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110TH YEAR, NO. 191 ©2013

FINAL EDITION

IN MY OPINION

Dan Le Batard [email protected]

Obliterating doubts and doubters

T

he evolution of LeBron James took another seismic step last week in Boston, the loud and historic place The King had again come to conquer. Champion Jason Terry tried to get in the way of what was coming with LeBron. All of it. The basketball. The fast break. The game. The desire. The force. The streak. The future. And, for his efforts, because of the size of the moment and the size of the momentum, Terry was left flat on his back in the key, looking like he should be surJAMES rounded by yellow police tape and a chalk outline. This works as a symbol for anything and anyone who has dared to get in the way of LeBron’s Heat the last 50 days, during which Miami has won 25 consecutive games, shame being but one of the dangers in stepping into what LeBron now clearly views as his ordained and righteous path. Understand this

■ A firm with an obscure pedigree has staked claims to more than 30 homes and condos in Miami-Dade, often with fake documentation. BY SCOTT HIAASEN AND JENNY STALETOVICH [email protected]

cavenging the remnants of South Florida’s housing crisis, a partnership called Presscott Rosche appeared to gobble up almost three dozen foreclosed homes in Miami-Dade County last year. The company is currently listed as the owner of 12 homes worth about $3.5 million, according to the MiamiDade property appraiser. But this seemingly thriving business is, in many ways, an illusion. The name of the company’s agent listed in state records is fake. So are many of the deeds the company has filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court to stake its claim to more than 30 houses and condos, a Miami Herald investigation has found. The company has gained control of these homes — renting them out to unsuspecting tenants, in some cases — by filing dubious deeds and documents filled with legalsounding jargon and shoddy punctuation. The author of

S

• TURN TO STREAK, 2A • In Sports: Chasing immortality and the Lakers, 1D

EDUCATION

Solution for graduation ‘bottleneck’: Diploma lite? ■ State lawmakers may let students pick from a menu of diploma designations, some arguably more challenging than others. BY KATHLEEN MCGRORY [email protected]

TALLAHASSEE — What if high school were less like an assembly line and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel? State lawmakers are considering a proposal that would let students pick from three different diploma designations, each with its own set of graduation requirements. One would be designed for students planning to go directly into the workforce. Collegebound teenagers would have their own pathway, as would highachievers with postgraduate studies in mind. Superintendents say the move would keep students engaged in their studies, and provide them with the technical training they need for high-demand jobs. But critics consider the proposal a blatant effort to water down the state graduation

• TURN TO TESTS, 19A

• TURN TO TAKEOVER, 18A

HUNGER STRIKE AT GUANTANAMO

War on terror devolves into fight over food ■ Tensions are high at the prison camp for war-on-terror captives, and at least 26 detainees — and perhaps many more — are engaging in a hunger strike. BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — It’s lunchtime on the communal cellblocks for cooperative captives, and detainees dressed in tan and white camp uniforms are steadfastly refusing

the guards’ offer to wheel in food carts. Only if a prisoner pulls shut a gate to a chute called a sally port can a soldier lock it remotely and send in the meals. And one by one, every block but Delta Block refuses. Some captives call out

that they don’t want the food. Over at Charlie Block, an angular looking detainee is stubbornly ignoring his guards, sitting at an empty, stainless-steel picnic table, watching footage from Mecca on Saudi TV. Within an hour, the guards systematically trash a lunch that looks like it could feed 100. Unopened juice bottles go in the garbage first, then Styrofoam boxes

of pita bread and special dietary meals. Buffet tins of stewed tomatoes, rice and sweet-and-sour stir-fried beef follow. It’s hunger-strike time at Guantánamo. And while the military and their captives dispute when it started and how widespread it is, it was clear from a three-day visit to the prison-camp compound

• TURN TO STRIKE, 19A

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FROM THE FRONT PAGE

THE MIAMI HERALD | MiamiHerald.com

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HUNGER STRIKE AT GUANTÁNAMO

Latest flashpoint in war on terror: food • STRIKE, FROM 1A this past week that the guard force is confronted with its most complex challenge in years. ● By this weekend, the U.S. military had defined 26 of the 166 captives as hunger strikers. Eight were being fed nutritional shakes through a tube snaked through a shackled captive’s nose to his stomach. Two were hospitalized, getting nutrition through a tube and intravenous hydration as well. Lawyers for the captives quote their clients as counting dozens more as long-term hunger strikers, who are getting weaker by the day. ● Communal captives are no longer cooperating with guards at the once-showcase Camp 6. They’ve covered the cameras inside their cells. They’ve quit going to art classes. Both sides report frequent fainting spells — the military calls them “Code Yellows” — although the prison spokesCAROL ROSENBERG/MIAMI HERALD STAFF man says they’re fake, staged LAST RESORT: Captives who won’t eat and are considered at risk are given regular feedings of Ensure or for visitors. ● More and more men are other nutritional shakes, often while strapped into a restraint chair. being moved out of communal confinement to the maximum-security prison, where up to 125 can be kept in 8-by-12-foot cells and where it’s easier to conduct tube feedings. But the Camp 5 commander, an Army captain who wouldn’t give her name, decided it would be too disruptive for a reporter to observe lunch being served there. To watch a guard pass a lunchbox through slits in the cell doors at the disciplinary block, the captain concluded, was too “high-risk.” HUNGER STRIKER COULD DIE Although it’s camp policy to prevent a captive from starving himself, the prison staff talks about the possibility that a hunger-striking captive will be found dead one day. Lawyers for the men say the strike was sparked in early February by an unusually aggressive search of prisoners’ Qurans that to them amounted to desecration. Prison staff says no Qurans were disrespected, no policy changed. All sides blame long simmering frustration with President Barack Obama’s inability to deliver on his promise to close the facility. The prison’s Arab-American Muslim cultural advisor, a Defense Department employee, says he and the chief guard, Army Col. John Bogdan, have been trying to negotiate with the detainees. But it may be that nothing short of an airplane ticket will end the deadlock. “They are serious,” says the advisor, who goes by Zak. “They have lost hope.”

PETTY OFFICER KILHO PARK/U.S. NAVY

CAROL ROSENBERG/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

FOOD IN: Meal time in 2011. During a more recent visit, journalists were not given access to this.

GARBAGE OUT: Soldier guards trash a communal meal that Guantánamo detainees refused to eat.

Says Army Capt. Jason Wright, the lawyer for a 30-something Camp 6 Afghan hunger striker called Obaydullah: “There’s no constructive engagement” in the standoff over handling of the Quran. “There just appears to be a stalemate.” In years past, captives staged hunger strikes in single-occupancy cells where meals went in, containers came out and camp staff could closely monitor consumption. This protest began in Camp 6, the place where in better times the military would boast that up to 130 cooperative captives could eat and pray in groups, play soccer and go to class — and troublemakers were removed one at a time.

drinking water. But the communal meals ended weeks ago, complicating the calculation of how many meals in a row a particular detainee has missed. Guards now are keeping checklists, trying to track a captive snacking or slipping into a food pantry — an increasingly complex task because the commanders say the no-longer cooperative captives of Camp 6 have covered the cameras in their individual cells with empty cereal boxes, making it hard to look inside. “All they can do is watch TV and movies and play PlayStation. It’s pretty boring for them now,” said the Army captain, who gave his first name, John. On Wednesday, Capt. John said

They pointed to perks like PlayStations, food pantries and wristwatches that helped keep the captives cooperative. The detainees were inside the cellblocks, with guards watching through cameras, and posted just outside. MILITARY: ‘HUNGER STRIKERS’ CHEATING On Wednesday, the Army captain in charge of Camp 6 since January said all the cellblocks but one had refused their food carts for “around three or four weeks,” and were subsisting on snacks such as pita bread and peanut butter that were stashed in their pantries or thrown over recreation yard walls from Delta Block. The captives are still

“the pantries are getting thin … It’s now just beginning to be a problem.” The strike is by no means universal. On Delta Block, a chubby, elderly prisoner closed the gate and received the lunch cart. He systematically unloaded buffet trays into Delta’s designated food pantry. Minutes later, other Delta captives filed inside. From a distance, some of the men in Camp 6 seem slim, their clothes clearly baggy as they can be seen standing on cellblock scales to check their weight. The elderly captive who unloaded the food cart at Delta Block, however, had a potbelly. Commanders point to scraps of pita bread and used

individual portions of peanut butter in trash bags otherwise filled with empty water bottles at the exits of supposedly hunger-striking cellblocks, and snicker that the captives are cheating and eating. Still, the boycott of the popular arts and life-skills classes is total, camp commanders said. Soccer games are rare. Camp 6 has stopped requesting items from the detention camp library. But the chief librarian, who gives his name as Milton, said four copies of the last Twilight episode are still in circulation, as well as John Madden NFL 2013 and NBA 2K13 — for the PlayStation mounted inside each Camp 6 cellblock. Defense attorneys who speak with the captives paint a far more desperate picture. They wrote to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, saying that their clients report frequent fainting spells and some captives coughing up blood. LAWYER: CAPTIVE’S WAIST HAS WITHERED Kuwaiti captive Fayez al Kandari, 35, told his lawyer he was down to 108 pounds this past week, and lost 32 pounds in his hunger strike. “His cheeks were sunken and sallow. He was exhausted,” said Ohio federal public defender Carlos Warner. During a meeting Wednesday, Warner said, Kandari’s waist looked like that of the lawyer’s 6-year-old child. (A military weight chart released years ago says Kandari was five feet six inches and 136 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in 2002.) The Pentagon staff is at times dismissive of the claims — “Nobody’s coughing up blood. They’re using ketchup or biting their tongues,” said Zak, the cultural advisor — but also concerned that somewhere in the communal camp a captive may be stealthily managing to starve himself, out of sight of the cameras and checklists the military uses to scan physiques at prayer time. “It’s all about using the hunger strike as the weapon,” said Zak, blaming a hardcore group in detention for a decade or longer as inciting others to forgo food. “We might be hit with one behind hidden cameras, that one suddenly dies.” The Navy prison camps spokesman, Capt. Robert Durand, said “stealth hunger strikers” are a concern. Captives who openly refuse meals agree to be led off to a tube-feeding while none of the others are watching. But some detainees may be trying to thwart the system, Durand said, by accepting a meal but not eating it.

EDUCATION

Florida might offer three varieties of diploma • TESTS, FROM 1A requirements. One factor clearly helping drive the decision: This year’s high-school freshmen are the first who need to pass a trio of challenging state exams to graduate. Some district officials have said the requirement is too tough, and will prevent thousands of Florida students from earning a diploma. “We really believe it’s going to be a difficult scenario for our students,” Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia recently told a House education panel. The graduation bill is the latest effort by Florida lawmakers to shake up the state’s secondary schools. Several laws have attempted to make the curriculum more challenging and relevant to students’ career goals. Other laws have phased out the old Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests. In 2010, the Legislature ushered in a new regime of standardized tests known as end-of-course exams.

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Three were designed as must-pass tests: Algebra I, Geometry and Biology. This year’s freshmen are the first students saddled with the graduation requirement. That concerns superintendents, who point out that only 59 percent of test-takers passed the Algebra I exam last year. “Right now, you and I know that there is the potential for a bottleneck effect for graduating students,” Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told state representatives in Tallahassee last month. The bill under consideration in the state House would give students more flexibility. They would still have to pass the algebra test to earn a diploma. But only students choosing the “scholar” designation would be required to pass the geometry and biology exams. For other students, the tests would count as 30 percent of their final grade in that subject. The proposal would also give students the freedom to take more electives. Students electing the diploma

Pub. date: Sunday, March 24

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with an industry designation, for example, could take eight credits in a career-training program like automotive technology or hospitality in lieu of the physics and chemistry courses currently required. Carvalho, the MiamiDade superintendent, said the various “pathways” would help keep students engaged by connecting their studies to their interests and future plans. “One of the most critical elements that leads to dropping out is that students are not seeing contextual relevance in their learning,” Carvalho said. “That needs to change.” The House bill and a similar version in the Senate have been moving swiftly through their respective chambers. Both have the support of leadership and lawmakers with expertise in education. “The concept is a great one,” said Rep. Manny Diaz Jr., a Hialeah Republican and assistant principal at Miami’s George T. Baker Aviation School. “What it does is make high school

Edition: 1st

relevant to careers.” But some provisions have Graduation been the subject of intense rates debate in Tallahassee. Earlier this month, PatriIn the era of the Florida cia Levesque, executive diComprehensive rector of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, former Assessment Test, or Gov. Jeb Bush’s education FCAT, graduation rates think tank, tried to dissuade in Florida steadily rose. a House panel from dropSuperintendents are ping geometry from the concerned about what graduation requirements. will happen when a She urged lawmakers not to new testing regime lower the standards, saying kicks in this year. students in Florida had risen to previous challenges. YEAR GRADUATION Her proof: Statewide RATE graduation rates have risen 2002-2003 56.5 steadily over the past 2003-2004 59.2 decade. 2004-2005 59.3 Levesque also raised con2005-2006 58.8 cerns with the different di2006-2007 59.8 ploma designations. 2007-2008 62.7 “When you set those low 2008-2009 65.5 bars, the students that are 2009-2010 69.0 going to be more often 2010-2011 70.6 counseled into that diplo2011-2012 74.5 ma are our minority and unSOURCE: FLORIDA DEPARTMENT OF derrepresented students,” EDUCATION she said. Lawmakers insist there will still only be one stanAnd Sen. Bill Montford, a dard diploma offered in Tallahassee Democrat, deFlorida. It will just come in nied that the bill would wathree equally rigorous vari- ter down the curriculum. eties. “This whole approach is

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not … retreating, not backing down,” said Montford, who is also CEO of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents. “It’s a tweaking and a better alternative for a lot of our students.” Pinellas County Superintendent Michael Grego, who pitched a similar proposal earlier this year, agreed. “Right now, if you don’t pass an end-of-course exam, you don’t graduate,” Grego said. “It shouldn’t be an-all-or-nothing thing.” Those who stand to be most affected might not get a say in the political process. Most are busy preparing for finals. But Lina Zuluaga, a 16-year-old student at Michael Krop Senior High in Northeast Miami-Dade, said students would welcome the opportunity to custom-design their education. “This would open a lot of doors,” she said. Miami Herald staff writer Kathleen McGrory can be reached at kmcgrory@ MiamiHerald.com.

4A | SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2013

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GUANTANAMO

U.S. guards raid camp, move hunger strikers to single cells ■ Overnight, guards raided a communal prison and locked about 60 captives into individual cells to end months of protests. STEVE HELBER/AP

AT NASA’S WALLOPS FACILITY: An Orbital Sciences Corp. rocket sits on a launch pad in 2006. The company will test its new Antares rocket soon.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

WASHINGTON — U.S. forces raided Guantánamo’s showcase prison camp early Saturday, at times battling with detainees, to systematically empty communal cellblocks in an effort to end a three-month-old protest that prisoners said was sparked by mistreatment of the Quran, the military said. “Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons and, in response, four lessthan-lethal rounds were fired,” according to a statement issued by the prison camps at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. “There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.” The pre-dawn operation took place hours after delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross left the remote island prison and during a blackout of news media access to the crisis in the prison camps.

Launch to shine light on Va. island ■ A private firm’s first test launch of its Antares rocket at a little-known NASA facility on Wallops Island will thrust it into public view. BY BROCK VERGAKIS Associated Press

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — On one of Virginia’s small barrier islands, a NASA facility that operates in relative obscurity outside scientific circles is preparing to be thrust into the spotlight. On Wednesday, Orbital Sciences Corp. plans to conduct the first test launch of its Antares rocket under a NASA program in which private companies deliver supplies to the International Space Station. If all goes as planned, the unmanned rocket’s practice payload will be vaulted into orbit from Wallops Island before burning up in the atmosphere on its return to Earth several months later. The goal of the launch isn’t to connect with the space station, but to make sure the rocket works and that a simulated version of a cargo ship that will dock with space station on future launches separates into orbit. Orbital officials say that should occur 10 minutes after liftoff. In that short period of time, Wallops Island will transition from a littleknown launch pad for small research rockets to a major player in the U.S. space program. The Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s rural Eastern Shore is small in comparison to major NASA centers like those in

Florida, California and Texas. The site is near Maryland and just south of Chincoteague Island.The Eastern Shore is dominated by forests and farmland, and Wallops Island’s isolated nature, with marshland to its west and the Atlantic to its east, has made it home to a Navy surface warfare combat center. Those who work at Wallops Island joke that even people living on the Eastern Shore are surprised to learn about rocket launches there. In fact, more than 16,000 rockets have been launched from Wallops Island since 1945, but none has drawn the attention of Antares. Most are suborbital and focus on education and research. “The real transformation here at Wallops is we’ve always been kind of a research facility,” said William Wrobel, the facility’s director. “So this transition is really kind of into an operational phase, where we’re going to be doing kind of regular flights out of here to the space station.” A successful launch would pave the way for Dulles-based Orbital to show that it can connect its unmanned Cygnus cargo ship with the space station this summer. If that’s successful, Orbital would launch the first of eight resupply missions from the island in the fall under a $1.9 billion NASA contract.

RESISTANCE The worst injury involved a rubber pellet piercing a captive’s “flank,” said Army Col. Gregory Julian at the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison camps operation. The captives resisted the raid with broom and mop handles as well as plastic water bottles that had been wrapped and modified into clubs, he said. The scenario described by the military — individual men locked one to a cell, maximum-security style, in a facility designed for communal medium-security confinement — returned the prison camps to an austere detention approach dating back to the Bush administration. By the time President Barack Obama took office, the prison camps had established communal confinement in a prison called Camp 6 that was more in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, with POW-style amenities such as satellite TV, books and, for well-behaved captives, wristwatches. The Pentagon even built a $744,000 open-air barbed-

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wire and fence-ringed soccer field guarded by troops in air-conditioned towers to keep the two sides apart and avoid friction. But lawyers for the detainees had in recent months described mounting tensions at the camps that hold 166 captives following a particularly aggressive Camp 6 cell search held Feb. 6, after U.S. Army soldiers took over from U.S. sailors as guards in the communal camps. Lawyers for the captives said a wide-ranging hunger strike was underway. The strike, they said, was sparked by what the captives considered abusive searches of their Qurans but was fueled by years of frustration at their status of legal limbo. The military denied that the Quran was mistreated in what it called routine, respectful searches — and downplayed the magnitude of the food strike. Before Saturday’s battle between captives and troops, the prison had counted 43 of the captives as hunger strikers, with 13 being force-fed nutritional supplements by tubes snaked up their noses and into their stomachs. A visit to the camps in March made it clear that guards had lost a measure of control over life inside the communal blocks. The captives could be seen systematically disobeying communal camp rules. They covered surveillance cameras in individual cells with cereal boxes. They refused to admit food

carts to the cellblocks. Commanders said they were concerned that, out of view of the guard force, there were stealth hunger strikers who could suddenly die. The raid let guards and medical staff examine each captive individually, according to one military source, and the official figure spiked to about 65 counted as hunger strikers. Some were being treated at the prison camp hospital because of malnutrition, not injuries from the raid, the source said, in an account that prison camp spokesman Navy Capt. Robert Durand was checking Saturday evening. LIVING TOGETHER At the height of Camp 6 cooperation, about 130 captives lived in pods — praying together, eating together and having around-theclock access to an open-air recreation yard, while guards kept a distance. Following Saturday’s raid, about 60 captives were confined single-cell, maximum security style and the guards were inside the blocks that the captives once controlled. “In order to reestablish proper observation, the guards entered the Camp 6 communal living spaces to transition detainees into single cells, remove obstructions to cameras, windows and partitions, and to assess the medical condition of each detainee,” a statement from the prison said. Nearly 90 of Guantánamo’s 166 captives had been

cleared for release or transfer to their home countries years ago but are trapped at the base in POW-style status because of congressional restrictions on releases. Ohio Federal Public Defender Carlos Warner, who represents several detainees, said Saturday’s assault “is exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. As of last week the strike would end if they allowed the men to surrender the Quran. Instead, the military is escalating the conflict.” Human Rights Watch counsel Andrea Prasow noted that many of the hunger strikers have been identified by their lawyers as precleared captives. So, while she said it is understandable that the military sought to reestablish authority over a portion of the prison camps, the new maximum-security lockup regime means that the captives “are essentially being punished for acting out their despair.” An International Red Cross spokesman, Simon Schorno, said the organization “was not involved in any way in this operation and therefore will not comment on its objectives, the way it was conducted or the detainees’ response to it.” The White House had no comment on the raid itself but said in a statement that it had “been monitoring the situation at Guantánamo closely” and was told in advance of the “plan to transition detainees at Camp 6 from communal to singlecell living to ensure their health and security.”

IN THE CAMPS

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WALTER MICHOT/MIAMI HERALD FILE, 2012

AT THE HEIGHT OF COOPERATION: Captives are shown kicking around a soccer ball for exercise at Camp 6 in 2012. Tensions at the camp have been mounting.

Forced feedings set off ethics debate ■ Dozens of war-on-terror captives are on a hunger strike and 11 are being fed by tube by the U.S. military so that they won’t starve to death. BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

WASHINGTON — The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross said this week that the group disagrees with the United States over its practice of force-feeding captives at Guantánamo. As of Friday, 43 of the 166 war-on-terror captives are on hunger strikes, and 11 of them were receiving tube feedings, a Pentagon spokesman said. “There is a discrepancy between the position of the United States and the ICRC. That’s very much part of, a point on the agenda,” the Red Cross’ Peter Maurer told reporters a day after meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss the ongoing crisis at the prison camps in southeast Cuba. The Red Cross position, as is that of other international medical groups, is that when it comes to eating, prisoners have the right to choose their fate. The U.S. advocacy group, Physicians for Human Rights, argues that force-

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feeding hunger strikers is a violation of medical ethics. “If someone who is mentally competent expresses the wish not to be fed or hydrated, medical personnel are ethically obligated to accede to that person’s wishes,” said Dr. Vincent Iacopino, an expert with the rights group. “Under those circumstances, to go ahead and force-feed a person is not only an ethical violation but may rise to the level of torture or ill-treatment.” The U.S. military says that the Navy medical staff has been systematically pumping nutritional supplements into the stomachs of detainees who will not eat on their own and are considered medically at risk. During a recent visit, a reporter asked the prison camp staff why they will not let the captives starve at Guantánamo Bay. Here are five replies. ● It’s not humane. The motto of the 1,700-strong detention center staff at the prison of 166 captives is “Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent.” And the an-

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swer from an Army captain named John, the officer in charge of Guantánamo’s communal Camp 6, was that the military couldn’t let detainees starve themselves to death because “that would be inhumane. They can choose not to eat but we’re not going to let them starve.” ● “First, do no harm” is the creed of medical professionals, and to let a captive starve is at odds with U.S. military medicine. A Navy lieutenant commander wearing a nameplate with the moniker Leonato put it this way: “We’re obligated to protect life. I signed on as a nurse not to carry a rifle but to keep people alive, render medical care. I’m here to deliver therapeutic care as a mental health professional.” ● It’s un-American. “Allowing a detainee to harm himself is not only counter to our responsibilities under the laws of war, but is anathema to our values as Americans,” says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon spokesman responsible for detention and legal issues. “Allowing a peacefully protesting detainee to harm himself by choosing to sit by while he starves himself to the point of endangering his

life is not only a violation of the very code followed by civilized peoples everywhere, but it is the worst kind of victor’s justice: repugnant and wholly unacceptable.” ● It looks bad. “It’s our job to take care of them, to feed them and take care of their needs,” says Zak, the Arab-American cultural advisor to the admiral in charge of the detention center, who like nearly everybody who works there grants interviews on condition that his full name not be published. “Otherwise they will say we killed them, let them die.” ● It’s policy. That’s according to Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the public affairs officer for the detention center where 56 captives could leave if Congressional restrictions on transfers were lifted and the U.S. could arrange safe repatriation or third-country resettlement agreements. “We disagree with the ICRC opinion that they should be allowed to starve to death. That’s not the position of the government. I don’t know why that policy decision was made.”

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110TH YEAR, NO. 226 ©2013

BROWARD & KEYS EDITION

GUANTANAMO

Prison careens from calm to crisis ■ A look at how life at Guantánamo’s war-on-terror prison camp has deteriorated from peaceable routine to hunger-striking nightmare. BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected] MICHELLE KANAAR/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI [email protected]

There are many Vanderbilt mansions, all of them grander, and certainly larger, than the relatively modest manse on Miami’s Fisher Island that bears the famous family name. Ah, but if only you could see it — the beautifully proportioned stone and stucco Mediterranean Revival exterior, the octagonal entry, the soaring living room and the old dining room paneled in antique oak and mahogany, all of it extensively and exquisitely restored — then you might want to stay a while. Alas, the 1930s estate, a designated Miami-Dade County historic landmark, sits at the heart of an ultra-private club and hotel on an island off the tip of Miami Beach that’s accessible only by ferry. Or by a very large bank account.

• TURN TO LOCKDOWN, 19A MiamiHerald.com/ guantanamo Track the hunger strike in an interactive graphic

CHILD CARE

A night out without the kids, thanks to the Web

• TURN TO MANSION, 18A

GOOD LIVING: William K. Vanderbilt II and his wife, Rosamund, by the pool of the historic mansion. The library, pictured above, has been recently renovated.

■ Internet companies that connect parents with baby sitters and other child-care professionals are luring millions to their websites each month.

FISHER ISLAND CLUB

A VIEW FROM THE TOP: Aerial view of Vanderbilt Estate and yacht docked at Fisher Island in December 1936.

BY DAVID SMILEY [email protected]

HISTORICAL MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN FLORIDA

BOSTON MARATHON BOMBINGS

Family’s story is one of a faded American dream ■ Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev took to America with gusto. Then they underwent transformations so dramatic that some friends would barely recognize them. BY MARC FISHER Washington Post Service

America had already welcomed two of his brothers when Anzor Tsarnaev crossed the ocean with his family in 2002. Anzor’s brother Ruslan, who had immigrated just a few years earlier, already had a law degree and was on his way to an executive job and a six-figure salary.

The boys — who authorities believe are the Boston Marathon bombers, responsible for killing four people and injuring more than 250 — took to their new home with gusto. The older one, Tamerlan, was sociable, even showy, dressing sharply, honing his body to become an Olympic boxer. He married an American

And at first, Anzor, his wife, Zubeidat, and their two sons, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, seemed as energetic and brimming with initiative as their relatives had been. Anzor, a mechanic, fixed up cars. His wife turned a cut-rate apartment in affluent Cambridge, • TURN TO FAMILY, 17A Mass. into an improvised salon, offering facials at attractive • Tamerlan and his mother talked of jihad on a Russian wiretap, 17A prices.

BROTHERS: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was cocky and flashy; Dzhokhar was a joker who partied hard.

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GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Dozens of brandnew personal DVD players for the prisoners are stashed in a closet, a perk the military has now put on hold. The $744,000 soccer field is empty. The halal kitchen still cooks three meals a day for each prisoner, but guards throw most of the food away. With nearly every one of the 166 Guantánamo prisoners now under lockdown — back in solitary existence after years of communal living — the military has reverted to a battle rhythm reminiscent of the Bush administration. Pre-cleared captives awaiting

Decked out in their pajamas, Bodhi, Kai, Drake and Roman colored with markers and listened to a complete stranger read aloud Pete the Cat while their moms and dads slipped out the front door. That the young boys didn’t know Melissa Rincon meant little; meeting new sitters is old hat when you’re between the ages of 3 and 6. But tonight, their parents had only met Rincon 15 minutes earlier when she knocked on Jodi Gallant’s door and introduced herself as the baby sitter from the Internet. In a matter of minutes, Gallant versed Rincon, 24, about acceptable snacks, bedtime tricks and procedures for operating the television remote, while Drake and Roman’s mom checked out her

• TURN TO SITTERS, 2A

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INDEX BOOKS, 5-6M | CLASSIFIED, SECTION E | DEATHS, 4-5B | EDITORIALS, 2L | LOTTERY, 2B | MOVIES, 10M | PEOPLE, 8A | REAL ESTATE, 7H | TELEVISION, 10M | HOROSCOPES, 11M

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FROM THE FRONT PAGE

THE MIAMI HERALD | MiamiHerald.com

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SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 2013 | 19A

GUANTANAMO

THE PSYCH WARD: The prison’s Muslim advisor has warned prison officials that force feedings will not stop the next suicide. ‘They are not done yet,’ Zak says.

Life under lockdown at strike-hit camp • LOCKDOWN, FROM 1A political change are confined for long stretches to 8-by-12 cells, each man praying behind his own steel door, deciding for himself whether to eat a solitary meal. Meantime, troops are back to managing the most intimate aspects of a detainee’s daily life — when he will be shackled and taken to a shower, when he’ll be shackled and taken to a recreation yard, when he’ll get to hear the call to prayer through a slot in the door rather than muffled through the prison’s walls. And, for 100 hunger strikers, the military decides when to shackle each man into a restraint chair for tube feedings — an austere, exacting control of the lives of these men that the prison’s Muslim advisor warns will not stop the next suicide. “They are not done yet, and they will not be done until there is more than one death,” warns the Pentagonpaid advisor, who goes by Zak. Zak has worked at the prison since 2005 and blames a dozen hard-core prisoners for manipulating the others to join the hunger strike that has engulfed most of the prison — and is still growing. The military acknowledges that two prisoners have attempted suicide since the strike began. Zak predicts the hard-liners will incite a vulnerable captive to die. The prisoners “have perfected their methods of committing suicide,” he says. “It’s not going to be obvious.” Defense lawyer Carlos Warner disagrees. He argues that the hunger strikers are slowly trying to commit suicide in plain view. “Suicide will happen because the men are hopeless,” he says, “not because of influence by other detainees.” They’ve lost hope, he said, because “President Obama has no intention to close Guantánamo.” CRISIS MANAGEMENT For now, the camps careen from one crisis to another. Reporters got a glimpse of this at dawn recently when the words “code yellow” suddenly crackled through a guard’s radio inside Guantánamo’s maximum-security lockup. An officer ordered the reporters to evacuate. Somewhere inside the 124-cell prison a captive “didn’t wake up” or “wasn’t showing enough movement” inside his cell, said the commander, an Army captain who would not provide even the first letter of her first name. So Alpha Block declared a medical emergency — something the Army captain said has occurred “very frequently” since she took charge in October. In September, a Yemeni prisoner was found dead in his cell of a drug overdose. The military called it a suicide.

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This time, troops shackled that morning’s medical emergency to a board and whisked him to the camp clinic. A Navy nurse diagnosed him as feeling “dizzy or faint,” and had him returned to his cell — all inside 20 minutes, according to an account provided by the prison’s Army public affairs team. The Pentagon introduced communal, POW-style detention while George W. Bush was still president. Defense Department contractors built the first barracks-style prison camp in 2004 as a pre-release lockup for some of the first of the 500 or so captives that the Bush White House would eventually send home. Once Barack Obama was elected, communal became the norm. Prison camp managers, Zak included, would boast that by letting captives pray together, eat together, study together, the Pentagon was both complying with the Geneva Conventions on how to treat war prisoners and reducing friction between men held for years and their guards, who pass through on roughly oneyear rotations. Even as Congress blocked closure, communal Camp 6 became the showcase of calm coexistence — guards watched from the outside, some in towers air conditioned for their comfort, prisoners got PlayStations, food pantries and permission to roam inside their expanding areas. The holy month of Ramadan passed peacefully, according to both sides, with the captives laying out festive meals at dusk for the break-fast prayers and feast that followed. Whatever detente existed ended on Jan. 2, around the date soldiers relieved sailors guarding the communal camp. A captive started to climb a fence and a guard fired rubber pellets into the sprawling soccer field the Pentagon built for $744,000. Then on Feb. 6, guards undertook the most aggressive shakedown of the communal cells in years. The captives responded with protest: They launched the hunger strike, refused to shut themselves in their cells for two hours of nightly lockdown, and one by one obscured more than 100 cameras that had let guards peer in every cellblock corner. On April 13, troops stormed Camp 6 to lock each captive alone inside a cell. Troops with shotguns fired rubber pellets and rubber bullets. Detainees wielded broom handles and other improvised weapons. Somebody whacked two guards’ helmeted heads and a detainee bled on two other guards during a five-hour operation that injured five prisoners and put all but a few of Guantánamo captives on lockdown. The commander of the guard force, Army Col. John Bogdan, described the February shakedown as tighten-


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Where did it all go wrong? GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Last summer, troops kept their distance and walked softly in their combat boots while more than 100 captives spent their 11th Ramadan in military custody, observing Islam’s holy month together in group meals and long stretches of hip-to-hip prayer. Last week, the same captives were locked inside single cells and the military walked the blocks where the captives had laid out meals. When Bravo Block conducted predawn fajr prayers, the guards opened slots on just two steel doors — for the prayer leader and caller — and left the other captives on the block to hear predawn worship as it echoed through the door and walls. Lawyers for the detainees and U.S. military commanders offer two theories for what caused the detainees to go on a hunger strike and the military to react by ending almost all POW-style communal living: ● No hope: Prison officials point out that the troubles began around the time President Barack Obama took office for his second term, with no new ideas on how to achieve his first-term pledge of emptying the prisons at Guantánamo. Of the 166 detainees, at least 56 of the men know they were cleared for release by a federal task force, but Congress has blocked most transfers and the White House has put a particular hold on repatriations to Yemen, the home country of most Guantánamo prisoners and the place where an al-Qaida franchise has flourished. “They had great optimism that Guantánamo would be closed,” Marine Gen. John F. Kelly told Congress in March. “They were devastated apparently … when the president backed off.” ● New guards: U.S. Army military police now guard the communal camp in place of sailors, an organizational change that has contributed to tensions. The chief of the guard force, Army Col. John Bogdan, concedes that the latest rotation of MPs may be going “a little more by the book,” referring to Guantánamo’s “Standard Operating Procedures” on how to run this prison like no other. The procedures mean everybody should be treating the captives the same way, he said. But, “there’s doctrine and how you apply doctrine on the ground.” One source of tension is the new soldiers’ decision to have a Muslim linguist leaf through captives’ Qurans during a Feb. 6 shakedown. Bogdan, who got took charge of the prison in June 2012, said the prison had been systematically checking each captive’s holy book for years; the prisoners, who mostly arrived in 2002, said through their attorneys that the practice stopped years ago. Lawyers quote detainees as claiming that some of the soldiers have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq with bitter memories and are taking their anger out on their Muslim captives. The military has been unable to quantify what percentage of the 1,700 contract and uniformed prison staff served in the two conflicts. But it is true that most of the Navy guards had been pulled from shore duty in the U.S. or ship duty as a stopgap measure. Few would have had experience in direct contact with enemy forces. CAROL ROSENBERG

CAROL ROSENBERG/ MIAMI HERALD STAFF

EYES ARE WATCHING: A prisoner under lockdown, as seen through a surveillance camera.

FOOD IN CONFINEMENT: A prison guard serves a meal to a detainee through a small slot in a cell door.

THE CHAIR: Hunger strikers, now numbering 100, are shackled into a restraint chair for tube feedings. ing what is now seen as an era of permissiveness in the prison before Navy sailors turned over their cellblocks to Army guards. For a one-named Afghan hunger striker named Obaidullah that means knocks on his cell door between 2 and 4 a.m., offering a shower, according to his lawyer, Marine Maj. Derek Poteet. Guards had yet to issue the man a bar of soap and toothbrush by his 10th day in lockdown, the lawyer said. That account, according to Army Col. Greg Julian, could not possibly be true. Every captive gets basic issue items, said Julian, who works at Southern Command, the Pentagon’s South Florida headquarters that supervises the prison and U.S. military interests throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. ‘A BAG OF BONES’ Obaidullah, in his 30s, is one of just a few hungerstriking prisoners to have a military defense lawyer. This week, the Marine said, the Afghan man was so weak and so withered that he presented “a bag of bones” when he reached out with a handshake. Bogdan told reporters that he has met with some captives, heard their requests for “any number of things” that he did not detail. “None of them were considered,” he said, noting that gestures would “reinforce bad behavior.” Ultimately, he said, they want to be re-

Edition: 1st

leased from Guantánamo, and that’s something he has no authority to do. That was before the raid that locked everybody at the communal camp inside an individual cell, a single-cell style of confinement that Obaidullah’s lawyer says the Afghan hadn’t seen since the Bush years. The morning of April 13, Poteet said, Obaidullah was doing ritual washing in an inner recreation yard in anticipation of pre-dawn prayers when the guards arrived, throwing tear gas and firing something he could not identify. Obaidullah swears he did not resist, his lawyer said, and believes he is consigned to suffering a kind of collective punishment for the bad acts he attributes to some, not all. Obaidullah told his lawyer Monday that he knew the troops who hold him “don’t have the authority to send me home. But they do have the authority to be nice.” He pleaded, Poteet said, for “some basic human dignity and reasonableness.” To claims of collective punishment, Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the prison spokesman, offers a quote from Southcom’s commander, Marine Gen. John F. Kelly: “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever reward bad behavior.” Because every camera within reach was covered in the communal cellblocks, the military says, every captive who was there is being punished. Bogdan would


not predict when they might return to group meals and prayers; Zak said he hoped at least some would be together by Ramadan. It starts in early July. LIMITED FREEDOM In a section of Camp 5, now Guantánamo’s most populous, maximum-security prison, there still exists an unseen corner of communal confinement — about a dozen prisoners who can walk around the corridor unshackled, with the guards watching from outside. Each man now has his own player to watch DVDs in his cell. None of those men happens to be a hunger


striker, says Army Lt. Col. Samuel House, a prison camp spokesman. An unscripted view of the block last week seemed to confirm this. Just as eight men in Bravo Block were finishing up predawn fajr prayers inside their cells, a monitor in the command center showed a bearded captive pop something into a microwave oven. He waited perhaps 60 seconds, then carried that something away — a privilege no longer possible for the men in lockdown. A meal arrives three times a day and is offered through a slot in a steel door, presenting a choice: eat it or the guards will throw it away.

CELEBRITY KIDS’ NAMES SPARK TREND

TROPICAL STORM MAY BE CLOSE CALL FOR S. FLORIDA LOCAL & STATE, 1B

KHLOE KARDASHIAN & MASON

TROPICAL LIFE, 1E

W E D N E S D AY , J U LY 1 0 , 2 0 1 3 | 7 5 C E N T S | F I N A L E D I T I O N | M I A M I H E R A L D .C O M

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MIAMI POLICE

Feds cite ‘pattern’ of excessive force ■ The Justice Department found unconstitutional use of force in Miami police-involved shootings. Now, a list of reforms will be drawn up and overseen by a federal judge. BY JAY WEAVER, KATHLEEN MCGRORY AND DAVID OVALLE [email protected]

For the first time, a federal judge will monitor the Miami Police Department to enforce sweeping institutional changes involving use

LEAKED DOCUMENTS

viewing 33 police shootings of individuals — including seven black men killed in the inner city — as part of a lengthy civil rights investigation of Miami police practices from 2008 through 2011. Federal officials agreed with the police department’s own findings that three of the 33 shootings were “unjustified,” but concluded that an unspecified number of others

of force, after the U.S. Justice Department Tuesday found that several police-involved shootings were unjustified during a fouryear period. The Justice Department took the unprecedented step after re-

involved excessive force, too, and “may have resulted from tactical and training deficiencies,” said the letter of findings, signed by Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez. Miami U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer said the Justice findings serve a “dual goal of shining a light on past wrongs and — more importantly — setting a clear course

for the future that will assure the residents of the city of Miami that this type of behavior will not be repeated in our city.’’

• TURN TO REPORT, 2A MiamiHerald.com/ miami-dade Read the Department of Justice’s report

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY | 2013-14 BUDGET

Americas riled over report of NSA spying

Mayor calls for tax-rate hike ■ The tax-rate increase would maintain fire-rescue services, fund a new animal-welfare plan and pay for voter-approved construction projects. BY PATRICIA MAZZEI [email protected]

■ Citing classified NSA documents, Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported that the United States was spying on Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and other regional allies. BY JIM WYSS [email protected]

BOGOTA — Allegations that the United States has been actively spying on friends and foes in Latin America threatened to open new diplomatic fronts for the Obama administration as it scrambles to detain the source of the sensitive information: NSA leaker Edward Snowden. On Tuesday, Brazil’s O Globo newspaper, citing National Security Agency documents, said the United States had been monitoring Internet and telephone communications in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador, among other countries. The newspaper said U.S. intelligence gathering went beyond national security issues to include economic espionage — collecting information on the petroleum industry in Venezuela and the energy sector in Mexico. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called an emergency meeting and has asked the United Nations to investigate the claims. One of her cabinet members suggested the revelations might jeopardize Rousseff’s state visit to the U.S. in October. The allegations come amid growing speculation about the fate of Snowden, who has been stranded in a Moscow airport for more

• TURN TO SNOWDEN, 10A

MARICE COHN BAND/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

BUDGET PLAN UNVEILED: Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez discusses his plan on Tuesday at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center, 111 NW 1st St., Miami.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez on Tuesday proposed raising the property-tax rate for the first time in three years to stave off cuts to fire and library services and fund a plan to stop killing dogs and cats at the county’s animal shelter. The mayor’s 2013-14 budget increases the overall tax rate by 5.37 percent — a hike Gimenez said would avoid fire station and public library closures and pay for the animal-welfare plan that nearly 65 percent of Miami-Dade voters approved in a nonbinding ballot question in November. The hike includes the separate portion of taxes that pays for construction projects voters approved in a major bond issue a decade ago, such as expanding the Florida exhibit at Zoo Miami. In an unincorporated neighborhood such as Kendall, a homeowner with a taxable property value of $200,000 would pay an additional $102.52 in county taxes, which make up only a por-

• TURN TO GIMENEZ, 2A

Proposed $412 million budget increase Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez proposed a new county budget Tuesday that would PDLQWDLQ²UHUHVFXHDQGOLEUDU\VHUYLFHVDQGIXQGDQDQLPDOZHOIDUHSODQ0RUHWKDQ YDFDQWHPSOR\HHSRVLWLRQVZRXOGEHIUR]HQEXWQROD\RIIVZRXOGEHUHTXLUHG

The plan would increase the property-tax rate by SHUFHQW¨WKH²UVWWLPH*LPHQH]KDVUDLVHGLW during his three years as mayor.

Mayor’s proposal

Mayor’s proposal

Year

Operating budget

2011-12

$4.47 B

2012-13

$4.31 B

2013-14

$4.43 B

Capital budget $1.70 B $1.63 B

Total budget

Year

$6.18 B

2011-12

-11.8%

2012-13

-2.0%

$5.95 B

$1.93 B

$6.36 B

Change in property-tax rate (year over year)

2013-14

+5.37%

Source: Miami-Dade County

KARA DAPENA/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

GUANTANAMO NAVAL BASE | HUNGER STRIKERS

ISRAEL | RON DERMER

Rapper’s video spotlights detainees’ forced-feeding

New Israeli envoy to U.S. has roots in Miami Beach

■ A London law firm’s advocacy efforts expanded with a video, released on the eve of Ramadan, in which a wellknown performer dramatizes hunger strikers’ situation.

■ Former Miami Beach resident Ron Dermer will become Israel’s top diplomat in the United States.

THE GUARDIAN

BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

In a brutal video that’s gone viral, rapper-actor Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, is clad in an orange jumpsuit and recoils against restraints as a doctor tries to put a feeding tube up his nose. He resists. He sobs. He wriggles out of his restraints.

It’s the latest production by a London-based law firm determined to get its captive clients out of Guantánamo. But there’s a problem, says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon spokesman for Guantánamo policy: “It doesn’t comport with our procedures.” Breasseale, who has never ac-

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86 | 78 Storms likely; downpours

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From Herald Staff and Wire Reports

tually seen a forced-feeding at Guantánamo and earlier in his career served as the U.S. Army’s en-

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IN 4-MINUTE VIDEO: Mos Def, also known as Yasiin Bey, called it quits before forcefeeding was completed.

Edition: 1st

Section, zone: Asection, HeraldDade

er’s connections to Republicans. Dermer, 42, has been Netanyahu’s top diplomatic advisor for the past four years. He will replace Michael DERMER Oren, the outspoken and telegenic New Jerseyborn historian who has served in Washington for four years. In an

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday appointed Ron Dermer, a close advisor with ties to Miami Beach, to be Israel’s next ambassador to the United States. The long-anticipated pick had raised some concern in Washington because of Derm- • TURN TO DERMER, 10A Inside today’s Herald Classified ......7-10D Comics ..............5E Deaths ..............4B Lottery ..............2B

Last change at: 22:43:59 July 9

Movies ...............3E People ..............6A Puzzles ..............4E Television ..........3E

110th year, No. 299 ©2013

10A | WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2013

FROM THE FRONT PAGE

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MiamiHerald.com | MIAMI HERALD

GUANTANAMO NAVAL BASE | HUNGER STRIKERS

ISRAEL | RON DERMER

Video dramatizes forced-feeding

Israel’s envoy to U.S. hails from Beach

• PRODUCTION, FROM 1A voy to Hollywood, was at first reluctant to offer a review. “We don’t provide commentary on theatrical productions,” he said. But, unlike other members of the U.S. military who wouldn’t comment, he called it “a clever bit of cause marketing by Reprieve and the Guardian,” the British newspaper that first posted it. That’s the point. Reprieve, the London law firm that catapulted Guantánamo’s hunger strike onto The New York Times’ op-ed page with a prisoner’s firstperson account, has captured the public’s imagination with the native New York rapper’s failed dramatization of a captive’s forced-feeding. The lawyers released the video on the eve of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, and, as it happens, hours before a U.S. District Court judge called Guantánamo’s tube-feeding practice “painful, humiliating and degrading.” The judge, Gladys Kessler, said she was powerless to act on the request of Syrian captive Jihad Diyab, 41, to stop the Pentagon from force-feeding him. Reprieve represents Diyab and 16 other prisoners at Guantánamo, where the prison said 106 captives were on hunger strike Tuesday — 45 of them listed for tube feedings. Lawyers for Diyab and three other captives asked the federal court in Washington, D.C., to stop the

REPRIEVE UK

IN VIDEO: Rapper-actor Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, before the effort to force-feed him begins. feedings. Kessler said the person with the power to do it is President Barack Obama. At the White House Tuesday, spokesman Jay Carney defended the policy. “The president said in April, we do not want these individuals to die,” he said. Carney added that Obama “understands that this is a challenging situation,” then referred reporters to the Justice and Defense Departments for “specifics about the hunger strikers and then the litigation itself.” In London, Reprieve attorney Cori Crider said the video racked up 2 million hits in the first day. It also stole the thunder of the military’s latest bid to ease tensions at the prison of 166 captives staffed by about

2,000 employees — Navy nurses, Army guards, contract linguists and librarians and a little-mentioned intelligence unit. At 6 p.m. Monday, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the military issued a “Ramadan pardon,” excusing some disciplinary offenses and restoring “some privileges lost” for this, the 12th Ramadan at the prison camps in Cuba for most of Guantánamo’s captives. About 40 detainees, none of them hunger strikers, were released from nearly 90 days of lockdown, up to 22 hours daily in their solitary cells. The prison was letting some captives eat and pray together during Ramadan, provided they voluntarily went to their solitary cells to be locked inside for six hours a night.

Others could eat and pray together at times but were being locked in their cells 12 to 18 hours a day. In a concession to Islam’s monthlong holiday, those being force-fed would get their tube feedings after sunset and before dawn. Reporters who visit the prison have so far been forbidden to see the twice-daily tube feedings, to test military claims that most captives go willingly and sometimes agreeably chug a can of Ensure instead. News photographers can’t show a captive’s face as a condition of access to the camps. Forced-feeding became perceived as a distant, daily numerical report from Cuba. Enter Bey, a New Yorker who is also Muslim. He donned the orange jumpsuit of a detainee in June, said Crider, to make the fourminute video in a single day in London. It shows a British doctor in turquoise scrubs lubricating a tube and then attempting to insert it into Bey’s nostril, the doctor urging him to “relax.” Instead, Bey tenses up as another doctor and unseen actors in black T-shirts try to restrain him. In a portion of the video that military sources say could not happen at Guantánamo today, the actor gets loose from his restraints. Bey wails and sobs, and calls it quits. “It is me,” he said. “Please stop. I can’t do it.” Efforts to reach the rapper failed Tuesday. Crider said he was in Morocco, unavailable for comment.

LEAKED DOCUMENTS

New Snowden allegations rile region • SNOWDEN, FROM 1A than two weeks as he eludes U.S. authorities on espionage charges. Early Tuesday, a Russian lawmaker Tweeted that Snowden had accepted an asylum offer from Venezuela, only to delete the message minutes later. The Associated Press said the message had been an error. Foreign Minister Elías Jaua Tuesday confirmed that the government had not received Snowden’s response. Even so, President Nicolás Maduro said Snowden is welcome in the Andean nation. “He has to decide when he flies here, if in fact he wants to come here,” Maduro said. Bolivia and Nicaragua have also offered the 30-year-old former CIA employee asylum. According to the O Globo article, which was co-authored by Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who has had unprecedented access to Snowden, the NSA and CIA were using programs called “Prism” and “Boundless Informant” in Latin America. Prism gave intelligence officials access to emails, chats and voice mails from companies such as Face-

book, Google, Microsoft and YouTube, which the NSA used to collect data on oil and military purchases in Venezuela, energy and narcotics from Mexico, and track the movements of Colombian guerrillas. Boundless Informant was used to catalogue calls and Internet access, the report said. While the report suggests that Brazil, Colombia and Mexico registered some of the highest intelligencegathering activity in the region, it’s unclear if the programs were taking place with consent, said Alfredo Rangel, a national security analyst in Colombia. “It’s not clear who was being intercepted and what the motives were,” he said. “The United States and Colombia have agreements on fighting narco-trafficking and terrorism. And if these recordings were aimed at those groups, and handed over to Colombian authorities, then all we’re looking at here is bi-national intelligence cooperation.” The Colombian government’s silence in the face of the allegations only seemed to support that theory, he said. On Monday, responding to more limited allegations about spying in Brazil, U.S.

State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said officials had been in contact with Brazilian authorities. “As a matter of policy, we have been clear that the United States does gather foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” she said. “We plan to continue our dialogue with the Brazilians through normal diplomatic channels, but those are conversations that, of course, we would keep private.” Tuesday’s allegations come amid the backdrop of Snowden’s ongoing asylum plight. Experts say there’s no easy way out of Russia for him. His U.S. passport has been revoked and commercial flights out of Moscow to potential Latin American asylum destinations stop in countries that are likely to extradite him. His best bet might be a flight from Moscow to Havana, but even that flight crosses international boundaries that could complicate his journey. And it’s not clear if Cuba is interested in playing a role in the affair, said Frank Mora the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. “The Cubans don’t want any of it. They are in the

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midst of negotiations with the U.S. government,” he said. “They are not going to throw a grenade into the middle of this by ranting ideologically about why it’s important to protect Snowden.” Venezuela and the United States are also in talks, and hoping to exchange ambassadors for the first time since 2010. Giving Snowden asylum would likely complicate those conversations. But Mora doubted it would ever come to that. He said Venezuela and others have likely made the calculation that they will never have to make good on their promise. “This offer is an opportunity for these three countries to poke the eye of the imperialists without having to incur much of a cost because it’s just rhetoric,” he said. “The question is whether, push comes to shove, if they will accept him. I tend to think no.” Also Tuesday, the Organization of American States held a special meeting in support of Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose airplane was forced to make an emergency landing last week in Austria amid suspicions he was trying to smuggle Snowden out of Europe. Bolivia and its allies say that Spain, Italy, France and Portugal put the president’s life at risk, and broke a series of international treaties, by closing off their air space. Bolivia is asking the OAS to pass a resolution condemning the event and asking the involved nations to explain the incident and apologize. An agreement had not been reached by late Thursday. The United States wants Snowden on criminal espionage charges after he began revealing details about Prism and other mass surveillance programs. Snowden has said the activities are illegal and violate international agreements. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity, love or friendship is recorded,” he said in a video interview published on the Guardian Web site this week. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support not something I’m willing to build and not something to live under.”


• DERMER, FROM 1A announcement Tuesday, Netanyahu said Dermer has “all the necessarily characteristics to successfully fill this important role.” Dermer, a neoconservative who once worked for Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, was seen by some as questioning President Barack Obama’s commitment to Israel during his first term, and of supporting Obama’s GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, in last fall’s presidential election. But since November, he has worked to repair his reputation in Washington and has won over many in the White House with the critical roles he played in negotiating a cease-fire after Israel’s eight-day operation in the Gaza Strip, reconciling relations between Turkey and Israel and planning Obama’s much-heralded March visit to Israel. Now, several people close to the Obama administration said, any suspicions about Dermer’s political leanings are outweighed by the benefit of having an ambassador in Netanyahu’s inner circle. He is expected to start the job in the fall. “If you have someone you know is well-connected to the prime minister, it means you can always use that channel, no matter how sensitive the message is, and understand it’s going to be communicated the way you want it,” noted Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East envoy who is now counselor to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It reduces the prospect of surprise, it reduces the prospect of misunderstanding — that’s something that’s highly desired.” Dermer was raised in Miami Beach, where his father and brother both served as mayor. He likes to point out that they were Democrats, although the family also supported former President George W. Bush and his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush. He has a bachelor’s degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. His mother, Yaffa Dermer, who still lives in Miami Beach, said she is “all for it” when asked about her son’s new position. “I’m excited. I think he’ll do a wonderful job because he’s a redblooded American,” she said Tuesday. /“He told me he’s going to visit me a lot.” His mother, who was born and raised in Israel before moving to the U.S., said that Ron was constantly involved with Israel while growing up in their Miami Beach home, adding that he “loves” the country. Former U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, applauded the choice on Tuesday and described Dermer as a smart man who knows how essential the job is. “It’s great to have someone from Florida to take on this very central role of Israel’s ambassador to the United States,” said Klein. “It’s exciting for someone from the United States and from our community to be represented with this opportunity.” While Klein supports the selection, he also pointed out that Dermer’s career has mainly been behind the scenes in politics and he will need more than just his relationship with the prime minister to make a strong impression, especially with many in the Jewish community. “The Jewish community in the United States looks to the U.S. ambassador,” Klein


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APPOINTED DERMER: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. said. “What he says reflects on how the Jewish community looks at the relationship between Israel and the U.S.” After immigrating to Israel in 1997, Dermer co-authored a book with Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli leader — The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. In 2005, he renounced his U.S. citizenship to take a job in the Israeli Embassy in Washington. When Netanyahu returned as premier in 2009, Dermer became his chief speechwriter and strategist, summoned frequently — and at all hours — for consultations and covert assignments on politics and foreign policy. He has often expressed skepticism about whether Palestinians truly want a state of their own and about their reliability as a peace partner. “I left America because I wanted to help another nation I love defend the freedoms that Americans have long taken for granted,’’ he once said in a 2005 New York Sun interview. “I left America to help another people I love fight not merely for their survival but also for their right to survive.’’ A 2011 profile in Tablet, an online magazine, was titled “Bibi’s Brain,” using Netanyahu’s nickname, and said Dermer “comes across as equal parts George Stephanopoulos and Karl Rove.” In appointing him Tuesday, Netanyahu said in a statement that Dermer “has all the qualities necessary to successfully fill this important post.” Dermer, a yarmulkewearing modern Orthodox Jew, and his wife, Rhoda, a Yale-educated lawyer, have four sons and a daughter born last month. He did not respond to requests for interviews. Abraham H. Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said American Jewish leaders and Washington politicians alike would welcome Dermer’s appointment because his “life epitomizes the relationship between Israel and America,” and “most importantly, he’s got the ear and trust of the prime minister.” “The issue of whether or not he would be persona non grata, I think, has dissipated,” Foxman said. “It’s important that whoever sits in that seat has a close working relationship with the prime minister. You don’t need vacuums in that relationship, because vacuums are mischievous.” U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, who serves as chairman of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee in Congress, was also supportive of Dermer’s appointment. “I have known Ron and his family for many years, and I look forward to working with him in his new role,” Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement Tuesday. Miami Herald staff writer Lance Dixon contributed to this report, which also contains material from The New York Time, the Associated Press, and a previous Herald staff story.

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GUANTANAMO

Medics: Feedings aren’t torture BIG Summer ■ U.S. Navy medical personnel who administer forced feedings to detainees said what they do isn’t painful and keeps captives alive. BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Rapper Mos Def may have scored sympathy for the prisoners here with a brutal Web video dramatization of a forced feeding. But in this corner of Cuba where U.S. troops are charged with managing the long-running hunger strike, fans are hard to find. “I deleted his music off my iPod. I was a little upset about it,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Vernon Branson, 33, who is a watch commander at Camp 6, the steel and concrete prison where more than 100 prisoners went on hunger strike this year. As of Friday, the military said, 68 captives were on hunger strike, down from a high of 106 amid apparently easing tensions for Ramadan, Islam’s holy month. Of the 68, 44 were designated for tube feedings of the type that the hip-hop recording artist who now goes by Yasiin Bey tried to portray in London last month in a demonstration organized by a British legal defense

group. Detention center troops interviewed this week expressed opinions ranging from resentment to indifference to the rapper’s stunt that put a spotlight on the forced feedings that the world’s not allowed to see. Reporters have requested to observe tube feedings throughout the hunger strike, but permission has not been granted. So the question is: Where does the truth lie? Is it the depiction in the viral video and the lawyers’ claim that their clients are being tortured? Or is it the insistence of the U.S. military that forced feedings are intended to preserve life, not inflict pain? Several guards in Branson’s military police unit got nasogastric feedings out of curiosity since deploying here two months ago, the sergeant said, “and took it like a champ.” “It’s a lifesaving tool if you ask me,” said Branson, whose troops deployed from Fort Bliss, Texas. “We see it every day and we know it’s not as bad as they

make it out to be.” The captives’ lawyers say their clients consider it torture — an agonizing, degrading introduction of nutrition that obviates their right to protest their indefinite detention. They got U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler to agree, although she ruled she does not have the authority to stop the military. President Barack Obama, who does have the authority, has lamented that in his failure to close the camps that now contain 166 captives, the United States has come down to “the current situation, where we are forcefeeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike.” Yet 10 members of the Navy medical corps who do the feedings said in a series of interviews that they are proud of their service and pained by the portrayal that they are doing something inhumane. Detainees who don’t want the tube, they said, have the option to eat. But, as U.S. military medical forces, they are determined not to let them starve. “I never felt like I would be that person who would be persecuted for keeping a detainee alive,” said Eric, a

24-year-old corpsman, the Navy’s name for a medic. He helps evaluate the captives to see whose body weight is low enough to merit tube feedings of a nutritional shake — if they will not drink it on their own. In the video that went viral, the rapper recoiled from the tube and wouldn’t let a British doctor snake it up his nose. He resisted. He wriggled free of his restraints. He sobbed in a stunt a Navy nurse who goes by Ensign Lodowick called “ridiculous.” The video is “the opposite of everything that goes on here,” said Lodowick, 30, who spends his nights offering captives designated for nutritional supplements a choice — drink a bottle of Ensure, or take it through a tube inserted in their nose to their stomach. “It’s not that painful. It’s not that excruciating,” he said Thursday evening on his way to a night shift at the prison where, for Islam’s daylight fasting during Ramadan, the prison staff adopted an after-dark feeding routine. “They’re not begging for you to stop,” a 23-year-old corpsman named Hannah chimed in.

U.S. to transfer 2 detainees to Algeria

• PENNSYLVANIA

‘Use my broken heart,’ Trayvon’s mother says

BY CHARLIE SAVAGE The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — The mother of slain teenager Trayvon Martin told a National Urban League gathering in Philadelphia on Friday to use her tragedy to stop the same thing from happening to another child and she blamed Florida’s Stand Your Ground law for allowing her son’s killer to go free. Sybrina Fulton told the audience that she believes God is using her and her family to make a difference. “So my message is coming across, and it’s coming across the right way,” Fulton told attendees. “My message to you is please use my story, please use my tragedy, please use my broken heart to say to yourself, ‘We cannot let this happen to anybody else’s child,’ ” she told the audience.

• MARYLAND MANNING’S FATE IN JUDGE’S HANDS FORT MEADE — Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s fate was in the hands of a military judge Friday after nearly two months of conflicting portrayals of the soldier: a traitor who gave WikiLeaks classified secrets for worldwide attention and a young, naive intelligence analyst who wanted people to know about the atrocities of war. Judge Col. Denise Lind said she will start deliberating on the 21 charges Manning faces, but she did not say when she would rule, only that she will give the public one day’s notice before her announcement. The most serious charge is aiding the enemy.

• WASHINGTON, D.C. FDA ISSUES RULES FOR IMPORTED FOODS

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Friday that it was reviving the repatriation of low-level detainees from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which had dried up after Congress imposed strict limits on transfers. The announcement comes as William K. Lietzau, the top Pentagon official dealing with detainees, is stepping down to take a private sector job, according to people familiar with the matter. Officials said the timing was a coincidence. The White House said it had informed Congress that it intended to return two detainees to Algeria under the terms of a statute that requires Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to certify that various security conditions have been met. “We are taking this step in consultation with the Congress, and in a responsible manner that protects our national security,” the ad-

The Food and Drug Administration released longawaited proposals aimed at ensuring that the growing amount of imported foods, which now account for about 15 percent of the nation’s food supply, meet U.S. safety standards. The new rules represent one piece in a broader effort to overhaul the nation’s approach to food safety for the first time in generations by preventing contamination and illness rather than simply reacting to outbreaks. Under the regulations proposed Friday, domestic importers would have to vouch for the food-safety practices of their overseas suppliers.

• CALIFORNIA EMBATTLED MAYOR TO GET COUNSELING SAN DIEGO — Declaring he “must become a better person,” San Diego Mayor Bob Filner said Friday he will undergo two weeks of counseling after multiple women claimed he made unwanted sexual advances like groping, kissing and offensive comments. The announcement did little to stifle widespread calls for the former congressman to resign and further plunged the nation’s eighth-largest city into political turmoil.

ministration said in a statement. “We continue to call on Congress to join us in supporting these efforts by lifting the current restrictions that significantly limit our ability to transfer detainees out of Guantánamo, even those who have been approved for transfer.” The statement did not identify the two detainees. There are as many as five Algerians at the prison who were recommended for transfer by a task force in early 2010. In all, 86 of the 166 detainees remaining at the prison have been recommended for transfer if security conditions can be met. President Barack Obama has recently sought to revitalize his administration’s effort to close the Guantánamo prison amid a widespread hunger strike that appears to be dwindling. Obama had pledged to close Guantánamo within a year of taking office but his efforts have been strongly opposed in Congress.

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EDITORIAL: BREAK THE GRIDLOCK IN D.C.

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OPINION: JEB BUSH DEFENDS TONY BENNETT

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SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2013 | EDITOR: SERGIO BUSTOS [email protected] | 305-376-3411

IN MY OPINION

Leonard Pitts Jr. [email protected]

What does being a Muslim have to do with it?

N

o it was not the most excruciating thing ever seen on television. We’ve seen worse. We’ve seen Roseanne singing the national anthem, Magic Johnson hosting a talk show and Paris Hilton, existing. But if it’s not number one on that list of god-awful TV, author Reza Aslan’s recent interview with Fox “News” is surely in the top 10. Google it if you haven’t seen it. Or just ask some woman to rake her fingernails down a chalkboard for 10 minutes. Same difference. Over and over again, speaking in the honeyed, patient tone you’d use to instruct a slow child, Aslan answers the question that has been put to him by reciting his bona fides. He is a historian. He is an expert on the New Testament. He is fluent in Biblical Greek. He holds four degrees. He has spent 20 years researching the origins of Christianity. The study of religion is his job. And over and over again, doing her best imitation of Mike Wallace pinning miscreants to the wall (if Mike Wallace had shilled for a company

BY SALLY QUINN Washington Post Service

A

nthony Weiner, the New York mayoral candidate, says that his decision to stay in the race despite another sex-chat scandal “is not about me. It’s about the citizens of New York.” Unfortunately, that is just not the case. It’s about the mayoral race, yes, but even more so, his decision is inextricably linked to the perception of the role of women in our culture. Up until Weiner’s cringe-worthy news conference last week, I had felt sorry for his wife, Huma Abedin, even though I couldn’t understand how she was able to condone his online antics in the first place. I have nothing against Abedin. I like her: She is a lovely, gracious, intelligent woman. I ache for her need to come to the rescue of this man who has betrayed her so often and will likely do it again. I ache for all women who find themselves in this position. And yet, there she stood in front of the cameras, this modern American career woman, standing by her man, saying she had forgiven him, loved him and believed in him. Just what exactly does she

• TURN TO PITTS, 4L

IN MY OPINION

Carl Hiaasen chiaasen@ MiamiHerald.com

By standing by her husband and condoning his humiliating behavior, Huma Abedin is making all women look like weak and helpless victims. believe in? The only thing she can believe in for sure is that he will continue his infidelity. Though her friends say she is strong and resolute and defiant, sadly she makes all women look like weak and helpless victims. She was not standing there in a position of strength. It was such a setback for women everywhere. After Weiner was forced to resign his congressional seat in 2011, he and his wife faded into the background to repair their marriage and have a baby. Last summer, they gave a heartwarming interview to People magazine and sat for pictures with the baby, Abedin saying Weiner was devoting his time to being the best dad and husband he could be. He was, in fact, sending lewd pictures to a 22-year-old woman, offering to get her an apartment and begging to meet with her, under the name Carlos Danger. When the first scandal hit, I just thought Weiner was a grandiose, narcissistic, entitled creep. Now it is clear he must be mentally ill as well. That he has no respect for women, including his own wife, is also clear. Yet when he confessed his newest transgressions to his wife last fall, what did she do? She joined him a few months

later for yet another interview, this time for The New York Times’ magazine. Abedin agreed that her husband should run for mayor of New York. She knew full well that the old stories would be rehashed and, in all probability, the new ones would come out. So why did she do it? Michael McManus, president of Marriage Savers and author of the online column Ethics and Religion, sees Weiner as the villain here. McManus says that Weiner should have heeded the Book of Proverbs, which is full of warnings for men who stray. He quotes Proverbs 6:12-15: “A scoundrel and villain, who goes about with a corrupt mouth, who winks with his eye, signals with his feet and motions with his fingers, who plots evil with deceit in his heart — he always stirs up dissension, therefore disaster will overtaken him in an instant; he will suddenly be

• TURN TO WEINER, 4L STANDING BY HER MAN: New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner listens as his wife, Huma Abedin, defends him at a news conference on July 23.

Snowden tastes liberty — in Russia! An absolutely true news item: After spending a month confined inside a Moscow airport, former U.S. intelligence contractor and NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. weet freedom, at last! I thought I’d never get out of that crummy terminal. After a month of gagging on Cinnabon fumes, even this sooty Moscow air smells like daisies. Today I walk the streets a free man, accompanied by my two new best friends, Anatoly and Boris. They do NOT work for the KGB, OK? They’re professional tour guides who came strongly recommended by President Vladimir Putin. By the way, Vlad (that’s what he told me to call him) has been a totally righteous dude about this whole fugitive-spy thing, unlike a certain uncool American president, who keeps trying to have me arrested and prosecuted for espionage. The Russians have generously given me a Wi-Fi chip and free Internet, so I can go online anytime I want and see what the world is saying about me. A recurring theme in many

S

• TURN TO HIAASEN, 4L

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Pub. date: Sunday, August 4

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GUANTANAMO

Ramadan offers a glimpse of peace at prison ■ Islam’s holy month, which ends next week, has been a gloomy but less contentious one at Guantánamo for detainees after months of lockdown and hunger striking. BY CAROL ROSENBERG [email protected]

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — On a weekday during Ramadan, soldiers usher reporters to a window looking in on Echo Block where about 15 men are at afternoon prayer. The prisoners stand hip to hip in two rows, kneel then rise in the only glimpse of the captives the reporters will

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get in a weeklong visit. As the military tells it, an angry hunger strike is cooling, and Islam’s holy month is a new beginning. But this guarded glance at the 12th Ramadan for most Guantánamo detainees shows no fellowship, no festive meal in the blocks. And it is the complete opposite of a generous, confident Ramadan visit of a year ago. Then, the prison gave the Miami Herald night and day access to prayer and meals at different times in different cellblocks, to look and listen from unseen vantage points while commanders unhurriedly stood inside prison corridors chatting

Section, zone: , Herald

with confidence that they were doing the right thing. Last year, the Herald got to record a prisoner under lockdown berating his guards before settling down to call his fellow captives to prayer through his steel cell door. This year, it is the job of the Pentagon salaried cultural advisor called Zak to tell their story, from behind a desk at the command headquarters. In the places where the reporters can’t look or listen, says Zak, himself a Muslim, the detainees are “praying, reading the Quran, meditating, being on their own.” Lockdown has ended for dozens who are allowed to live com-

Last change at: 22:41:57 August 2

munally now, if not as liberally as before. “They watch TV,” he says, and a recent report on Al-Jazeera about plans to hold parole-style reviews for indefinite detainees went over well. “Ramadan is just a time when detainees spend worshipping,” he adds. “It gives the guards a break from putting up with the detainees.”

• TURN TO RAMADAN, 4L MiamiHerald.com/ Guantanamo See a video of a Navy nurse explain the process of tube-feeding a hunger-striking detainee.

4L | SUNDAY, AUGUST 4, 2013

MiamiHerald.com | MIAMI HERALD

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LEONARD PITTS JR.

ANTHONY WEINER SCANDAL

Fox ‘mugs’ Muslim historian on Jesus

Support deals a setback for women

• PITTS, FROM 1L of rightwing propagandists playacting at journalism) Lauren Green keeps bringing him back to what she regards as the central issue: “You’re a Muslim,” she informs him, “so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” The book in question is Zealot: The Life And Times of Jesus of Nazareth, a search for the historicity of the itinerant rabbi who founded the biggest religion on Earth. On that basis, you’d expect it to be controversial. Green, however, seems less vexed by the book’s content than by its author’s faith. “Why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?” she asks. And, “You’re not just writing about a religion from a point of view of an observer.” And, “You’ve been on several programs and never disclosed that you’re a Muslim.” To which Aslan replies that his religion is disclosed on the second page of the book and in every media interview he’s ever done. It goes on like that for 10 cringe-inducing minutes. At some point, you find yourself drifting in a stupor of disbelief, amusing yourself by imagining how Green might have interviewed other authors in history: “John Steinbeck, you’re from California. Why did you write about people from Oklahoma?” “Tom Wolfe, you’re no astronaut. Why did you write about astronauts?” “Alexis de Tocqueville, you’re a Frenchman. Why

did you write about the United States?” That’s the subtext of Green’s interview, after all, the idea that one must belong to a given tribe before one may write about that tribe. But of course, that’s not quite what she’s saying, is it? No, that stricture only applies if one is a Muslim. For all their professed abhorrence of so-called “identity politics,” it is for many conservatives an article of faith that if one’s identity includes Islam, that fact trumps everything else: character, upbringing, beliefs, politics, or fluency in Biblical Greek. Think Glenn Beck asking a Muslim congressman to prove he is not in league with America’s enemies. Think Michele Bachmann accusing an aide to the secretary of state of terrorist ties. You are your tribe. More to the point, you are the worst iteration of your tribe, the scapegoat for all our fears of your tribe. So Fox’s mugging of Aslan was an embarrassment, but hardly a surprise. The nation seems to have grown uncomfortably comfortable with the sort of “thinking” from which it proceeded. The encounter drove Aslan’s book to the top of the Amazon best-sellers list, which is good news for him. But the better news is that he lives in a country where the right to follow any line of scholarship he wants is carved in stone, regardless of how he conceives God. There is a word for that: Freedom. Lauren Green should look it up.

EDWARD SNOWDEN

Savoring the taste of liberty — in Russia! • HIAASEN, FROM 1L blogs and chat rooms seems to be: What was that kid thinking? First of all, I believe with all my heart that Americans have the right to know about the far-reaching surveillance tactics employed by our government to monitor its own citizens. I also believe I’ve restarted an important debate about national security and privacy. Could I have handled this whole thing differently? Sure. In retrospect, there’s definitely something to be said for anonymity. But, hey, cut me some slack. I’m only 29 and this was my first time leaking classified intelligence data. I’ll be the first to admit that my plan wasn’t 100 percent seamless. For example, I should have figured out what new place I wanted to live in before I revealed my identity as the leaker. Clearly, I underestimated how difficult it would be to find a country that would welcome me, especially a country as free and open as the United States. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” I declared in a video interview. This was weeks after I’d left my place in Hawaii and flown to Hong Kong to meet secretly with reporters. The hotel was nice, but after the stories broke I couldn’t go out anywhere. How do you like your accommodations, Mr. Snowden? Can we bring you another pitcher of green tea? More noodles, perhaps? I found another place to crash in Hong Kong and gave a new interview revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency had hacked government computers in China. I assumed that in gratitude for receiving this heavy-duty info, the Chinese authorities would let me stay as long as I wanted. Wrong.

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No problem, Eddie Boy, says some WikiLeaks dude. We’ll get you into Cuba. Now I was seriously jazzed because Cuba’s supposed to be a lot like Hawaii — sunshine, great beaches, good surf, a chill music scene. First connection (or so I thought) was at the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. There I scored a ticket to Havana on Aeroflot (which is sort of the Russian version of Jet Blue, minus the TVs in the seatbacks), and I’m ready to roll. Load up my iTunes with the Buena Vista Social Club but then . . . More bad news. Apparently the Cuban regime wasn’t super excited about me moving there. I never really got the whole story. The plane left without me is all I know. So I was stuck in the Moscow airport’s “transit” area, feeling not-so-great about how this whistleblower stuff is playing out. The security guys wouldn’t even let me into the main terminal to hit a Starbucks and check out the Sharper Image. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama kept bugging the Kremlin to hand me over. Putin basically flipped him off, which bought me some time to scout other destinations that had fewer ice storms. The Bolivian government has offered me asylum, but I’ve been thinking about what happened down there to Butch Cassidy and Sundance. I might take a pass. Venezuela also said I could come down, and maybe that’s where I’ll end up in a few months. At least it’s warm there. Ecuador sounds pretty sweet, too. Don’t get me wrong; I love the Russian people. Anatoly always insists on carrying my laptop for me, and Boris gave me a cell phone with unlimited minutes. The coverage here is so amazing that somebody usually answers even before I finish dialing!

Pub. date: Sunday, August 4

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• WEINER, FROM 1L destroyed — without remedy.” Yet I can’t help blaming Abedin for condoning this behavior and allowing this charade to continue. The Washington Post reported last week that Abedin, a longtime key aide to Hillary Clinton, has been soliciting money from Clinton donors, who are too afraid of alienating Clinton to turn Abedin down. Then there was the stunning news conference in which she defended her husband. I understand that one woman’s humiliation is another woman’s power play, but I can’t see how what Abedin did could be a good example for any woman anywhere. “I do very strongly believe that that is between us and our marriage,” she said then. She says the marriage has taken a lot of hard work and a lot of therapy. She says she is standing by Weiner for her family and her child. Does she really think her son will benefit from looking back on his mother’s excruciating display of lack of self-respect? Does she believe that the fact that she is essentially condoning Weiner’s behavior sets a good example for her son? She clearly has no line Weiner can’t cross. We thought we had seen the last of this kind of women’s humiliation

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP

DYNAMIC DUO: Huma Abedin has decided to take a break as a key aide to Hillary Clinton.

brought up again the pain she and her children suffered. Perhaps Weiner has changed Abedin’s view of what is moral and ethical behavior. Or could it be that she’s afraid of him? But neither of these fits her actions past and present. The only possibly reason I can guess for Abedin’s embrace of her husband is that she wants the power as much as he does. As Clinton’s assistant, she has seen the limos, the planes, the salutes and the flags, and that is the life she aspires to. She thought she had it when she married the wildly ambitious, though widely disliked, congressman. She saw the Clintons rise above infidelity, and she fooled herself into thinking she and Weiner could also ride this one out. When will all of this end? The only way out for Abedin, as I see it, is to give up being the “Good Wife,” dump Weiner and run for office on her own. Both Weiner and Abedin have certainly not learned any lessons from another verse in Proverbs: “A good name is more desirable than riches. To be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”

with Silda Wall Spitzer. You don’t see her out on the hustings with her husband, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who is running for city comptroller. Who can forget the painful scene of her standing next to her husband after he was caught with a prostitute and resigned from office? Can you imagine her doing that again, especially if he had done Quinn anchors The Washington it again? She now reportedly has told Post’s On Faith online discussion friends that she’s divorcing him, not and writes a religion-focused surprising since his campaign has column.

GUANTANAMO

Ramadan offers a glimpse of peace • RAMADAN, FROM 1L It is the first Ramadan at Guantánamo for most U.S. soldiers here and, coming after months of lockdown and hunger striking, the prisoners’ most austere in years. Midnight meals come in Styrofoam boxes slid through a slot in each captive’s cell door. Even those the military says are eating and behaving are locked alone inside a cell for six hours, then let out in time for dawn prayers. Conversations with lawyers, in person or by phone, take place in a different building. So guards are under orders to search each man’s genitals, twice, an invasive procedure the prison implemented after Ramadan last year. As a result, most captives are refusing to speak with their lawyers, leaving attorneys like Cortney Busch to conclude from scant meetings and phone calls that her clients’ spirits are broken. “Throughout the holiday we have learned that communal time, a tenet of Ramadan, is used as a reward for those who give up hunger striking — and a punishment for those who refuse to do so,” she wrote from the base after several clients wouldn’t come out of their cells to see her. “Certainly there is nothing to celebrate this Ramadan, and the mood of the camp reflects this.” That’s a change, too. Last year, commanders said that because hunger striking was a legitimate protest, a handful of prisoners who had refused to eat for years were entitled to the perks of communal life — as long as they compliantly took nourishment through tubes snaked up their noses. The procedure was done at night to let them observe Islam’s Ramadan fast, too. This year, the hunger strikers are under lockdown. It’s easier for a Navy medic to knock on a cell door to ask, after dark, whether the captive will be drinking his bottle of Ensure by hand. Or whether he’ll get it up the nose after two soldiers take him in shackles to a restraint chair. If any of the dozens of hunger strikers are allowed to worship communally, the military will not say. “We want to make sure they protest safely. The best way to do that is in a single cell,” said Army Lt. Col. Samuel House, a prison camps spokesman who was mobilized to the prison in January. ‘RAMADAN PARDON’ The holy month began after dark July 8. The prison announced a “Ramadan pardon.” On that day, the military counted 106 of the 166 captives as hunger strikers. The prisoners’ lawyers argued there were more. Troops offered the captives clean, white uniforms, and let some prisoners out of lockdown to communal pods inside a 200-cell cement block prison called Camp 6. The Army commanders forgave past sins, according to Zak, in a “reset” that wiped the slate clean of accrued disciplinary days for doing bad things, such as covering surveillance cameras, refusing to leave a cell for tube feeding or hoarding “contraband” food. Another way a detainee gets discipline time is by “weaponizing” his excrement. Social scientists say it happens especially in solitary confinement when a captive collects it in a cup and flings it through a food slot at a guard.

Section, zone: , Herald

CAROL ROSENBERG/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

PRAYING: About 15 prisoners take part in afternoon prayers inside Echo Block at Camp 6 at Guantánamo on July 24. A 40-year-old Army guard, “Sgt. M,” calls it “a crime of opportunity” that he’s experienced four times. Prison public affairs officers in particular, and commanders taking Congress members on tours, cite the tactic as one of the greatest indignities of service at Guantánamo and an example of gross misbehavior. Guards used to say they got “cocktailed,” for other bodily fluids that a bored or angry captive has added to the brew. These days they call it “splashing.” By Ramadan in the communal cellblocks, according to one watch commander, the detainees had stopped their “splashing” and the commanders had reinstated art classes. Guards were “building rapport with the detainees,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Vernon Branson, the watch commander, whose Military Police company got to Guantánamo about a month before Ramadan and found the prisoners “pretty upset being in single cells.” By his account, there’s been a “night and day” transformation. “We don’t want to upset them. We know this is their holiest month.”

that moment. It’s not a pleasant thing to have to endure but you have to take that next breath,” said M., who added that “not all” the detainees treat him poorly. He came to Guantánamo from guarding criminal soldiers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and said the work here takes the same skill: “Maintain your composure, maintain your professionalism.” Most members of the guard force serve for nine months to a year, and call their captives by their internment numbers, not their names. They are forbidden to read the military assessments of the detainees that court-martialed Army Pvt. Bradley Manning gave to WikiLeaks, and are posted on the Miami Herald website. Still, Sgt. M. said he does have empathy for the men he guards.“I understand these people are human beings,” he said. “They’ve been away from their families. I’m sure they miss their families and their homes.” Last year, a Camp 5 commander said nearly exactly the same thing. Since then, the detainees through their lawyers have complained of cruel treatment, of disrespectful Quran searches, humiliating genital pat downs and horribly painful ‘SPLASHING’ IN PROTEST forced-feedings — all of which the Branson’s Texas-based 591st MP U.S. military denies. Co. was supposed to be going to Afghanistan. But the Defense Depart- 60 HUNGER STRIKERS ment diverted it to Cuba after troops By this weekend, the prison said stormed Camp 6 in April during the the number of hunger strikers had restive hunger strike. A career Army dropped to 60 from that all-time high cop, he’s done two tours in Iraq, one of 106. But nobody on either side was in Saudi Arabia. He calls Guantána- declaring victory. mo’s guard schedule — five 12-hour “The strike will continue until the days in a row — stressful, career-en- military relearns how to communihancing duty that some troops re- cate with the men,” said Ohio public lieve with scuba diving during two- defender Carlos Warner, attorney for day weekends. about a dozen captives who won’t “Everyone talks about being take a phone call from him because of splashed,” he said. “All I know is, it’s the groin-search requirement. better than being shot at." “Meeting them with force and punSome troops say splashing even ishing them like children will only stopped for the first few days of Ram- deepen their resolve. It’s five months adan at Camp 5, the 100-cell maxi- into the strike, and the military still mum-security prison whose Army refuses to have a meaningful diacaptain in charge won’t say how ma- logue with the men.” ny captives are under 22-hour lockAt the prison, medical and guard down. House, the camp spokesman, staff insisted that the overwhelming estimates the prison burned about 50 majority of prisoners took part in U.S. Army uniforms that got contam- Ramadan’s nightly festive iftar meal. inated from being splashed during Some were simply not eating enough the hunger strike. to get healthy, according to Navy “We do have a few detainees who corpsmen who help evaluate the caplike to splash,” House said. tives’ body weight. At Camp 5’s particularly high-risk, Zak, the cultural advisor who got hostile cellblocks, guards don face there in 2005 and was around when masks and jumpsuits atop their bat- the camps introduced the “Ramadan tle dress. Even so, Sgt. M said the pardon,” is unwilling to say whether slime slid inside four different times. the strike has been broken. He got a medical checkup, decon“We don’t know,” he said. “Are they tamination drill and new uniform. taking a break because it’s Ramadan? “It’s tough. You cannot be angry in That’s their choice.”

Last change at: 22:42:17 August 2