rickshaw number plates and portraits of dead people, he found himself in a police station assigned with painting a giant map of the city. “A constable was trying to get information about a robber. All he was able to get was his height and the color of his shirt,” Nitin said. “So I asked him if I could take over.”
 
Since then, he has lost count on the number of cases he’s worked on, mostly for free. A sepia-toned photograph of a younger Nitin, dressed up like the Marati-language film star Chhatrapati Shivaji, smiled down at him from chipping wall as he pulled out a dusty folder that has the sketches of hundreds of criminals. The collection includes a man who robbed and raped a Spanish woman in Mumbai in November last year, a man who raped an eight-year-old and a gun-totting henchman accused of threatening a local politician. “People remember everything except for the eyes of a perpetrator. So it is my job to fit them in depending on the rest of the description,” he said.
 
Vaishali, sitting cross-legged in a printed nightgown with her hair tied up in an untidy bun, prefers to lock up this folder of sketches at night. “I don’t like to see them,” she said. “It reminds me that he could get into trouble.” A few years ago, Nitin received a call from someone who claimed to be part of an organized gang. The person on the phone threatened to kill Nitin if he continued to work with the police on the case of a murdered lawyer. “I know what he is doing is right but at the end of day, I stand to lose if something happens to him,” she said.
   
A neighbor stumbled into the house with a copy of a Marathi newspaper in which Nitin had been featured, laughing nervously, tickled by knowing a local celeb. “You see, God has given me this talent for a reason,” Nitin told me philosophically. “But the Mumbai police should train more people like me.” 

@Mansi_Choksi


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Wise words. via Flickr.

On the morning of my 25th birthday, I woke up to find my brain had disappeared. My mental landscape was composed of only the odd tumbleweed and a few lonely crickets. Food was still a completely laughable idea, and I couldn’t make sense of anything. I was floating—but not in a good way.

My brain decided to take this hiatus because I thought I had innocently been popping molly for two months, when in reality, it was a member of the bath salts family I’d been unwittingly indulging in.

Remember those? Bath Salts? The ones that made that one dude chew that other dude’s face off? Right, well they had nothing to do with that incident, but they are still one freaky-ass designer drug.

In the midst of winter, I started seeing a new guy. From what I could see, he was addicted to a drug called MCAT, which he described as “like MDMA” but with less serious side effects. The high didn’t last as long, he said, so popping one was less of a commitment. In reality, from what I can tell, the side effects are far more serious. MCAT fucked with my serotonin levels worse than any other drug I’ve touched.

I realize now that the very fact I had so much trust in my MCAT loving boyfriend makes me sound a bit crazy. The dude kept a toolkit stuffed with this white powder beneath his bed. While the rest of his room was pandemonium, the kit was pristine and carefully organized, like the contents of an OCD-ridden doctor’s bag. In the kit were several grams of MCAT, tucked carefully in beside baggies of soon-to-be-filled pill capsules. There was also a hollow glass tube—open at both ends—that he’d bought at a medical supply store. Because fuck snorting this stuff with $20 bills, right? That would just be amateur hour.

When you get rolling on MCAT, it feels scarily like MDMA. You feel your body tingling, then there’s a buildup of energy traveling up to your brain. Like ecstasy, MDMA, or whatever you want to call it, the desirable effects of this drug lie in the transformation one experiences where they go from a regular ol’ numb, modern human being, to an extremely empathetic alien from Planet Love.

You want to crawl right into other people’s souls and soul-copulate to form love angels. You feel no reservations about doing this. You pop, and all of a sudden your brain is buzzing. You see the person beside you as a beautiful human who is capable of boundless feats, and boundless connection. Like I would on molly, I would snatch his face in my hands, squeeze it, look so openly into his eyes and exclaim, “You’re an artist. You’re changing people’s lives. You’re changing the world.” Though you know you’re a total cliché, these feelings are “real” in the moment.

Along with the empathy, you get a huge rush of wakefulness similar to the effect of blow. Needless to say, all feels right with the world. That is, until you can’t scrape any more serotonin from your abused cavity of a cranium, and you realize what it is you’ve really been doing.

My first time doing this drug was in the park with the dude, Monsieur MCAT, and he told me he was feeling "adventurous." So we drove to the grocery store to get some smoothies. “It puts your body in starvation mode,” he said. “So these will be good.” I feel the need to try anything once, so this wasn’t much of a warning bell to me, unfortunately.

We went back to his place, and he pulled the small metal kit from under the bed. Extracted a small baggie of white powder. He began stuffing capsules, a process I’d seen several times before. We each popped one at 10PM with the intent to go to sleep early, at 2 or 3. It was a Monday night.

We popped another one around 2AM, probably. And another at 4AM. And another at 10AM.

I had to go to the bank that day to sign off on some papers for a new apartment. Still at his place, I took about a two-hour nap, one where I could still see the light through my three-quarters-closed lids, like the way people who are dying are supposed to feel before they reach the end of the tunnel. I woke up feeling GREAT, except for being a little tired. There was the dude at his computer, with a t-shirt on and no pants. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, kind of groggily. “Masturbating,” he said, still wide awake. “Wanna do another bump?” I had to write and make it to the bank before it closed, so I declined and headed back down to my place from his west end apartment, feeling adventurous and also kind of like a boss.

MCAT’s full name is actually mephedrone, which is a cathinone extracted from the khat plant. It’s one of the bath salts clan, alongside methylone and MDPV. I know that now. At the time, though, despite the fact that I research for a living, I trusted this guy enough that I didn’t feel the need to give the drug a thorough examination before agreeing to the experiment.

By the time I made it home from that first trip, I was terrified. Children looked like grotesque little monsters. Human faces erred on the carnivalesque. I was convinced I was in a film. (Mephedrone use can cause hallucinations, as I found out later). My roommate, who had seen me in far too many different states of ultimate fuckupedness, was getting ready to start work for the day. She asked me what the hell I was doing.

“GOING TO THE BANK,” I probably shouted at her. “I’m really scared,” I remember saying. “Keep your phone close. I don’t know how I’m going to make it there and back.” The bank was about a 15-minute streetcar ride from my house. I rehearsed what I was going to say to them the entire way, making active attempts not to gnash my teeth.

“Unghhhh I can’t believe I did this,” I whined to her later, trying to force some dry cereal down. A stolid bastion of practicality, she asked me why I do these things in the first place. My brain still wasn’t in a super high-functioning state, so I just told her “empathy.” That was all I could get out in terms of an explanation, but looking back, I can see it’s true. I really longed to trust someone that deeply, and I found I couldn’t do it without the drug. So I kept going back.

The dude said it was hard to get, so he’d buy a couple thousand dollars worth at once. He said he never knew when he’d be able to get more, but he wouldn’t tell me where he got it—I’ve actually never seen someone be so secretive about where they got their stuff. Because he stocked up so much each time he re-upped, it was always available when we were together. It was the star of about half of our hangouts.

Looking back, his secrecy makes sense. Mephedrone and all of its weirdo cousins are controlled under item one of schedule three to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It’s classified under the heading “Amphetamines, their salts, derivatives, isomers and analogues and salts of derivatives, isomers and analogues.”

In a VICE article by Rula Al-Nasrawi, Craig Motbey explained some of the more concerning aspects of MCAT use. Motbey is a researcher in psychopharmacology at the University of Sydney, and he fed mephedrone to rats to determine its potential for addiction and other risks. He found it damages long-term memory more than MDMA. Not to mention it’s also more addictive, which can result in more re-dosing. (Exhibit A: 10AM, final bump).

Long after my relationship with Monsieur MCAT ended, I was lazily perusing Facebook whilst crabbily waiting on a flight one morning at 7 or so AM, and I found out, through Al-Nasrawi’s article, what it was this guy had really been feeding me. Fucking bath salts. MDMA may not be the healthiest pursuit in this world, but never would I knowingly snort and parachute bath salts throughout a two-month period. It took that many times before I realized its true effects, the emptiness of mind when your brain can’t help itself with serotonin reuptake.

Each time I did this drug with what’s his name, he gave me capsules of 5-HTP, which can be found in the supplements aisle of just about any drug store, and which help with serotonin production. The day I turned 25, we didn’t have any 5-HTP. We didn’t have any smoothies. And we didn’t have any magnesium. I was utterly fucked, and realized that there was definitely something off about this drug I’d made such a habit of popping. Molly, that hot and cold mistress, was never especially good to me, but it never left me totally defenseless, either.

I don’t deny for a millisecond that the onus is on me when it comes to taking responsibility for the drugs I ingest. That is, I don’t deny it now. I tried to blame it on him for a while, but the truth is, those who are truly interested in just about any level of self-preservation take the time to thoroughly research any new drugs they decide to indulge in. Especially if, say, they’re formally trained researchers. In short, my addiction to no-holds-barred experiential living trumps the little concern I have for my own health, every single time. That addiction could have, and almost did, lead to another addiction: to bath salts. Again, all of this was, and is, my own responsibility.

But. On the flip side, if you care about someone, do you really take it upon yourself to feed them truckloads of bath salts? I would say it’s your responsibility to go ahead and not do that, just as much as it’s my responsibility to not be naive and snort them up my unsuspecting nasal cavities. This drug inspires unconditional trust, which can feel dangerously like unconditional love.

I still try hard not to blame him. Again, it’s my own fault…but, nonetheless, there’s something not quite right about the pattern he’s established. In the end, the dude and the drug became synonymous. I wrote him to say I couldn’t see him anymore.

The moral of this story, in case it isn’t clear, is ‘Be careful where you get your molly.’ Or “Utilize the Internet.” Or, actually, I’ll leave you with this video as my parting words. Enjoy.

Previously:

Kitty Litter: Meow Meow, a.k.a. MCAT, May Look Like MDMA, but it's Not