Search Results for: military

Welcome to the Center of the Universe

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Shannon Stirone | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 22 minutes (5,546 words)

The power has just gone out in mission control. I look to Jim McClure, operations manager at the Space Flight Operations Facility, and he assures me that everything is fine. A power outage like this hasn’t happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearly eight years, and while it’s only been out for a few seconds, the Deep Space Network is disconnected and NASA has temporarily lost contact with Cassini, the nearly 20-year-old space probe in orbit around Saturn, as well as all spacecraft beyond the moon.

We’re standing in JPL’s mission control, known simply as the Dark Room to those who work here. Five men and women are glued to their screens, the artificial pink-and-white glow highlighting their faces. I’ve been here twice before, but I have never seen this many people running the consoles. The operators are calm and hyper-focused despite the unexpected hiccup, both hands typing, eyes darting at one another’s screens.

While the quiet panic plays out, I walk over to a sunken plaque in the middle of the room that glows with blue neon lights: the center of the universe. Above it is a large metal coin embossed with the images of three spacecraft and a DSN antenna, below is JPL’s motto, “Dare Mighty Things.” Teddy Roosevelt offered these words during an 1899 speech in approbation of the virtues of a “strenuous life” and they are now synonymous with the risks taken when it comes to spaceflight. “Far better is it to dare mighty things,” he said, “to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I catch a bit of conversation. “Are you having any luck over there?” the data controller asks the person sitting at the Tracking Support Specialist desk. “Not yet.” Above the consoles near the ceiling are six large television screens that curve around the room. Usually, these screens stream real-time telemetry from dishes around the world and are labeled with the name of the spacecraft they’re talking to. Right now, most of them are blacked out. The only active monitors display images of celebrities who’ve visited JPL: Matt Damon in the Mars Yard, William Shatner giving the Vulcan salute. Read more…

Guantánamo, Forever

Guantanamo guards keep watch over detainees inside a common area at Camp 6 high-security detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Amos Barshad | The Marshall Project & Longreads | February 2018 | 16 minutes (4,100 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

The message came in on a spring day via the undisclosed U.S. government facility that approves all correspondence out of the military prison in Guantánamo Bay. It was a request for representation from Haroon Gul, a detainee, to Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, an attorney. Gul had never had a lawyer. He was one of the last men in Guantánamo without one.

Now, in 2016, his request was urgent. After nearly a decade of nothing, he was being given the chance to explain himself. It would happen through the Periodic Review Board, an administrative body that considers whether Guantánamo prisoners who have not been charged should be transferred home or to another country. A board representative wrote Sullivan-Bennis an email explaining that Gul, also identified as detainee number ISN 3148, “has requested in writing that you assist him with … proceedings before the PRB, at no cost to the Government.” When the email arrived, Gul’s first hearing was weeks away.

Guantánamo lawyers are famously overworked. At the time, Sullivan-Bennis was juggling five other clients. She and her coworkers at the human rights organization Reprieve asked themselves: How can we possibly handle another one? “And then everyone was like, ‘Let’s just try,’” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “Because otherwise he’ll be alone.’”

She typed Gul a brief note saying that she’d take his case and that she’d come see him soon. She asked if he wanted anything from Guantánamo’s all-purpose department store, the Navy Exchange.

“Dear Honorable Miss Shelby Sullivan Bennis,” he wrote back in sloping, cursive handwriting, “I have no words to express my feeling of gratitude, appreciation and Thanks for your timly legal and moral help in my PRB hearing. I was in a helpless and hopeless state of my mind in my legal affairs you gave me emotional psycholgcal help.”

A few weeks later, they met for the first time in a windowless cement cellblock on prison grounds. Gul sat across a plastic-top table from Sullivan-Bennis in a loose-fitting, tan-colored T-shirt, with his ankle shackled to a metal ring secured to the floor. He’d been detained in Guantánamo since 2007, shortly after Afghan National Directorate of Security forces burst with guns into the rural guesthouse where he was staying outside Jalalabad and threw a bag over his head.

For the first time, he told his story to a lawyer. He was in his early 30s, like her. He had a wife, Halimah, and a 10-year-old daughter, Maryam, living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Gul himself grew up in a Pakistani camp after violence forced his family to flee his home in Afghanistan. Despite harsh camp conditions, he’d earned an economics degree at Hayatabad Science University. He spoke four languages, including Pashto and Dari. While at Guantánamo he’d learned a fifth, English.

And like nearly every other detainee held at Guantánamo since 9/11, Gul had never been charged with a crime. The U.S. government was justifying his detainment under the law of war. In a secret government dossier on Gul released by Wikileaks, Gul (also known as Haroon al-Afghani) is described as “high risk” and of “high intelligence value.” The dossier alleges that he was an explosives expert and a high-ranking military strategist who had executed attacks on the Northern Alliance on behalf of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, a party affiliated with al Qaeda in the 2000s. U.S. intel also indicates that, in 2001, Gul attempted to help Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.

Gul was too polite to put it this way, but he was effectively saying that it was all, all of it, bullshit. His affiliation with HIG was the same as that of millions of other Afghans: The group ran the refugee camps he needed to survive. He said he supported his family by selling small goods, like used books and jars of honey. He said the reason he was in that guesthouse that night was because he was on the road, selling, trying to scrape together some money. He said the Afghans had grabbed the wrong person.

The government’s allegations were built on secret interrogations and unidentified sources named things like IZ-10026. Sullivan-Bennis came to believe that Gul was innocent. It had happened before: An alleged al Qaeda agent named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was detained for 13 years before his release; during his PRB hearing, the government admitted it may have had the wrong man. Read more…

Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)

(Alex MacGregor)

Alex MacGregor | Longreads | February 2018 | 19 minutes (5,053 words)

Geographers have an affinity for superlatives. Among the millions of named features on Earth, if something can claim to be the biggest, tallest, deepest, longest, or otherwise most extreme, it gets a lot of attention.

Asserting any superlative involves a degree of hubris. Our world has been picked over for superlatives, but how sure can we really be about any one claim? Any elementary school class will recite in unison that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world — that is, unless the class happens to contain an Ecuadorian student. Ecuadorians correctly learn that the highest mountain in the world could be measured by distance from the center of the earth, rather than from mean sea level. By this measure, Ecuador’s Chimborazo is taller than Everest. An asterisk is warranted for even this basic claim.

Of much less prominence on the globe, but also a tricky superlative to nail down, is the most densely populated island in the world. A handful of the perhaps 100,000 islands on Earth have stratospheric population densities: Ultra-crowded islands exist in places as disparate as Kenya, Hong Kong, France, and the Maldives, but it’s regularly cited that, by the numbers, the densest of all is Santa Cruz del Islote, a 3-acre islet of about 1,200 people off the coast of Colombia. This claim has been repeated in numerous publications, most recently by The New York Times, and it’s even the subject of a short documentary. Journalists usually emphasize the bonds of family and community in a place so radically removed from western consumerism.

All of which makes for an uplifting read about a fascinating place. But what if the premise is wrong? I can’t comment on the experience of life on the island. But we’ve already learned to be wary of superlative claims, especially when westerners are the ones keeping score; what about this one? What if this is merely a very crowded island, and not the most crowded island?
Read more…

A Finder, No Longer a Keeper

Jenny Klion | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Twenty years ago, in the parking lot of a Cirque du Soleil show at Santa Monica Beach, I saw in the dust an antique diamond engagement ring. Of course I picked it up, all tiny diamond and huge ring size, but the mystery took hold of me: who was its owner, what was her story, and did she mean to throw away her marital promise ring?

“Look at this!” I said to my new husband James. We’d only recently found each other, were instantly simpatico, and had married at nearly first sight.

“Are you sure you want to mess with that?” he asked. “That’s somebody’s magic, you know, sitting in the dirt.” He was always talking about somebody’s magic, and messing with it.

“I do!” I gleaned, and pocketed the sweet thing.

Six months later, back in New York City, I was lying on the floor in a group hippie singing class, engaged in a visualization exercise about some inner artistic journey. Our instructions were to invent a guide-type helper for ourselves, and at the end, give that guide a gift. So in my mind’s eye, because it was all I could think of, I offered up the antique diamond engagement ring I’d found in the Cirque du Soleil parking lot. I felt very good about myself, filled with generosity and hope.

But when I checked in on the ring proper, which I’d stashed away for safekeeping — there it wasn’t. Well, the ring was in its place, but the diamond was gone. It had disappeared. I had no idea what happened to it.

“Did that imaginary guide-type helper actually take the diamond?” I wondered aloud. Was that possible?

“No,” James scoffed, laughing, pulling me onto his lap. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Hey, you are messing with my magic,” I said, a bit stung, and moved away from him.

It’s what I wanted to believe, anyway. Because since then, I find jewelry, nearly everywhere I go.

Read more…

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words) 

* * *

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo by Brenton Geach / Gallo Images / Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Mark Arax, David Grann, Stephanie Nolen, Eleanor Cummins, and David Marchese.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Here’s What War With North Korea Would Look Like

Longreads Pick
Analysts and military officials describe the many likely scenarios that would play out before and during a war between North Korea, South Korea and the U.S. Nerve gas, smallpox, yellow fever, preemptive nuclear strikes, all of these scenarios are horrifying, because even though North Korea would lose, the civilian death toll would always be high.
Source: Vox
Published: Feb 8, 2018
Length: 21 minutes (5,389 words)

His Life’s Set Prize: The Story of Polar Explorer Henry Worsley

Unreleased picture date is Friday April 18, 2008. Left to right. Shipping lawyer Henry Adams, City worker Will Gow and Team Leader, Henry Worsley, 47, during a training session at Constable Point, Greenland. (Photo by Joel Ryan - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

At The New Yorker, David Grann tells the story of Henry Worsley, a British military man and “apostle” of polar adventurer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley earned fame by retracing Shackleton’s failed expedition to reach the South Pole. He, along with two teammates reached their destination on January 9th, 2009. A case study in the art of story pacing, this piece is a testament to the triumphs and perils of human ambition and endurance.

After Frank Worsley and other members of the expedition buried Shackleton, at a cemetery on the island, they found stones and built a cairn to mark the grave.

More than eighty years later, Henry Worsley, carrying a rucksack and a sleeping bag, pried open the cemetery gate and went inside. It was twilight, and he could just make out the cairn and a granite tombstone, which was engraved with a paraphrase of a line by Robert Browning: “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” Worsley put his sleeping bag on the ground and climbed inside it, facing the block of granite. “Reaching out to touch it I considered for a moment just how significant a moment in my life this was,” he later wrote, adding, “I was about to spend the night . . . beside the grave of my hero since childhood.”

Read the story

The White Darkness

Longreads Pick

David Grann tells the story of Henry Worsley, a British military man and “apostle” of polar adventurer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley earned fame by retracing Shackleton’s failed expedition to reach the South Pole. He, along with two teammates reached their destination on January 9th, 2009. A case study in the art of story pacing, this piece is a testament to the triumphs and perils of human ambition and endurance.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 12, 2018
Length: 85 minutes (21,418 words)

A Teen and a Toy Gun

(Illustration by Nicole Rifkin)

Leah Sottile | Longreads | February 2018 | 33 minutes (8,200 words)

I.

The night before Quanice Hayes was shot in the head by a police officer, the skinny 17-year-old was snapping selfies with his girlfriend in a seedy Portland, Oregon, motel room.

Bella Aguilar held her phone close when she clicked off the photos: In one, the 18-year-old girl pushes her tongue out through a smile, her boyfriend leaning over her right shoulder, lips pressed to her cheek, his dreads held back with one hand.

In another, Aguilar cradles her cheek against a black-and-sand-colored gun. It’s fake — the kind of air-powered toy that kids use to pop each other with plastic pellets in indoor arenas. Hayes peeks into the frame behind her.

If you know that the gun is fake, you see a snapshot of two kids playing tough; if you don’t, those photos looks like the beginning of a story about to go terribly wrong.

A few hours later, it did.

It was a cold night in February — a Wednesday. Aguilar and Hayes  snapped photos and danced when friends came by the motel room where the couple had been crashing. They drank cough syrup and booze. There were pills and pot and a bag of coke.

They fired the toy gun at the motel’s dirty bathroom mirror, laughing when they couldn’t get the glass to break.

When the long night caught up with Aguilar and she lay down to pass out on the room’s queen-size bed, Hayes yanked on her arm, nagging her to stay awake. Two friends crashed on a pullout couch; two more were on the floor. But Hayes didn’t want to sleep. He walked outside.

Hours passed. The sun came up. Aguilar jolted awake and felt the bed next to her, but her boyfriend wasn’t there. His phone was — it sat on the table next to the bed. She felt frantic. Panicked. Confused. “I don’t know why, but it was that moment. I just felt really, really bad,” she said last summer, sitting outside a Portland Starbucks where she took drags from a Black and Mild.

She couldn’t remember why Hayes had left. She couldn’t remember so much of the night.

She frantically tapped out a text to her boyfriend’s mother, Venus: Do you know where Quanice is? Read more…