For the third feature in VICE's screening series with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation at Nitehawk Cinema, we present Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita: the Italian maestro’s grandiose satire of Roman nightlife in the 60s.

Today, it’s tough to articulate the seismic impact the film had inside and outside the film industry. It catapulted Fellini to a stage reserved for few directors of world cinema and introduced terms like paparazzi and Fellini-esque into the lexicon. Oh, and the film itself isn’t too shabby either. It's a sprawling catalogue of Fellini’s past and future ideas, all centered around a playful damnation of the overprivileged and morally bankrupt. VICE’s Eddy Moretti will introduce the film and set the stage for Fellini’s magnum opus.

To get you prepped, we asked a few friends to weigh in with their own thoughts and feelings about the film.

— Introduction by Greg Eggebeen

AIDA RUILOVA – ARTIST AND FILMMAKER (Head and Hands: My Black Angel, Goner)

“I like lots of things, but there are three things I like most: love, love…  and love.”—Sylvia (Anita Ekberg)

Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita captures Marcello Mastroianni playing Marcello, a journalist and playboy struggling to find his place in a postwar Rome. Handsome, elegant, and always with the right people, his life looks enviable. But as we follow Marcello through a series of events, some real and some reenacted, we realize he is deeply disconnected. Fellini’s film is full of despicable characters, and I fall for all of them.

The thrill-seeking Maddalena is one of my favorite characters in the film. She is rich and bored with life. She drives Marcello to a prostitute's apartment to have sex. She’s attractive, well-dressed, and wears dark sunglasses day and night. As she lays on the prostitute’s bed, she looks over to Marcello, and then lifts her dark sunglasses to reveal the one event missing from the film, her black eye. That black eye was given quite an entrance by Fellini, revealed so precisely that Maddalena becomes almost incidental in its wake.

As that black eye is to Maddalena, it's the infamously replayed image of Sylvia baptizing Marcelo in the Trevi Fountain with a drip of water from her finger that summarizes the voluptuous Hollywood star played by Anita Ekberg. Sylvia’s inflated proportions are on the verge of exploding at any moment, but her biggest asset may be how little she actually says. Instead, she howls with the dogs and purrs with a lost kitten. Ekberg plays a role similar to that statue of Christ dangling from a helicopter over Rome: she is here to be photographed.

It is Emma, Marcello’s neglected mistress who plays outcast to the yin and yang of Sylvia and Maddalena. Her failed suicide and nagging pleas for commitment are lost on the ever evasive Marcello. As Marcello follows two children who have purportedly sighted the Madonna, Emma hopelessly prays to the Virgin Mary to be given sole possession of Marcello’s heart. Marcello’s fear of staying anywhere for too long for fear of missing something else is where the absence of his heart lies.

MICHAEL MUSTO – WRITER (Gawker, Out)

For over 28 years, I wrote a breathless gossip column called La Dolce Musto, hoping to nab some of the cachet of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita with my title alone. It’s a swirling, haunting movie about a jaded tabloid reporter who’s held prisoner by the giddy society folk who surround him every night, putting on a show that’s alternately dazzling and disheartening. I could certainly relate to the mixed feelings, but mostly I live for the film’s breathtaking images, from the Christ statue being helicoptered through the ruins to Anita Ekberg bewitchingly wading through the Trevi Fountain’s waters. They all serve Fellini’s vision of a pointedly hollow Roman holiday of the soul.

In the 80s, years after having first seen the classic film, I got to meet Anita Ekberg, Fellini, and Fellini’s casting director. Anita was intolerably rude. Fellini seemed remote. And Fellini’s casting director was an ass. When I jokingly remarked to him that I wanted to be in a Fellini film, he turned to his cohort and said that I was too ugly. I guess he didn’t count on me knowing Italian... So they were all frauds! Who cares? All the better for them to hold a magical mirror up to society’s frailties. Besides, my column’s name was intended even more as a nod to Gilda Radner’s brilliant 1978 parody “La Dolce Gilda” on Saturday Night Live.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN - CHEF, AUTHOR, TRAVELING ENTHUSIAST, HOST (Parts Unknown, The Taste)

The king of the Italian-sunglass films. Absolutely beautifully shot, lit, written, and edited—a high watermark for Fellini, for cinema, and for a decade. It will be copied and referred to forever.

Print courtesy of Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in association with The Film Foundation, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia‐Cineteca Nazionale, Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux‐Pathé, Mediaset‐Medusa, Paramount Pictures and Cinecittà Luce. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.

The screening is sold out. Next time, don't procrastinate!

@nitehawkcinema 

Previously: 

Go See 'A Woman Under the Influence' on Tuesday Night  

Come Watch Good Movies for Once with VICE and the Film Foundation  

The internet ruined dating for me. Ever since 16-year-old me, already desensitized by years of childhood exposure to weird porn and AOL chatrooms, tricked my mom into giving me a ride to Orange County to get deflowered by a girl I met on MySpace, I’ve consistently used technology as a crutch for dating. Thanks to websites like OKCupid and apps like Tinder, fooling around with no strings has never been easier. The problem for me has been my complete inability to start, build, and maintain a relationship with a girl. 

 

 

I met Raschel through a group of friends in seventh grade. I asked her to be my girlfriend on the phone, and she said no.

 

VICE: You were the first girl in my memory that I ever asked out who said no.

Raschel: Really? We used to have most of our conversations on AIM. We were awkward with each other in person, so we talked about the shit we talked about online when we weren't together. 

 

We also role-played as ducks.

We made up stories about SamDaTalkinDuck and FayeDaTalkinDuck. I don't even really remember what they did.

 

They were in love.

They were? 

 

You don't remember?

No. 

 

They were a duck couple!

AWWW!

 

I spent my entire adolescence and even my early twenties thinking of girls and women almost like aliens. These mythical extraterrestrial beings I couldn't communicate with. The internet was easier for me than actual human connection. When did you figure out I liked you?

I think I knew pretty much off the bat, because you made it pretty obvious.

 

I had no subtlety. I also made it obvious to other girls at the same time. Did that bother you?

No, because I wasn't interested in you as more than a friend.

 

You have a boyfriend now. Were you initially attracted to him when you first met?

Um, I guess not. Not especially. It wasn't like he walked into a room and I... you know...

 

A girl I just spoke to said you just know immediately.

I wouldn't say that. When we started talking, I definitely knew that he wasn't disqualified, which a lot of people are.

 

What disqualifies?

Arrogance. Being controlling. Lying. Lots of things. Anything. 

 

What about physically?

I prefer guys that are taller than me.

 

I'm five six. Being short has definitely cut out some options for me. It’s like, fuck, I can't control that shit. I’ve lost a bunch of weight, but I’ll always be a short dude. 

And neither can the girls you're striking out with. It's not like they're just being a dicks.

 

But wallowing about it doesn’t do any good.

Yeah.

 

Any advice?

Stop being gullible. I was too, always letting people make me feel bad about myself because I always accepted their version of reality over mine. Stick to your guns, and you'll probably be happier in the long run because people won't hurt you as much.

For more on relationships:

Five Tips for Ruining an Interracial Relationship

Anthony Weiner and the Problem with "Sex Addiction

I Catfished Hundreds of Boys to Understand the Male Sex

Doug Mesner. Photo by Shane Bugbee.

I have sought to promote alternative thought for more than 25 years as a publisher, promoter, gallery owner, and, as my mother-in-law once said, "a flim-flam man." During this time, I have opened the door to free thinkers and pure crazies alike. Sometimes they are welcome guests; other times, not so much.

Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple, who first showed up at my door over a decade ago, would fall into the former category. He was a young man, too smart for his own good. He wanted a copy of a book I had republished called Might Is Right. It was a 100-year-old tome, long forgotten by most, with the exception of Anton LaVey, who'd found it in a bookstore as a young man and used it as the basis for The Satanic Bible. I asked Anton to write an introduction, and he jumped at the opportunity to introduce the book to the world again. By way of thanks Anton invited me to his home and made me a high priest in the Church of Satan. He also allowed my wife and I to conduct the final interview with him just months before his death in 1996.

The release of this new version of Might Is Right became a phenomenon within the underground, and that is what brought the future leader of the Satanic Temple to my door. Only his name wasn't Lucien Greaves at the time, it was Doug Mesner. (This isn’t the first time Doug has been connected with the Temple, though it is the first time he has publicly admitted his involvement.)

When he first came to my home, Doug brought a stack of his drawings and writings with him. It was amazing stuff, and much to my surprise he left it with me. Not long after our first meeting, and after reviewing his sketchbooks at length, I reprinted a limited edition version of Might Is Right and asked Doug to illustrate the chapter headings for it. His work on the book was truly excellent. When I began podcasting in 2002, I invited him to co-host the first-ever live streaming 24 hour broadcast. For 24 hours straight we interviewed guests, philosophized, and argued. It was so great we did another one a year later.

Not long after that Doug was accepted to Harvard University. He used to call me, shocked that his professors were taking him to lunch and inviting him to meet with luminaries like Richard Dawkins. Doug's studies at Harvard focused on neuroscience, and he began delving deeply—and sometimes dangerously, I felt—into the world of false memory related to ritual abuse and alien abduction, even exposing professional psychologists as culprits and forcing them to recant, retire, and even run.

Doug Mesner became an active participant in the Satanic Temple to further his work and philosophy, and below is the exclusive interview I recently conducted with him.

The author (left), with Mesner (right). Photo by Amy Bugbee

VICE: Is the Satanic Temple a satanic, or a satirical group?
Doug: That is a common question. I say why can’t it be both? We are coming from a solid philosophy that we absolutely believe in and adhere to. This is Satanism, and to us it couldn’t be called anything other than Satanism. However, our metaphor of Satan is a literary construct inspired by authors such as Anatole France and Milton—a rebel angel defiant of autocratic structure and concerned with the material world. Satanism as a rejection of superstitious supernaturalism. This Satan, of course, bears no resemblance to the embodiment of all cruelty, suffering, and negativity believed in by some apocalyptic segments of Judeo-Christian culture. The word Satan has no inherent value. If one acts with compassion in the name of Satan, one has still acted with compassion. Our very presence as civic-minded socially responsible Satanists serves to satirize the ludicrous superstitious fears that the word Satan tends to evoke.

Reminds me of a darker version of the Yes Men.
Yes. Just as the Yes Men use very catching theatrical ploys to draw attention to a progressive agenda, we play upon people’s irrational fears in a way that hopefully causes them to reevaluate what they think they know, redefine arbitrary labels, and judge people for their concrete actions. I believe that where reason fails to persuade, satire and mockery prevail. Whereas many religious groups seem to eschew humor, we embrace it.

Can you give me a bit of background information on the temple? Do you consider yourselves activists?
The Satanic Temple was actually conceived of independent from me by a friend and one of his colleagues. They envisioned it more as a “poison pill” in the Church/State debate. The idea was that Satanists, asserting their rights and privileges where religious agendas have been successful in imposing themselves upon public affairs, could serve as a poignant reminder that such privileges are for everybody, and can be used to serve an agenda beyond the current narrow understanding of what “the” religious agenda is. So at the inception, the political message was primary, though it was understood that there are, in fact, self-identified Satanists who live productive lives within the boundaries of the law, and that they do deserve just as much consideration as any other religious group. I was brought in originally as a consultant due to my expertise in the history of witch hunts and my understanding regarding conceptions of Satanism. While the original thinking was that the Satanic Temple needed to hold to some belief in a supernatural entity known as “Satan,” none of us truly believed that. I helped develop us into something we all do truly believe in and wholeheartedly embrace: an atheistic philosophical framework that views “Satan” as a metaphorical construct by which we contextualize our works. We’ve moved well beyond being a simple political ploy and into being a very sincere movement that seeks to separate religion from superstition and to contribute positively to our cultural dialogue. To this end, I am very much an activist.

The author, strangling Doug. Photo by Amy Bugbee.

I’ve known you for a long time, and the Satanic Temple seems like an extension of your life's work and studies. What exactly are you fighting, trying to change, or needing to prove—what's the end game here, Doug?
I grew up in the shadow of what is now known to sociologists as “the Satanic Panic”—an embarrassing episode of witch-hunting in the modern era. I was horrified by daytime talk show fables of homicidal Satanic cult hordes. I became very curious, later on, regarding the question of the truth of the conspiracy claims, and I began pursuing this as an active study. Was there any truth to the idea of murderous Satanic cults? In fact, there is no unbroken tradition of Satanism, no canonized Satanic doctrine that extends back for centuries into biblical times. Nor is there one uniform concept of Satan. Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible was released in 1969, and contained no indication of the antihuman doctrine alleged by hysterical anti-Satanists. Sometimes, however, anti-Satanist conspiracy theorists would point to particular groups of alleged “Satanists” as evidence of their claims. I went looking for these alleged Satanic cults and found no substance to the claims against them. I met you, Shane, and you were a priest in the Church of Satan who was conferred with that title by Anton LaVey himself. You and I found and interviewed inner-circle members of the notorious Process Church of the Final Judgment, which was said by some to be the world’s most dangerous “Satanic” cult. Through you, I met a variety of self-proclaimed Satanists of the LaVeyan school and others, finding them to be a demographic no more burdened by psychopathy than any other (and, in fact, full of some very thoughtful, intelligent people). I illustrated an edition of Might Is Right, the text of which LaVey had built The Satanic Bible from, and which you published—along with a forward by LaVey—when you were running Michael Hunt Publishing. In all that time, I never encountered credible evidence of a criminal Satanic network.

In 2009, I went to a “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control” conference in Connecticut where I listened to “experts” elaborate upon their beliefs in Satanic Ritual crimes. I thought they would be a fringe grouping of delusional people holding firmly to incredible beliefs, hurting nobody but themselves. What I found instead was a twisted subculture of licensed therapists, and their clients, who subscribe to a pseudoscientific belief in “dissociative amnesia”: The theory that some events—particularly sexual abuse—can be so uniquely traumatic that the conscious mind cannot comprehend it, and thus those memories are “repressed.” This school of “therapy” breeds conspiracy theory and literally indoctrinates clients into false beliefs in a Satanic threat. Clients are encouraged to “remember” episodes of abuse that are presumed to have been concealed from their conscious minds, and when the evidence doesn’t match their confabulatory false memories, they explain it away as evidence of a much larger conspiracy—a Satanic conspiracy. With the false veneer of science, these “experts” in dissociation have kept a witch-hunt alive. Innocent people have been convicted and imprisoned on the “evidence” of recovered memory testimony, even though this is the exact same “evidence” we have for alien abduction, and is the same “therapeutic” process by which people practice “past life regression.” I have a long and complex body of writing, much of which can be read at www.process.org, where I detail in a number of articles how this cult-like therapy subculture continues to ruin the lives of innocent people. So one of my own goals is to destroy this harmful pseudoscientific practice, and dispel the myth of an international Satanic conspiracy. The broader goal of the Satanic Temple in general is to advocate for all of those who are unjustly maligned, demonized, or marginalized—victimized by conspiracy theorists and dogmatic supernaturalists. We seek to assert the rights of religious non-believers and skeptics. We also hope to provide the philosophical framework by which our membership may hone their cognitive tools and never fall victim to those forces.  

And what the hell is a religious nonbeliever?
It is our goal to separate religion from superstition. Religion can and should be a metaphorical narrative construct by which we give meaning and direction to our lives and works. Our religions should not require of us that we submit ourselves to unreason and untenable supernatural beliefs based on literal interpretations of fanciful tales. Non-believers have just as much right to religion—and any exemptions and privileges being part of a religion brings—as anybody else.

Some might think, based on your study of the mind and the Satanic Temple’s actions, that your real agenda is to become a cult leader. Is that the organization’s true goal?
I studied, and continue to study, cognitive science. I also have a good deal of background studying cults and coercion. My focus, however, is in teaching people to recognize cultic influence, and help them learn ways in which they can resist coercive influences. We want to provide our membership with the philosophical framework and cognitive tools to exercise their critical thinking skills in such a way that will help immunize them from the various mystical charlatans who seek to convert them into credulous followers. We do not want followers. We seek to build and offer support to leaders. We do not seek to build a rigid authoritarian structure—such would be the very antithesis of Satanism. Far from being a cult, the Satanic Temple could even be described as the anticult.

What’s the difference between the Satanic Temple and the Church of Satan?
The Church of Satan was active, it seems, during Anton LaVey’s own lifetime, but appears to be almost entirely defunct now. It’s currently reduced to a website from which one may buy a membership card, but I’m not aware of any actual activities that they’ve been involved in during the past couple of decades. The Church of Satan may believe that it provides a service simply by being a rallying point for “like-minded individuals,” but the value of that has been greatly diminished since the internet era, now that obscure niche groups are always within reach of our social networks—nor do they require a $200 entry fee [the cost of a Church of Satan membership card]. I believe that organizations should be measured for their effect in the real world, and should work to advance the general goals of their membership. We must constantly work to prove ourselves to our membership, not the other way around.

The author and Doug at a book signing for Might Is Right, 2004. Photo by Amy Bugbee.

You once mentioned to me that you thought the Church of Satan should have lobbyists on the ground in Washington, DC. Is that a goal for the Satanic Temple?
Yes, it is. By the time the New Atheism movement took hold, Satanism appeared to be a silly little throwback to the 1960s—absolutely no political influence, no known agenda, no advocacy whatsoever. Even in the high-profile West Memphis Three case, there was no discernable noise from an established Satanic organization expressing outrage over the fact that the idea of Satanism, in and of itself, was used as an accusation to convict innocent kids of murder. This kind of inaction is worse than worthless—it’s counter-productive. There is no point in running an organization unless you are going to organize. There is no point in being a part of an organization if that organization is not going to work to address the concerns and advance the goals of its membership. We are in the process of setting up a legal fund, we are strategizing a number of future campaigns, and we are aggressively going to pursue the agendas we put forward.

The Church of Satan has recently posted about the Satanic Temple, without directly mentioning it. They seem to be trying to separate themselves from the Satanic Temple because of its references to the afterlife in its ritual? Are you a spiritual Satanist, a theistic Satanist, or is the Satanic Temple adding to LaVey's philosophy, much like LaVey added to Ragnar Redbeard's Might Is Right?
They misinterpreted what we were doing, but that’s not entirely their fault. Something that I explained in a number of interviews with media—but that failed to show up in the majority of them—is the fact that I do not believe in the supernatural. Instead, when we performed our Pink Mass at the grave of the mother of the Westboro Baptist Church’s founder, Fred Phelps, we were playing upon his own ludicrous superstitious fears. Ironically, the Church of Satan has never fully renounced supernaturalism, as we have.

And, yes, we are adding to LaVey. LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence. As a result, LaVey’s rhetoric tended toward Social Darwinistic Police State politics. Since 1995, violence in the United States—and, in fact, the world over—has been in decline, and we’re now in a position to evaluate what’s working for us, and where we went wrong previously. Certainly, a strong and effective police presence is a contributing factor, but we also find that autocratic governments breed social violence. We also find that Social Darwinism, interpreted in brutal, strictly self-interested terms, is counter-productive, and based on a simplistic misinterpretation of evolutionary theory. We do better when we work in groups, where altruism and compassion are rewarded. We are social animals. That said, however, I believe in a system that runs meritocratically. Also, revenge is a natural impulse, without which justice would never be served. We should do our best to mitigate the pain of those who are suffering, whoever they are—but also be diligent to punish the misdeeds of those who behave unjustly to those around them.  

What can you tell me about the documentary you're filming? This is the project that launched the Satanic Temple, correct?
When the Satanic Temple was conceived, the idea was that a documentary would be assembled from the various actions we would perform to put a new spin on the entire Church/State debate. To that end, we staged a rally in support of Florida Governor Rick Scott’s passage of Senate Bill 98, a bill that essentially allowed for prayer in school. While many groups were upset and offended that Scott was advancing a conservative Christian agenda, we staged a Satanic rally thanking Rick Scott for endorsing a bill that allowed Satanism in schools, ensuring that children who might otherwise never learn of the Satanic creed could be exposed to it in the classroom. This was a harsh reminder that religious freedom applies to all, and the United States is a nation based upon religious pluralism. During that time, we generated a lot of genuine interest from people looking to embrace a politically active, relevant Satanism. More and more we developed into a full-blown organization with a very profound mission. Now—although we have still been filming everything—we have no clearly defined film project regarding the Satanic Temple in the works to speak of. The idea of a film has become secondary, at best.

Most Satanists struggle with the ego issue… What happens if you fail to raise the funds needed for your adopt-a-highway project?
Then we move onto the next thing, or we make up the slack on the highway fund through another venue. It may sound platitudinous, but there is no shame in not reaching the goal, only in not trying at all. We haven’t, and won’t, gamble our entire organization on any one project. There are some things we’ll do that won’t work out as planned, and others that will surely hit the mark. We’ll keep working either way.

@shanebugbee

More on Shane: Shane Bugbee Searched for the Bad Side of America and Didn't Find It

More Satan:

Satanists Turned the Founder of the Westboro Baptist Church's Dead Mom Gay

Mississippi Police Want to Arrest the Satanists Who Turn Dead People Gay

Specialist Shannon Kelley being taken down the back ramp of the combat aid station to a waiting Gator.

US Army Private First Class Brian Wintering and Specialist Shannon Kelley were hanging around their heavily armored vehicle known as an MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) when the round hit.

It was the early afternoon on Friday, July 19, and it was already hot. The back ramp was open and so was the driver’s side door. The two soldiers were standing by as part of a quick reaction team in case the Combat Outpost (COP) Soltankhel in eastern Afghanistan came under attack, which it frequently does. But this time, they were the ones in the impact zone.

“I was playing Temple Run [the video game] and moved inside the vehicle so I could see [the screen] better. Shannon went out for a smoke,” said 21-year-old Wintering. “When the mortar hit I just went to the ground. I felt a piece of shrapnel hit my neck. I was pretty much in shock. But then I heard Shannon screaming outside. He was on the ground, his face all bloody. I picked him up and he said, ‘We gotta get to the combat aid station, and we just ran. That’s about all I can remember.”

This is the tailfin of 82-millimeter mortar round that landed on the base. The head of the mortar is packed with explosives and detonates on impact.

The single 82mm mortar landed inside the gates right next to Wintering and Kelley. At remote outposts like Soltankhel, soldiers know when it’s time to take cover.

They also now how to retaliate. Like many other American bases around Afghanistan, Soltankhel utilizes a high tech “eye in the sky” blimp, which is tethered above it. The blimp is known by the military acronym PTDS, which stands for Persistent Threat Detection System. The PTDS is mounted with a 360-degree video-camera platform that can scan for miles. But the technology also had its drawbacks. While the blimp offers a constant view of the surrounding terrain, one officer confided in me that it provides an aiming reference for Taliban mortar and rocket fire onto the base.

Still, the system archives the locations where previous attacks were launched so it can quickly acquire them if they’re used again. In this case, they were. The PTDS locked on to two men, one carrying what looked like a mortar launching tube.

“We scanned the area and we saw the POO [point of origin of the attack] and two guys, one carrying the tube which he covered up in a red cloth," said Lieutenant Zachary Peterson. Peterson is a fire support officer and the battle captain on duty, which is a military version of a police watch commander who monitors events from a tactical headquarters.

Using the PTDS, they watched the man try to make a getaway on the back of a motorcycle driven by another.

“We tracked them back to their staging area, which we’ve seem them use before, a local mosque,” said Peterson.

But along the way, the men passed behind some buildings and out of view of the PTDS. Somewhere on the route to the mosque, the man on the back tossed the tube.

Meanwhile on the COP, Wintering and Kelley scrambled to get to the combat aid station, both bleeding, but still able to compose themselves and make the 100- to 150-yard dash within just minutes of being hit.

“Your training just kicks in after something like that,” said Wintering.

The Gator headed to the helicopter landing zone.

My colleague, Alex Penna of Stars and Stripes, and I were on the other side of the building when the mortar hit and we actually felt the tremble of the ground and saw the men running to the aid station. Kelley’s face was streaming with blood, his hand pressed against the wounds on his neck. Wintering following right behind him.

Inside the aid station, medics quickly assessed the injuries of the two soldiers. Concerned whether the shrapnel may have penetrated vital organs, they quickly bandaged Kelley’s head and chest and within just 26 minutes had him plugged with a saline IV drip, wrapped in a mylar coated (space) blanket to help prevent shock, and packaged on a stretcher on the back of a Gator (a golf cart on steroids) heading to the helicopter landing zone for a medevac to the more advanced medical facility at Forward Operating Base Shank (15 to 20 minutes away by chopper).

Wintering was kept on base, treated for the blast concussion and monitored for any hidden, internal injuries.

While the injured soldiers were being treated, Lieutenant Peterson had American artillery teams standing by to respond to the attack with mortars of their own, but since the local men had disappeared from view, they couldn’t be certain the two were responsible for the attack. 

Peterson called up two A10 Warthog aircraft on station. The pilots located the dropped tube and using an IR camera, which detected a white-hot heat signature that likely indicated it had been used to fire the mortar round.

“In an immediate show of force we dropped two, 500-pound bombs on the tube,” Peterson said. “It was an open area without potential for collateral damage and we destroyed the weapon. That’s a victory for us.”

And a message for the Taliban, or EOA (Enemies of Afghanistan) as the military now calls them.

Specialist Kelley was bandaged, packed and ready for transport to a more advanced medical facility within 26 minutes of the mortar attack. 

As far as the two wounded soldiers, Kelley’s injuries were not life threatening. He was treated and is expected to return to COP Soltankhel within the week.

As for Wintering?

“I still have a headache and ringing in my ears, but I guess I’m OK.”

Mortar attacks are obviously expected in a war zone and the current frequency of these attacks signal how dangerous Afghanistan remains. But regardless, Wintering does wonder, as others must who survive lighting strikes, shark attacks, and other acts of spatial violence, how, out of all the real estate on COP Soltankhel, this mortar fell so near to him.

“You’re shocked and ask yourself why me. I’ve seen them before but you never expect it to be you,” Wintering said, “When you get knocked down, you have to get back up again. But when I hear the explosions, I still get scared.”

Watch Kevin's video of the events:

All video, text, and photos by Kevin Sites.

Kevin Sites is a rare breed of journalist who thrives in the throes of war. As Yahoo! News’s first war correspondent between 2005 and 2006, he gained notoriety for covering every major conflict across the globe in one year’s time and fostering a technology-driven, one-man-band approach to reporting that helped usher in the “backpack movement.” Kevin is currently traveling through Afghanistan covering the tumultuous country during "fighting season" as international forces like the US pullout. Keep coming back to VICE.com for more dispatches from Kevin.

More on VICE from Kevin Sites: Afghanistan's Game of Drones

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com

Photos by Maggie Lee and Sandy Kim.
Photo Assistant: Brayden Olson

Click through to the next page for more photos.

More from our 2013 Photo Issue:

Manic Botanic

Place of the Inside Out

Terram Tenebrosam

Photo via

Despite the fact that military bases are often featured prominently in gay porn, I've never imagined there's a whole lot of sex happening at them, IRL. Getting laid while on duty requires discretion, and propositioning the people you work with on a regular basis is about as sneaky as a Panzer. So you can't really blame our soldiers (and civilian contractors) for posting dirty ads online complete with sexxxy requests and pictures of their junk. Everyone is looking for some NSA (No Strings Attached) action.

Unfortunately the Great Cock Block from the West, a.k.a. the US military, isn't too happy about our soldiers’ online solicitations. It has become such a problem, in fact, that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has started "tracking service members who are hooking up in the war zone via internet sites," according to Marine Corps Times. Posting personals isn’t technically against the rules, but in Afghanistan, sex between unmarried soldiers is "highly discouraged," and posting pictures of your junk on the internet is against the Uniform Code of Military Justice (probably because soldiers can't take one without removing their uniforms, hey-o!).

In the interest of military transparency and boners, let’s take a look at some of the ads our servicemen and women are posting.

This one seems nice and innocent. A grunt on Kandahar Airfield just looking for a nice lady for "conversations." So puritanical.

After being stuck with 60 guys for nine months straight, this solider just needs some pussy. He's not real picky, but he claims to have a big dick and he's going to be at Bagram Airfield for a night. So, ladies, can't you help a brother out?

Here's a bi soldier who is looking for a regular dude at Camp Eggers in Kabul. "Deployment drags and gets boring here so fast!" he says. Nothing passes the time like a BJ, does it?

This brazen boy doesn't want your name or to even talk with you, but he's ballsy enough to post pictures of his face on the world wide web. What he might lack in conversational skills, he makes up for by having a place to host his guests, which seems to be a premium out there.

Yes, that is the boy with the dragon tattoo, but he's just a civilian contractor so he won't get in any trouble. No danger there. He does have a room on Forward Operating Base Warrior in Afghanistan, though. Ladies, get in line!

Pssst. Guys. There's a nice lady at Bagram Airfield, one of our largest bases in Afghanistan, who just wants to service some service members’ members. Just a blow and go. Pass it on.

This lady is not in Iraq or Afghanistan. She's at home, and has a tan-line fetish. She's showing you hers, now she wants some "roughnecks" to send her pictures of theirs and the "muscles" they've been working on in the "sandbox." This is why we're out there fighting, boys.

No wonder they call Forward Operating Base Salerno "Rocket City"—all the guys are in the shower showing off their rockets. This gay soldier wants to beat off another private in public. These showers seem to be about as active as every Equinox in the world. This is why they didn't want to end "don't ask, don't tell," people. Thanks for setting back the gay rights movement so you can blow a load down the drain.

Someone please fuck this lady at Warrior so she can take her pussy lips off the internet. Thank you.

This gay dude at Camp Leatherneck is crafty. He posted his ass in the w4m section hoping to lure hard-up straight soldiers into his sex den. Congrats, mister. This is a winning strategy.

Camp Leatherneck is a bastion of gay craziness. Here is a guy who wants to be a bitch/slave for a soldier. You can do whatever you want to him in his office. I'm hard as hell right now.

There are some undiscerning straight guys on Leatherneck, too. This pussy eater is so hungry he doesn't care what the lady looks like as long as she's clean. He just wants to chow on that vag forever. Yum. Yum. Yum.

This hot soldier in Kandahar Airfield not only has a room, but a car, too. What is he, some kind of dignitary? He would like a massage, but only from a lady. Got that, guys? Stop offering to massage him. He likes the ladies. No, seriously. Ladies.

If he doesn't get that massage, maybe he can stop by the private glory hole in this guy's room on KAF. It's not gay if you don't know that the person sucking your dick through a wall is definitely a guy. It could be a lady. Sure. It could.

And, finally, this contractor on Warrior base is so fucking horny he doesn't care who, he doesn't care where, he doesn't care how, he just needs to fuck. Anything. Everything! He'll do it. Call me up when you get home, buddy. I'll screw you silly. It's the least I can do for our troops.

Previously - Don't Celebrate the Gay Marriage Victory with a Wedding of Your Own

@BrianJMoylan

The female Jesus, Lightning Deng (left) and Eastern Lightning founder, Zhao Weishan.

In some ways, Eastern Lightning are hilarious. For starters, the cult's core belief is that Jesus Christ has been reincarnated as a middle-aged Chinese woman called Lightning Deng who now lives in Chinatown in New York. Then there are the bizarre evangelizing attempts to recruit China's rural communities—stuff like the sudden appearance of live snakes painted with scripture and mysterious glow sticks hidden in people's homes that somehow (I'm really not sure how) signal the second coming of Christ.

Leaders of Christian groups warn their members against the "flirty fishing" methods supposedly adopted by Eastern Lightning ladies to convert Christian men to the path of their female Christ. Lastly, of course, there's the name, which sounds more like an energy drink or AC/DC cover band than a cult. Perhaps that's why, these days, they often use the alias "Church of the Almighty God."

To their victims, though, Eastern Lightning aren't a joke. In fact, to some they must seem kind of terrifying. The cult operates by infiltrating China’s underground house churches (proper ones are banned in China) and integrating themselves into the community, before allegedly seducing, kidnapping, bribing, or blackmailing members into joining them. Highly organized and comprised of more than a million members, according to some estimates, Eastern Lightning train their leaders to build trust slowly over months before making their move.

Their activities have not gone unnoticed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the two sides are currently engaged in a low-key fight to the death.

Items Eastern Lightning adherents hid in people's homes as part of their evangelizing scheme.

One of Eastern Lightning's main tenets is that the Communist Party of China is Satan incarnate—they call it “the Great Red Dragon”—and that its rise to power signifies the end of the world. That may sound like the plot of a video-game, but in a country where the persecution of Christians continues to rise and unregistered religious leaders are imprisoned or “re-educated through labor" by the government, it's perhaps not all that surprising that religious rhetoric is becoming so militant.

Eastern Lightning started in the 90s when their founder, Zhao Weishan, met a woman in Zhengzhou, Henan province. The woman called herself “Lightning Deng” and had written a book, Lightning from the Orient, which restyled the Christian narrative in Chinese terms. It's unclear whether the two are in on the plot together or if Zhao is taking advantage of Deng, but what's certain is that it was Zhao who declared her to be the reincarnation of Christ and started gathering followers with her as the spiritual leader.

The pair are currently thought to be “escaping religious persecution” in Chinatown, New York, where they continue to spread their religion safe from the fiery death-breath of the Great Red Dragon. Eastern Lightning pamphlets have also shown up in San Francisco, which has a large Chinese immigrant population.

While the cult have remained largely secretive in their home country, they briefly surfaced at the end of last year, holding protests across China to coincide with the "Mayan Apocalypse." Wei Guangzheng, a 30-year-old interior designer from Hebei province, told me some peculiar stories about the cult, which began to take hold of his neighborhood around the time of the 2012 apocalypse washout.

“Most of their believers live in the countryside, with little education, and they're mostly unemployed," he said. "They dance naked together in their basement—all female—and light up bonfires, like a party. A few days before the 2012 ‘doomsday,’ a preacher came to our house when my mother was alone, saying that the end of the world was coming and she had to join Eastern Lightning to be saved. My mom replied, 'I've arranged to play mahjong with friends and I have to go. I haven't got time to believe in God right now.' Good one, Mom."

Eastern Lightning adherents protest against the Communist Party of China on December the 21st, 2012, to coincide with the "Mayan apocalypse."

The government has been upping its efforts to root out the cult since the December 2012 protests, sometimes subjecting Christian house church members to violent interrogations in an effort to reach Eastern Lightning members.

Dennis Balcombe, a well-known American pastor who preaches in China, was released from house arrest a few months ago after being detained during a government crackdown on large religious congregations. After determining that he wasn't an Eastern Lightning adherent, the authorities let him go. I spoke to Dennis about his experiences being targeted both by the government and the cult.

“I was recently detained by the Religious Affairs Bureau after a hotel worker reported our meeting," he told me. "They sent a few dozen police to see if we were Eastern Lightning or not, but concluded that we weren’t and let us go. Paranoia about Eastern Lightning has been growing since the December 21st Mayan prophecy. They’re extremely violent and use sex to try to convert people. I’ve heard stories of Christians being burned, beaten, and told to kill their children. When they kidnap you, you usually don’t get out for six months, and that whole time they’re trying to brainwash you."

A depiction of the Second Coming of Christ (this time as a woman and in China) from the Eastern Lightning Bible, Lightning from the Orient.

While it's not possible for us to corroborate these claims, Dennis continued to allege that Eastern Lightning aren't just concerned with religion, but with making a profit out of their converts. "They're like the Mafia," he told me. "They’ve extorted 100 million remnibi ($16,453,755) from mainly poor, rural people. They’re extremely well-trained. It’s like a criminal element infiltrating your church. Leaders of Christian house churches have also been offered huge sums of money—like 150,000 remnibi ($24,670)—to bring their followers and themselves into the cult. The government believes they have funds coming from outside of China.”

Dennis told me how, by training leaders over Skype, the cult have managed to spread all over Asia, establish a base in Hong Kong and become “more aggressive than ever before.” He was recently confronted by four Eastern Lightning members trying to convert him while at a religious conference in Hong Kong. When they refused to leave, he took his camera out, hoping to obtain a photo to show authorities, but was physically attacked by the women. Before they could wrench the camera from him, he snapped a photo and got away.

American pastor Dennis Balcombe says these women are Eastern Lightning followers, attacking him at a conference in Hong Kong.

Outside of Chinese Christian communities, the cult’s violent activities go largely unreported. But within those circles, Eastern Lightning are highly feared. I contacted the director of one of the largest Christian ministries in Asia, but he declined to speak to me out of fear that the cult would target him. He did tell me that "there are many Chinese who would comment," but that they wouldn't want to be interviewed because, "they tended to be house church leaders on the run from the police."

I contacted multiple defectors from the cult, but they also refused to comment, suspecting that I was somehow connected with Eastern Lightning or the government. The deeper I dug, the more I realized that their paranoia made absolute sense.

In 2002, Eastern Lightning kidnapped 34 leading members of an underground Christian network, the China Gospel Fellowship, and held them captive for two months. I managed to speak to an American missionary, Hope Flinchbaugh, who met one of the kidnapped Fellowship leaders while in China. According to Flinchbagh, women from the cult seduced the captured pastors and took compromising photographs to blackmail them later if they resisted their conversion efforts. 

One pastor, she said, was drugged and restrained while two women whispered Eastern Lightning doctrine into both of his ears throughout the night. Others had "legs broken and ears cut off." When one of the victims finally escaped and informed the police, every single one of the cult members supposedly disappeared without leaving a trace.

Recently, the cult seems to be distancing themselves from their violent reputation and moving into a stage of positive PR. By expanding outside mainland China, where they aren't forced underground, Eastern Lightning have been able to put on a friendly face, opening offices and evangelizing through a flashy new website that pegs the kidnappings and other horror stories as propaganda. "The government of the great red dragon," the website claims, "used all kinds of cruel means to suppress in a bloody way, making the country filled with rumors. The entire mainland [of] China became a world of terror." That same website, however, also has a section entitled “Typical Cases of Punishment for Resisting the Almighty God.” This includes an account of Li X, a 55-year-old woman from Ruzhou City, whose "vagina bled and discharged rotten flesh" when she supposedly prevented Eastern Lightning from preaching in her village. "At the time when the people were putting her body into the coffin," the story goes, "a thunderbolt suddenly came from the sky, and it flashed around in front of the funeral shed like a fiery dragon.”

An unnamed man who was kidnapped by Eastern Lightning. The top half of his ear is cut off—the same method of abuse the cult allegedly used on 34 China Gospel Fellowship leaders in 2002.

I contacted their offices in Hong Kong and Macau. Both of them denied all of the claims against them, and distanced themselves from the mainland group. A spokesperson from the Macau office said, "I’ve heard stories, but I don’t believe that they could have anything to do with people from our Church. Our Church centers around beliefs in love and loving other people. That’s why I don’t think someone from our Church would do harm to someone else. You’ve got to look at where these stories are coming from: from the government. And what is the government in China like at the moment? They don’t necessarily always tell the truth about people. Our beliefs are about being good to people, so we could never hurt anyone."

A member of the Church in Hong Kong said: "That's in China, we’re in Hong Kong, so we don’t really hear about stories like that. But they’re just stories and could have come from anywhere... These kinds of stories are hearsay, so we can’t really comment on them."

Considering Eastern Lightning are essentially the Marlo Stanfield of the Chinese messiah complex game—holding gatherings at short notice, using code names, and mobile phones registered under false aliases, resisting confession in police interrogations, scattering at the first sign of police, etc., etc.—it's no surprise that the government is trying and failing so hard to crush them. The rest of Eastern Lightning's evasion tactics are detailed in a document titled, "The Measures Against the Big Red Dragon's Spies."

So what exactly are the Big Red Dragon’s spies up to? In 2002, a secret Chinese government document was leaked to the US congress by an American Christian NGO. It contained a speech by Bi Rongsheng, the deputy director of the religion section of the Public Security Bureau (PSB) of Heilongjiang Province. In it, the Chinese official reveals his government’s great anxiety about Eastern Lightning and their need to “work more [and] talk less to smash the cult quietly.”

He admits that “our intelligence work has not touched deep into the core of this cult organization to such a point of a breakthrough, placing us on the defensive” and expresses worry that it will “definitely disturb people’s thought and seriously endanger the rule of the Party.”

He argues for the need to “enhance the build-up of secret forces and the operation of planted agents” and emphasizes that “the open trial is not appropriate for this cult case.” At one point he even expresses fear that Eastern Lightning have begun “to infiltrate into inner circles of the Party.”

The Eastern Lightning Bible (on the right).

The CPC has historical reasons to be terrified of apocalyptic movements—the millenarian Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century caused over 20 million deaths—but the issue isn’t so black and white. Eastern Lightning may be guilty of torture, kidnapping, sedition, and extortion on a huge scale—and, in some cases, of murder. But so is the CPC.

When China decided that the spiritual movement Falun Gong was a dangerous outlet for social discontent in 1999, they began a huge propaganda campaign against them. Using extralegal force, the government now arrests practitioners and subjects them to ideological conversion, forced labor, physical torture sometimes leading to death and, allegedly, organ harvesting.

Compared to the peaceful Falun Gong, Eastern Lightning are far crueler and more secretive. But considering Falun Gong have been largely eradicated, those characteristics may well be Eastern Lightning's main strengths—strengths they need in a country where the persecution of Christians rose by 125 percent in 2012 alone.

In the right light, with their enigmatic female Jesus and fiery gospel leveled against the Great Red Dragon of the CPC, Eastern Lightning are fighting a revolution against an equally shady and violent government. While this doesn’t excuse their actions or their absurd doctrine, it does complicate the issue because, until China loosens its grip on religious practice, it’s likely that they will continue to antagonize an already volatile population of believers. Frankly, the CPC may do well to heed the old line that "when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything."

All images are stills from a freely distributed Chinese Public Security Bureau video, which was given by the PSB to Christian pastors in China to warn them about Eastern Lightning. Video courtesy of Pastor Dennis Balcombe.

Translation and additional reporting by Liu Cheng and Jack Barry.

Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_A_Shea

More stuff about cults:

Cargo Cults Have Been Eating People  

Happy Science Is the Laziest Cult Ever  

Cult Kids: Westboro 

Michael Sandel. (Photo by Stephanie Mitchell)

Money can be a sneaky thing. Without making too much of a song and dance about it, markets and market thinking have entered spheres of life where they never were before and where, when you think about it, they never really belonged.

Want to lose a couple of pounds? You can pay for it. Want someone to stand in line for you? You can pay a professional line-stander to do so. Want to chase that indescribable shot of adrenaline you feel when unexpectedly meeting someone you're attracted to for the first time? You can go online and pay for it. Market norms are increasingly turning us into consumers in our approach to ourselves, as well as to the rest of the world around us.  

Michael Sandel, professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, has taken it upon himself to challenge the unquestioned faith in markets. His latest book, What Money Can’t Buy, asks the question: “Do we want to live in a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?” 

I spoke to Sandel, who has been described as the “indispensable voice of reason” by John Gray, about the increasing commodification of life, the loss of sacred institutions, and the dangers of utilitarianism and market reasoning.

VICE: What do you mean by the terms commercialism and marketization? And why should we worry about that?
Michael Sandel: In recent decades we’ve been in the grip of market faith, which says that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. This assumption has gone largely unquestioned in the past 30 years. As a result from that we have drifted from being a market economy to being a market society.

Could you explain the difference between the two?
The difference is that a market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organizing productive activity. A market society, on the other hand, is a place where everything is up for sale. It’s a way of life in which money and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life. From family life and personal relationships to health, education, civic life, and politics. In my book, What Money Can’t Buy, I suggest that we need to step back and ask some fundamental questions about what the role of money and markets should be in a good society.

How will the perception of future generations change if the world becomes increasingly marketized?
One severe danger of growing up in a thoroughly marketized society is that our identities as consumers crowd out our identities as citizens. If we think of ourselves only or primarily as consumers, then it becomes more and more difficult to demand a meaningful voice in shaping the collective destiny of society. A society dominated by material values makes us think that freedom consists of buying and selling goods. It substitutes a larger, more demanding idea of freedom for the idea of consumer choice.

Could you explain why you criticize utilitarianism?
Utilitarianism assumes that all good things in life can be translated into a single uniform currency or a measure of value, typically money. Many economists these days maintain that economics is a value-neutral science that can explain all of human behavior. This imperialistic ambition of economics reflects the utilitarian idea that all values can be reduced to utility or to money. The danger of this way of thinking is that it flattens the moral discourse and it fails to account for moral and civic goods that simply can’t be translated into monetary terms.

What would be an example?
Take friendship. Most people would agree that—even if one wants more friends—it wouldn’t help to buy some. Why not? We all know that a hired friend is not the same as a real friend. We recognize that the money that would buy a friend would dissolve the good that we seek when we aspire to have friends. This tendency of money and market relations to dissolve or crowd out certain important non-market goods can be seen in many areas of social life. The reason we need to worry about that is because, when markets reach into spheres of life that are properly governed by non-market values, they undermine the values that make those relationships important and precious.

Sandel giving a lecture about what money can't buy.

In the textbook Principles of Economics, there's an example about a pianist and a poet who live in the same building. Whenever the pianist plays, the poet can't concentrate, so he pays the pianist not to play. When I first read that I remember thinking that being paid doesn't give you the same pleasure as playing the piano—why do economists come up with this idea that money can be a substitute for something you enjoy?
That’s a great example. It seems very odd to assume that the joys of playing the piano can be bought off by money. This goes back to the utilitarian assumption we were just discussing; if you believe the joy of playing the piano and of improving one’s talent and that that whole set of human experiences can be reduced to money or utility, then their example works. But this is a very narrow and impoverished view of what the joy of making music consists of. I think this example perfectly illustrates the folly and the impossibility of the utilitarian way of thinking.

The utilitarian way of thinking also ignores new opportunities. Think about it this way: If the pianist and the poet tried to work it out, the poet might find that his or her poetry could actually be improved by engaging with the piano music at least some of the time. But that would be a non-market way of trying to solve the conflict.

One of the authors of that book, Robert H. Frank, also wrote Economic Naturalist, in which he attempts to show that economics explains almost everything. The assumption that he and many other economists have is that the market is a natural force that must be allowed to act freely so the most efficient outcome isn't disturbed. How did that kind of thinking come about?
The idea that markets are natural forces rather than social institutions designed to serve certain purposes is mistaken. But it’s a deeply influential mistake. Markets are not ends in themselves and they are not forces of nature. What has happened in recent years is that we have forgotten that markets are tools.

But couldn’t it be argued that the marketization of everything is inherent to capitalism itself?
I think it’s wrong to regard markets and capitalism as forces of nature beyond our control. We can and should resist the tendency of markets to infiltrate into every aspect of life. One of my goals in writing What Money Can’t Buy is to remind us that markets are not natural forces, but our tools. That’s why I think it’s so important to have public debates about where markets serve the public good and where they really don’t belong.

Recent years have seen a rise in lingual conventions—like "the love-market," for example—which already reveals how markets infiltrate once sacred spheres of life.
Yes, and there is a danger in viewing love and friendship as commodities that can be bought and sold on the market. I think it’s important to preserve a certain distance about the way we think about friendship, dating, and love from market metaphors and a market mentality. Take the example of gift-giving: some economists say that gift-giving is almost always irrational. That is because if the goal of gift-giving is to increase the utility of a friend or a loved one, then giving cash instead of a gift would always be better. Some have even gone so far to calculate what they call the “Deadweight loss of Christmas” associated with gift-giving.

(Screen grab via)

Sometimes cash is better than a poorly chosen gift. 
That's true, but suppose your closest friend gave you not a well chosen gift, but the cash equivalent—you would probably experience that as alienating. From the economist’s point of view, cash is always better because then you can just buy whatever increases your utility the most. But this assumes a utilitarian view of friendship, where the only purpose of gift-giving is maximizing the consumer happiness of the recipient. Yet it misses the expressive dimension of gift-giving, which entails the intimacy of a friendship or relationship. The focus on economic efficiency entirely misses out on the important features of gift-giving and friendship.

Economists don’t seem to understand the sacredness of friendship and gift-giving.
That’s because from the economistic standpoint nothing is sacred, strictly speaking. Because to call anything sacred is to say that it is priceless. Yet the economistic way of thinking about values assumes that nothing is priceless. It assumes that everything has its price.

You argue that public discourse should focus more on spiritual content. How has market reasoning crowded out that content from the public?
Well, I think we have to begin by recognizing the limitation of money and markets in capturing the meaning of everything that matters to us. That is the first step toward the kind of moral, civic, and spiritual engagement that market thinking misses. A part of the appeal of market thinking is that it seems to spear into us the need to engage in debates about controversial ethical and spiritual questions. Market relations are defined by voluntary exchanges between persons, and the assumption is that only the parties to the deal define the values of the things being exchanged. Markets seem to provide us with a way of outsourcing our moral judgments to a neutral mechanism. But I think this is a mistake.

Why?
Markets are not morally neutral. Sometimes buying and selling certain goods may change their meaning. Take this example: In Israel they have an annual donation day where students go from door to door to collect donations. One year economists set up an experiment—they divided the students into three groups. The first group was given a speech about the importance of the charities being supported and they were sent on their way. The second group was given the same speech, but they were additionally offered a one percent commission. The third group was offered a ten percent commission of the funds collected.

The result was that the first group that worked entirely without pay raised the most money. This reveals that putting a price on an activity such as this, where the motivation is truly altruistic and to do good, turns it into a kind of job and makes it less appealing than a civic, charitable activity. Of course, this doesn’t happen all of the time, but there are many cases where it does. This suggests that, before we introduce market mechanisms, we need to ask: What non-market values and norms may be diminished or eroded by the introduction of money and market thinking?

How can people be made aware of where market thinking has no place?
I think we need to rewrite the economics textbooks, for a start. In your example of the pianist and the poet, the textbook should provide a more profound discussion of further solutions instead of just paying off the pianist. It should mention the non-market values that are at stake if one chooses the market solution. I think it’s a mistake that economics presents itself as a value-neutral science of human behavior. The founders of classical economics, like Adam Smith, recognized that economics is a branch of moral and political philosophy. We need to get back to that conception of economics and recognize that economics is inseparable from moral and political questions.

Great. Thanks, Michael.

Follow Johannes on Twitter: @JohnVouloir

Count more stacks:

Pen Pals - Gettin' Money On the Inside

What Kids Say About Money

God Keeps Sending Me Letters Asking for Money

The best party I’ve been to all summer happened Tuesday night in DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood, and the whole thing occurred after only 24 hours’ worth of planning. Attendees totaled around 200, someone brought along a sick PA system, and then somehow we ended up outside of the White House asking the president to pardon Army Private First Class Bradley Manning.

So it wasn’t actually billed as a party, per se, but rather a rally—a last-minute politically charged rendezvous—assembled the evening before in anticipation of a long-awaited verdict in the court-martial of Manning. And though things didn’t go as well before the judge as they could have, the news wasn't all bad—as you probably know by now, Manning was acquitted of "aiding the enemy" but convicted of violating the Espionage Act and could now face 136 years in prison. His sentencing hearing begins today.

Twenty-five years old and thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Pfc. Manning has managed to attract a lot of attention in the three years since he was arrested and charged for leaking classified files to the website WikiLeaks. Supporters and the soldier himself say those documents exposed atrocities and prompted discussions across the world about US actions in the Middle East. Some even credit those revelations with expediting the end of the Iraq War. And although he never quite became a household name, what was perhaps Manning’s biggest day yet occurred Tuesday when all eyes were on a military court in Fort Meade, Maryland, where a judge would decide if the soldier should be convicted of “aiding the enemy” and 21 other counts including computer crimes and espionage for leaking documents to WikiLeaks.

If anyone celebrated anything Tuesday night with regards to the case, it was likely because Colonel Denise Lind, the presiding judge in Manning’s military trial, acquitted the soldier of aiding the enemy and in turn refuted the government’s accusation that he indirectly helped al-Qaeda when he sent thousands upon thousands of files to WikiLeaks after his first deployment abroad in 2009. Had Lind ruled otherwise, a conviction on that count alone could have yielded Manning a life sentence. Now spared from being found guilty of the most serious of charges, after Tuesday’s court session, the soldier faces only a maximum term of 136 years behind bars.

Should it matter at that point, Lind has already said she’d take 112 days off an eventual sentence in order to compensate Manning for the several months he was held in isolation after his initial capture (and she's since upped that figure to 1274 days an eventual sentence). By default the sentencing will go to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, but a pal of Lind told the Washington Post last month that Manning’s decider has been appointed to soon sit on that panel too—a promotion that must be ordered by the President himself and approved by the Senate.

President Obama, who campaigned on a platform of transparency and whistleblower protection, was caught on camera saying Manning “broke the law” years before Lind’s verdict. He has since prosecuted more whistleblowers under the World War One-era Espionage Act than all other presidents combined, and earlier this week his administration had to actually send Russia a letter promising not to torture or kill NSA leaker Edward Snowden if he is ever extradited to the US to be tried for espionage.

Manning has already been tortured while kept in isolation, and after Tuesday’s verdict, he is officially—in the eyes of the American justice system—a bona fide spy several times over. For sharing sensitive files with the antisecrecy site, Manning ultimately scored six convictions under the Espionage Act, a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violation, and multiple counts of stealing from the government.

By sharing those files, Manning told the court earlier this year, he hoped to spark public debate. I’m not certain 200 angry supporters in front of the White House was what he had in mind, but without a doubt it made people start talking. Even if it was the three-dozen tourists snapping iPad photos at ten o’clock on a Tuesday, that was still a discussion far beyond the scope of what the soldier will enjoy anytime soon as he sits in jail for letting the state’s dirty laundry be aired on the Web.

Standing around Dupont an hour earlier, the collectively shared emotion didn’t exactly resemble joy. And as celebration over the acquittal combined with impassionate anger directed at the Obama administration for equating Manning’s deed as an act of espionage, a catalyst in the form of an army snuff film leaked by the soldier spawned the most beautiful event I’ve experienced all summer in the city.

Before we all marched to the White House, someone showed the crowd a film that WikiLeaks called “Collateral Murder” when it published it in 2010. The now infamous helicopter footage from a US Apache chopper shows American troops fatally shooting civilians and journalists over New Baghdad in 2007, and Manning will get a maximum of two years for sharing it with the world. It’s since been viewed on YouTube millions of times and, apparently, is now screened to strangers in city parks. And in case you haven't experienced it yet for yourself, there's nothing quite like standing in the heart of a major city alongside hundreds of passersby as a film is screened showing soldiers from your very own country opening fire on innocent people. If that sounds sadistic, I'd recommend you watch it under similar circumstances and try to say it isn't a worthwhile experience.

David Coombs, Manning’s defense attorney, showed excerpts from that film no fewer than three times during his client’s court-martial. And although a handful of those in the circle knew the Apache crew’s dialog word for word, something about seeing war crimes being committed—and projected in a park down the road from the president’s house—creates a kind of indescribable emotion that could only be close to being called celebratory because it evokes an anger that seemingly can’t be calmed.

By the time the crowd descended on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Tuesday night, a ten-foot-tall cardboard marionette of Manning had made its way into the congregation and was mugging next to a mock Lady Liberty, while nearly a dozen demonstrators in dead silence stood before the president’s house with black-backed signs made of blue lights reading “Free Bradley.” Somewhere around mile two of the march I had lost Bill, a septuagenarian supporter who has been to Fort Meade more than 20 times to attend the hearings. For every 75-year-old with a sign there was also a brace-faced boy in a Guy Fawkes mask, chanting, “Free Bradley Manning,” a cheer for what Manning has done—and not as an enemy of America.

Manning will likely be decades closer to death if he’s ever released from prison, but supporters put that behind them Tuesday night and, even though the verdict is said and done, soldiered on. Next comes the sentencing phase, then, likely, a series of appeals. As long as Pfc. Manning is on the other side of jail bars, though, activists will call him a political prisoner—another accidental icon representative of an oppressive state.

And, at least in absentia, Manning is the life of the party. He's brought people together around the world by making those disclosures, and his prosecution has put modern democracy and journalism on the defensive end of a rather depressing battle. As long as misery likes company, though, a legion of supporters around the world intend on staying focused on their fight. Others might soon do the same, too—great news since the freedom of the press depends on it.

“The 'aiding the enemy’ charge has fallen away,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote after the verdict. “It was only included, it seems, to make calling journalism ’espionage’ seem reasonable. It is not.”

Assange went on to call Lind’s ruling “the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower,” and, in turn, “a dangerous precedent and an example of national-security extremism.”

And if that doesn’t sound like a reason to grab 200 strangers and make some noise, I certainly don’t know how to party.

Andrew Blake is a producer at RT. Follow him on Twitter: @apblake

Photo by Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Diego Enrique Osorno is a prominent Mexican author and poet. He has written six books, primarily focusing on the country's drug cartels, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León, where the real-life Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned.

Last week horror fans discovered that one of the genre’s most notorious villains, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, was based on a real doctor imprisoned in Mexico, whom the author met while visiting the prison as a young man to interview another inmate named Dykes Askew Simmons. Last spring, through my editor, I received a message from Harris, who wanted me to find and identify someone who had been a prisoner in the Nuevo Leon State Prison during the 50s and 60s. For a few moments I thought I’d wind up sustaining an epistolary exchange with Harris like Hannibal held with some of his patients. As I read the note, however, it became clear that I was only needed as a sort of hired detective. His note read [sic]:

I need information about a medical doctor, known in the press as "The Werewolf of Nuevo Leon," who was a prisoner in the Nuevo Leon State Prison in the late 1950's and the l960s. I do not know his name. The doctor was convicted of killing hitchhikers in Nuevo Leon, dismembering them and throwing them piecemeal out of his car at night. The doctor saved the life of another prisoner, Dykes Askew Simmons, in the prison when Simmons was shot by prison guards while trying to escape. The doctor also treated poor people for free while he was a prisoner, and had a medical office inside the prison.

Simmons was a Texan convicted in Nuevo Leon in March, 1961, of murdering three young members of the Perez Villagomez family in October, l959. He was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to 30 years. He was in the Nuevo Leon State Prison from 1961 until his escape in 1969. The case of Simmons, and probably the case of the doctor, were covered by the newspapers El Norte de Nuevo Leon and El Sol de Nuevo Leon. Two of the El Norte reporters who wrote about Simmons were Ricardo Bartres and Esteban Ardines.

              Any help would be much appreciated.

At first my assignment seemed awfully simple. With so many details, I didn’t think it would be difficult to find the name of the killer who interested Harris so much. I began my search with a phone call to the writer Eduardo Antonio Parra, one of the masters of crime literature from northeast Mexico whose work I very much admire. I gave him all of the details, but, unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anyone who matched the description. Next I looked up Hugo Valdés, author of The Crime of Aramberri Street, a novel based on an incident that occurred in Monterrey’s Barrio Antiguo at the turn of last century. Again, no luck.

Soon I had another message in my inbox from Harris [sic]:

I am very pleased to have your help in identifying the doctor who treated Dykes Askew Simmons. Thank you for your time. The identity of the doctor is my principal interest, and any details about him. I do not need further information on the Simmons case, except for his contact with the doctor.

I watched with interest your You.Tube discussion of current problems in Mexico, and I wish you well.

I then decided to take a different course of action. I sought out two ex-agents from the DA’s office, an ex-commander, and an ex-prosecutor. I asked them if they remembered anything about a prisoner who fit Harris’s description, but they did not. The search pushed me to make a quick index of the major celebrity crimes of the 60s and 70s in Monterrey.

That’s when Harris wrote once more, with a few more leads [sic]:

The director of the prison at the time was Miguel Guadiana Barra. One of the police inspectors was named Sarquiz. I hope that information is helpful.

Just to clarify:  All I need is the name of the Doctor, and a few facts about his crimes. He was in prison during the late 50s and the 60s, at the same time as Dykes Askew Simmons. He was convicted of several murders in which the victims were dismembered. He treated patients while he was a prisoner. He saved Simmons life when he was shot trying to escape. He was a member of a prominent family in Mexico.

When I know his name I can proceed with my publication.Thank you for your help. Best wishes.

Just as I was about to head to Alfonsina Chapel at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon to dig into the periodicals collection and check the newspapers from the late 50s and early 60s, day by day, my girlfriend called to say one name: Doctor Ballí. She—a sharp and avid reader of all forms of criminal tales—had investigated on her end with friends and family and ended up finding Harris’s guy. All of my Dick Tracey-esque hard work was bested by a few of my girlfriend’s casual conversations.

Once I knew the name I decided to dig a bit deeper. I found a story written in 2008 on Ballí based on a legal curiosity: Ballí was the last prisoner sentenced to death in Mexico. Lucky for the doctor, his sentence was commuted, and after a long stay, he left prison in the year 2000. Ballí’s interviewer for the story, titled “I Don’t Want to Relive My Ghosts,” was Juan Carlos Rodriguez, a friend and old colleague from the daily paper Milenio.

I called him up to ask about his experience with the doctor.

“Do you remember an interview you did a while ago with a doctor who was sentenced to death?” I asked.

“Alfredo Ballí Treviño?”

"Yes," I said. "Do you know if he’s still alive?”

“Don’t know. I suppose he might be. I remember more or less where he lived and worked as a doctor, although technically he couldn’t be working because he was an ex-con.”

“Any other details?”

“I didn’t keep much. In fact, that interview came about because a lawyer told us where we could find him, and we found him.”

“His office was in Colonia Talleres?”

“Yes. It was very austere. I don’t remember the exact street number.”

“What happened to him? Is he still alive?”

“I think so.”

Using the information provided by Juan Carlos Rodriguez, and information gathered at the periodicals collection, I prepared a bulky dossier for Harris, which I summarized as the following:

* The name of the doctor that treated Dykes is Alfredo Ballí Treviño.

* He was sentenced to death for “the crimes of qualified homicide, with clandestine burial and seizure of profession, in loss against the doctor Jesús Castillo Rangel.”

* His case is filed under the penal number 263/59, at the prosecutor’s office of the state of Nuevo Leon.

* The date this case was opened was October 9, 1959.

* The sentence in the case was served in May 1961.

* On the judicial front in Mexico, his case is interesting because it involved a person who was legally sentenced to death. The death penalty has not been practiced in Mexico in any legal form since then (although we’ve had governments who practice it in an extrajudicial form).

* More interestingly, the sentence was commuted.

* All signs suggest Dr. Alfredo Ballí Treviño died in 2010. Until that year, he practiced medicine at an office in a forgotten colonia of Monterrey. The street address is:

Calle Artículo 123,
Colonia Talleres,
Monterrey, Nuevo León,
México CP 64480 Norte

Harris responded with gratitude for the find. Now I know that he needed the information to finish the prologue for the 25th-anniversary edition of The Silence of the Lambs. In that text, excerpted in the Times of London, Harris narrates that at the age of 23 he traveled to Monterrey to interview Dykes Askew Simmons, at which point, he met a figure that inspired him to create Hannibal Lecter. In his text he refers to that person as “Doctor Salazar.” “Doctor Salazar” is Dr. Ballí. And Dr. Ballí is the alter-ego of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who, under the mastery of Harris, possesses a uniquely sinister manner of speaking that we’ll never forget: “Have you seen blood in the moonlight? It appears quite black.”

More serial killers:

Serial Killers I'd Sex Up

How Canadian Police Overlooked a Serial Killer

Anton Chekhov Vs. Jeffrey Dahmer

@diegoeosorno

A

T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan IT DON’T GITMO BETTER THAN THIS is perhaps the definitive physical manifestation of globalization. Sewn in Honduras and sold by Jamaican contractors on land rented from Cuba, the shirt celebrates an American prison holding Muslims who’ve been declared enemies in the war on terror. It’s a popular item in the Gitmo gift shop (yes, Gitmo has a gift shop), displayed next to the stuffed banana rats and shot glasses engraved with GUANTÁNAMO BAY: DIVE IN. 

Built in 1898, the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base looks like a US suburb. There’s a McDonald’s, a Subway, and even a Christmas parade. On Halloween, military members dressed as zombies complete a 5K run. Winners of the Mr. and Ms. Gitmo Figure and Fitness Competition arch their backs on the cover of the Wire, the base’s in-house magazine. The Team Gitmo outdoor movie theater screens all the big blockbusters (when I visited it was World War Z), and in the evenings, visitors can eat jerk chicken next to swaying banyan trees, get drunk at O’Kelly’s (“the only Irish pub on Communist soil”), or sing karaoke.

But since the Joint Task Force (JTF) arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has been home to the world’s most notorious prison.

Gitmo’s prison camps were built, in principle, to hold and interrogate captives outside the reach of US law. Nearly 800 Muslim men have been imprisoned since it opened, and the vast majority of them have never been charged with any crime. Since he was inaugurated in 2008, President Obama has twice promised to close Gitmo, but 166 men still languish in indefinite detention. It is a place where information is contraband, force-feeding is considered humane care, staples are weapons, and the law is rewritten wantonly.  

Nabil Hadjarab arrived at Gitmo 11 years ago, in an orange jumpsuit and a diaper, his head covered by a hood, eyes blinded by blackout goggles, mouth gagged, and with headphones blaring white noise into his ears.

At 34, Nabil is four years my senior. We both speak French, draw pictures, and, in our youths, liked to travel to desolate places and have adventures. But Nabil’s days of wanderlust may be over forever. Although he’s been cleared for release since 2007, the US will not return him to his family in France.  He has vowed to remain on a hunger strike till he finds freedom or death, whichever happens first. 

O

ne doesn’t expect the Gitmo press office to be delightful, but Lieutenant Colonels Pool and Breasseale (the latter was a Department of Defense consultant on The Hurt Locker) are tasked with being our friends. With warmth, charm, and helpfulness, they kept us far away from the prisoners we had come to write about. They know how to play the game, and they do their homework, making sure to gush over my past work, as well as that of my fellow reporters. The underlying assumption seemed to be that we were all bleeding-heart lefties, so they were sure to emphasize their fondness for Al Jazeera and support for getting green energy onto bases. 

Lt. Col. Pool had nicknamed me “Molly Worrywort” because of my badgerlike inquires about press credentials. Before I arrived, he suggested that I bring a swimsuit. Apparently the big bad terror camp was near some great beaches. Though there are nearby hotels, visiting journalists sleep in Army tents, in a subdivision called Camp Justice, and the pressroom is inside an airplane hanger—Gitmo is a “battlefield,” after all.

At the Naval Exchange, Filipino contractors bagged our groceries for tips. A JTF guard flirted with me until he heard that I was a journalist. He then turned to the Jamaican cashier, scowling. “She’s going to write how bad we treat the detainees.” I bought cherries, Knob Creek, and a pair of flip-flops.

For all their friendliness, the JTF controls what the media is allowed to see. Photos are prohibited in most places, and whenever I sketched a scene, press officers swarmed around me. The pressroom was filled with soldiers watching our laptops, listening to us talk. US cell phones don’t get service at Gitmo. There’s a sticker on all the landline receivers inside the compound: use of this telephone constitutes consent to monitoring. Badges that read military escort at all times are required to be worn at all times. We were given them inside something called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is plastered with propaganda posters. One features a woman in a ski mask pointing a gun straight ahead; underneath it reads: keep talking, we’re listening. practice opsec [operations security]. I took notes on the back of a pamphlet listing banned items. The security officer inspected my notes, worried that I copied a classification chart. Like so much of Guantánamo, the chart itself was classified.

At Camp Justice, a press officer showed us the only corner of razor wire that we were allowed to photograph. The military must approve all photos, and when our articles come out, they will rate us as “friendly,” “neutral,” or “adversarial.” 

When I interviewed Captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for JTF, he told me that too many reporters think that Gitmo is a Potemkin village, covering up some hidden face the military doesn’t want us to see. Durand denied this; however, reporters are not permitted to speak to the detainees. We signed contracts promising not to interview the Filipino guest workers. We visited during the 9/11 military commissions—the Gitmo Military Commissions were invented in 2006—that are a mash-up of civilian and military courts. While they were happening, we weren’t allowed anywhere near the prisons. The prison tours showed us only the smallest sliver of the camps.

The only journalist who has ever really seen Guantánamo is Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Hajj—the US government imprisoned him in Gitmo from 2002 to 2008, mostly to interrogate him about his TV station.

I

n Gitmo, nothing is certain. All participants are biased, and facts about detainees are hidden behind classifications, razor wire, and improvised legalese. 

As I researched Nabil before my trip, there was little information available other than what was relayed by his lawyer, Cori Crider, and a cachet of tribunal transcripts leaked by Bradley Manning. The DoD refuses to comment on individual detainees, and any communication with the prisoners themselves is forbidden. Details of Nabil’s life, unless otherwise specified, come from Crider.

Crider told me that Nabil’s father fought on the French side in the Algerian War, and on occasion served as a guard for Charles de Gaulle. Born in Algeria, Nabil arrived in France as an infant. His first language is French and his half-siblings from his father’s first marriage are all French citizens—one even earned a National Medal of Honor for his service in the French army. But because Nabil was born in Algeria, earning his French citizenship was a process. At 21, he hired an immigration lawyer to file his residency papers. The lawyer told him to leave the country while the papers were processed. Not wanting to return to Algeria, Nabil bought a fake passport, and then took off to England.

London can be a rough place for immigrants without the proper paperwork. Going broke while working off the books at a pizzeria, Nabil took the advice of a friend from his mosque: in Afghanistan, living was cheap, papers were superfluous, and you could study the Qur’an while the bureaucratic wheels churned in France. So, in the spring of 2001, Nabil decided to have an adventure.

Nabil’s first stop was a Kabul guesthouse, where his host gave him a gun for self-defense. Then, in September, everything changed when two planes smashed into the World Trade Center.

As American bombs fell on Afghanistan, Nabil started hearing reports that locals were rounding up Arabs. With his housemates, he fled into the Tora Bora mountains. Wounded by US bombs while trying to cross the border, a few “friendly” townspeople brought Nabil to a local hospital.

According to a report by the Seton Hall School of Law in 2006, only 5 percent of the 517 detainees then in Gitmo were captured by US forces. Eighty-six percent were turned over to US Armed Forces by Pakistan, the Northern Alliance, or random Afghans. The US was offering bounties of thousands of dollars a head. In an impoverished land known for kidnapping and extortion, this was a fortune of almost unimaginable proportions. One flyer dropped in Afghanistan read: “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” 

“There are awkward parallels between the failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the failed purpose of Guantánamo,” Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official, and the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, told me. “In both instances the US believed that money, lots of money, could solve any problem. The US believed that despite its own ignorance of the politics of bounty hunting and a third-country national presence, as well as the true reconstruction needs of Afghans, that was no reason not to act. Lastly, the US believed that even when failure was clear, it was crucial to pretend the opposite. So reconstruction projects are all labeled a success, and anyone in Guantánamo is obviously a terrorist.”

In the US, you’re innocent until proven guilty. At Gitmo, the opposite is true. According to his Combat Status Review Tribunal Summary, Nabil was a member of al Qaeda. By way of proof, they have only that he was in Afghanistan, owned a gun, and had attended a London mosque known for its extremism. To flesh out his “terrorist” profile, the official summary adds tales of a terrorist training camp and a grenade-filled mountain trench. No member of US forces has ever reported laying eyes on either, but this doesn’t matter because the secretive tribunals at Guantánamo allow hearsay as evidence against detainees.  

Add in circumstantial evidence, confessions extracted under torture, and “the presumption of regularity,” which means the presumption is that US officials are nothing but honest. Following this logic, the truth itself is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt—buried somewhere in the Tora Bora mountains. 

Afghans sold Nabil to Afghan forces from his hospital bed. Injured and terrified, he huddled together with five other men in the underground cell of a prison in Kabul. Interrogators whipped him. The screams of the tortured kept him awake at night. According to a statement filed by Clive Clifford Smith, Nabil’s lawyer at the time, “Someone—either an interpreter or another prisoner—whispered to him, ‘Just say you are al Qaeda and they will stop beating you.’”

At Bagram, Americans held Nabil naked in an aircraft hanger that was so cold he thought he’d die of exposure, while military personal in warm coats sipped hot chocolate. When Nabil tried to recant confessions he’d made under torture, the soldiers just beat him more, according to a statement filed by Clifford Smith. Finally, the military transferred Nabil to Kandahar, and then to Guantánamo Bay. 

Nabil arrived at Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray in February 2002. With its watchtowers, clapboard interrogation huts, and rings of barbed wire, X-Ray looks nothing but surreal—a concentration camp on the Caribbean. For the four months it took the JTF to build permanent prisons, Nabil lived in a metal cage under the burning Cuban sun. For hygiene, he had one bucket for water and another for shit. During the seven hours it took me to complete a drawing of X-Ray, I nearly passed out from the mosquitos and heat. 

Camp X-Ray has been abandoned for over a decade. Birds nest on the razor wire. Vines have overtaken the cages. With the breeze and butterflies, one could think it is just a still-standing reminder of a shameful past. For the current prisoners who passed through X-Ray, it is still part of their reality. They may have left, but they are not free.

In X-Ray’s interrogation huts, and later in the permanent prisons of Camp Delta, Americans practiced short-shackling, stress positions, dry-boarding (stuffing rags down a man’s throat and taping his nose and mouth shut), and sexual humiliation. Female interrogators molested detainees and smeared them with fake menstrual blood, according to Inside the Wire, a book written by a former sergeant who witnessed the incident at Gitmo. Former detainee Ruhal Ahmed described being chained in a squatting position and left for days to defecate on himself while dogs growled in his face. A memo by JAG (Judge Advocate General Corps) lawyer Diane Beaver, “Legal Review of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques,” describes water-boarding, using extreme heat and cold, beatings—termed “non-injurious physical contact”—and convincing the detainee that his family was in danger of torture or death as totally A-OK once approved.  

Nabil does not like to speak about his time at Camp X-Ray.

I

n 2010, Colonel Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Times of London that “[Former Vice President, Dick Cheney] had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent.”

Of the 779 men detained over the years at Gitmo, 604 have been transferred or released to other countries. This could mean an Albanian refugee camp, a Libyan prison, or a comfortable research job in Germany. The majority have demonstrated no terrorist leanings after Guantánamo.  

Among them are the Tipton Three, British dude-bros of South Asian descent, who, planning to attend a wedding in Pakistan, decided to play war tourists in Kabul. Then there’s Sami Allaithy, a teacher at the University of Kabul. He was beaten so badly he’s now a paraplegic. Murat Kurnaz, the German-born son of Turkish guest workers, was only 19 when the Pakistan authorities pulled him off a bus on the way to the airport. Cleared of all accusations five years later, he flew back to Germany from Guantánamo, shackled and hooded in a private plane full of marines. The flight cost US taxpayers more than $1 million.

In 2004, the court case Rasul v. Bush established that detainees had the right to challenge their detentions; however, most prisoners lacked lawyers or means to even contact them. They were expected to navigate the tribunal system on their own, in a language they often didn’t understand, with laws that were being improvised on the spot. 

The US refused to release detainees’ names, afraid that if they were made public, skeptical lawyers would take up their cases pro bono. Finally, in 2005, JAG lawyer Matthew Diaz hid a list of detainees inside a Valentine’s Day card and mailed it to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Diaz told me that the JTF had ignored his abuse reports. His hope was that once detainees lawyered up, guards would be less likely to abuse them.

Prisoners didn’t just suffer enhanced interrogations. ERFs (Enhanced Reaction Forces) pepper-sprayed, beat, and restrained less-than-compliant detainees. Nabil once threw his food tray through the bean hole in his cell, splashing a guard with milk. His JTF assessment classified this as assault. His family learned he was in Gitmo in 2002, but it was not until 2005 that a fellow detainee signed Nabil up to be represented by lawyers from Reprieve, a British legal charity that represents prisoners from death row to Guantánamo.

My assigned press officer adamantly denied that detainees were ever beaten at Gitmo. I brought up Specialist Sean Baker, who in 2003 played a detainee in an ERF training drill and whose resulting brain injuries landed him in Walter Reed for 48 days. She said that she had never heard of Baker, claiming that detainees throw themselves off stretchers, hoping to show off the resulting bruises to their lawyers. 

Guards dole out “comfort items” to reward compliance. According to Terry Holdbrooks, a former Gitmo guard and author of the memoir Traitor?, even toothbrushes were privileges. These same guards complain that as they pass by the cells, detainees splash them with shit. After 11 years of indefinite detention, it’s probably all some prisoners can do.

By 2009, Gitmo somewhat resembled a US prison, with collective living, a soccer field, and a library. Bush’s slogan “Honor bound to defend freedom” became Obama’s “Safe, legal, transparent, humane.” Over a direct message on Twitter, the author Neil Gaiman told me a detainee was a fan of his books. To keep prisoners busy while they waited for the war on terror to end, Gitmo offered art classes, hanging the drawings in a room only the press could visit. According to Captain Durand, detainees are permitted to call their families once a quarter; however, they were never allowed a visit. 

Along with the JTF, many in the press thought the detainees should be grateful. I imagined some self-righteous hack nodding along with the official tour: “These prisoners are spoiled. They even have lemon chicken.”

Who needs a future when you have lemon chicken.

E

very morning, the DoD emails the official tally of hunger strikers to the press. Out of the 166 men at Gitmo during my visit, 106 had joined the strike. Forty-five have lost enough weight to be, as the JTF calls it, “enterally fed,” which means there’s just enough flesh on their bones for them to survive. Nabil Hadjarab is one of them.

The hunger strike kicked off in February to protest guards’ alleged mishandling of Qur’ans, but that was just the catalyst. Bob Gensburg, a lawyer for detainee Abdul Zahir, told me, “The hunger strike is the culmination of 12 years of abuse, the end to which none of them can see. They believe they will be there forever, helpless, humiliated, stripped of their humanity.” Carol Rosenberg, who has been covering Gitmo for the last 12 years, wrote in a report for the Miami Herald that when detainees covered surveillance cameras in their communal cellblock, guards stormed in with rubber bullets and locked detainees in single cells. With this act, the “golden age” of Gitmo was over. 

Nabil loves soccer—his favorite player is Lionel Messi. He used to practice classical Arabic calligraphy. He also used to work out and became fluent in English, with dreams of becoming a translator. He kept his mind on a future beyond Gitmo, but as the years passed since he was cleared for release, that future became a mirage.

On March 18 of this year, the Army announced it had begun force-feeding hunger strikers. Twice a day, guards tie Nabil to a chair and push his head back. Doctors shove a length of surgical tubing through his nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. Then they pump a can of Ensure through the tube. Nabil is masked (“spitting is a tactic [used by detainees],” according to Gitmo spokesman Captain Robert Durand), and left tied to the chair until he has digested the Ensure. 

“We will not allow the detainees to harm themselves, whether by hoarding pills, making weapons, or starving,” Lt. Col. Breasseale told me. He also said that some detainees don’t even need to be tied down, but would rather lie back and accept the feeding tube. Detainees even get to choose their flavor of Ensure. 

Force-feeding, while practiced in some American prisons, is condemned by the American Medical Association. It is intensely painful, and can cause pneumonia if liquid drips into the victim’s lungs. 

Force-fed detainee Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel described the experience in an editorial for the New York Times. “As [the tube] was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up... There was agony in my chest, throat, and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before.” When I brought this up to Lt. Col. Breasseale, he responded, “They’re detainees. They’ve had their liberty removed. No one likes that. But that in itself is not torture.”

It is Captain Durand’s view that what detainees are really starving for is attention. “They’re seeing their lawyers on television and seeing media attention from it,” he said. “That encourages more people to join.” He added “I think it’s interesting that the Taliban were the first to report about [the hunger strike].” 

Throughout our trip, press officers told me and the other reporters present that no one suffers negative repercussions for going on hunger strike, but Captain Durand said that detainees won’t go back to communal living until they eat on their own. So Nabil sits alone in his cell, his family letters and drawings confiscated, with only his Qur’an for company. If he wants to speak to his lawyer, guards search his genitals before and after he uses the phone. 

“Solitary confinement is a very emotionally charged phrase,” Captain Durand continued. “But, single-celled detention is not solitary confinement. They can still talk to one another. Their cell ports are open.” 

During his last phone call, Nabil told Cori: “I am desperate for freedom. In our brief lives, freedom is all that matters. Things like privileges and food are secondary and meaningless. Force-feeding us is a way of burying what we have to say. In this place, isn’t the last thing I have left the ability to decide what to do with my own life? Will the military be allowed to take this from me too?”

I

n the days following 9/11, flyers bloomed on every wall in New York, posted by family members searching for husbands, sisters, children. These flyers stayed up for years, fading until the sun and mold made them illegible; they became the city’s scar tissue. But the faces on those flyers were buried beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, never to see New York again. 

My arrival in Guantanamo coincided with the pretrial hearings of “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a.k.a. KSM, and his alleged co-conspirators. The DoD flew down relatives of those killed on 9/11 to watch the proceedings, who held a Q&A for the press.

Rita Lasar’s brother, Abraham, worked on the 27th floor of the ninth tower. He died next to a quadriplegic colleague whom he would not abandon. “He was my kid brother,” Rita, 81, told us. A look of devastation overcame her face. “He did a decent thing. The country needs to do the decent thing by having a fair trial. In spite of who they are, they deserve the fairest, most transparent trial.”

“My mom died of cancer and there aren’t bumper stickers everywhere saying NEVER FORGET,” said Glenn Morgan, whose father was buried alongside FDNY rescuers when the second tower collapsed. “Sometimes you just fucking want to forget. But you can’t.” Glenn identified his father by the serial number on his titanium hip. “There is a desire to kill and a desire for revenge, and I have that desire. The Constitution protects from people like me, who would be vengeful.” Rita and Glenn both said that they wished KSM had been tried in New York. 

After a 15-minute break, the press was allowed to speak with the chief prosecutor, General Mark Martins. He spoke in the meandering, sound-bite-free style of a seasoned lawyer, but what he said shocked me so much I asked him to repeat it: only 20 detainees are actually chargeable. Looking at the nonplussed press, I felt naïve. Did that mean that the other 146 men held at Gitmo would never even be charged with crimes? The general tells me yes, that is the case.

After the press conference, Lt. Col. Breasseale pulled me aside. It was lawful to detain those men till the end of conflict, he explained, just like we detained Nazi soldiers till the end of WWII. But, if it’s impossible for a country to surrender in the war on terror, what does winning mean? At Gitmo, no one knows the answer.

I

n 2002, KSM bragged on Al Jazeera about masterminding 9/11. Forensic vein matching proves his hand beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl. In KSM’s case, unlike most prisoners held at Gitmo, there’s enough evidence of his atrocities to make torture-derived confessions superfluous. Yet today he’s held in the same prison as Nabil and 145 other men who will never be charged with a crime. At the KSM hearings, viewers are allowed to bring nothing with them but a notebook, or, in my case, art supplies. I drew the proceedings behind three layers of bulletproof glass. There was a monitor for sound, but it ran on a 40-second delay to allow our minders to censor sensitive information. Security officers had to approve our drawings before we took them from the courtroom, leaving Post-it notes in my sketchbook telling me when I misspelled a name.

During recess, I stared at KSM through opera glasses. With fruit juice, he’d dyed his beard Sunny-D orange. You’re the one who blew up my city, I thought. He stared back at me and rubbed his nose.

Stapled documents aren’t permitted inside the courtroom, based on the logic that the staples could be used as weapons. On previous trips, spiral notebooks were forbidden in the viewing gallery for the same reason. 

On our second day in court, security confiscated my opera glasses as well as those of official Gitmo sketch artist Janet Hamlin. Janet’s been documenting the facility for seven years—her sketchpad is the only visual record of the court. “I’ve been using these for three years,” Janet told the guard, but he banned them anyway, deeming them “prohibited ocular amplification.” 

The pretrial hearing concerned itself with violations of attorney-client privilege. Members of the defense team later described their work to me in patriotic terms, as “holding up the Constitution from both ends.” The defense lawyers are sharp and committed, but Gitmo itself is naturally slanted against them. They testified that the JTF had ransacked their clients’ legal mail, bugged smoke detectors in the rooms where they had had their meetings, and banned them from bringing notes when they met with their clients. 

Language mutates in Gitmo. In court, bland, corporate-sounding terms like privilege team and baseline review referred to government censors and cell searches, respectively. The word contraband didn’t mean guns or coke, but knowledge. James Connell, a lawyer for 9/11 defendant Ammar al Baluchi, told me: “The ‘informational contraband’ restriction prohibits attorneys from discussing important topics with their clients, including the people who tortured them or the whole idea of jihad.”

The defendants’ opinions and experiences are classified—especially their memories of rendition. Connell added, “The government can only classify information it owns or controls.  By classifying the ‘observations and experiences’ of the military commission defendants, the government is claiming something new and horrifying: the power to own and control the minds of the people it has tortured.”  

During the press conference, a reporter asked Glenn Morgan what he’d come to see. He said, “[I’d like KSM to think], Holy shit, I can’t believe they gave me a fair trial. What a fucking country.” 

But the trials don’t conform to American standards of fairness. At Gitmo, innocent bleeds into guilty. A young man traveling on a whim, like Nabil Hadjarab, is equivalent to the mastermind of 9/11.

L

t. Col. Breasseale told me that the JTF has hired eldercare specialists to fly to Gitmo and take care of the aging prison population. Despite Obama’s promises to close Guantánamo, those 166 detainees won’t be going anywhere soon. 

When Bush called these men “the worst of the worst,” he bestowed on them a scarlet letter. Congress has banned spending money to transfer detainees to the US. Sending them home is also fraught. Some countries torture returning detainees. Others won’t monitor them to our specifications.Third-party countries (countries that are neither the US nor the detainee’s countries of origin) aren’t eager to clean up what they see as America’s mess.

Speaking about Congress, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told me that “sending the message to our allies that we wouldn’t take detainees but they should have made it harder for us to place people in third-party countries. It was irresponsible fear mongering instead of responsible policy based on fact, to the detriment not just of these human beings’ lives, but to our national security.” 

The only proof that many of these men are terrorists is that they were “picked up on the battlefield.” But where can one find the battlefield in the war on terror? In a war without end, the world is the front line. Muslim men are presumed enemies for existing.

Over a beer, a press officer might call Gitmo a “pile of poo” left on the floor by a civilian government for the military to clean up. But however victimized they might feel, the JTF will carry out their mission. At the same time, they’ll hide everything they can behind layers of classification so that the public never comprehends what their mission is. 

We will spend $150 million a year to detain 166 men until the end to the war on terror. But, like the war on drugs, the war on terror will never end. And when detainees try to starve themselves to death out of hopelessness, we’ll keep them alive by pumping Ensure down their throats.

During our interview, Captain Durand said, “One thing our chain of command has made sure of is that we do not worry about the externalities, but just focus on doing it safely, doing it legally, doing it right.”

On my final night in Gitmo, I watched the Miami Heat game at O’Kelly’s. During halftime, a young girl dressed in white sang the national anthem. Her voice was pure and true: “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The bar burst into applause. 

B

efore my flight, my press officer escorted me up to Windmill Hill to survey the island. I’m not allowed to draw the JTF side, but I can remember.

Camp Iguana, which was built for juveniles but now holds compliant detainees, overlooks the glittering bay. Military families sunbathed below. The hills are as lush as a Watteau painting. Hazy in the distance, I could see the buildings of Camp Delta, where Nabil is indefinitely held. 

On Nabil’s most recent visit with Cori Crider, his uniform sagged off his thin frame. He was losing his vision. He was too weak to hold up his head.

During his June phone call with Crider, Nabil said, “It’s disappointing that the government can watch all of us starve for four months without reaching out to us, trying to negotiate about how we can regain our normal lives as free men.

“I don’t know if I will be able to make it to the phone next time. Please understand it’s nothing personal—I really appreciate everything you are trying to do. I’m just very, very tired and I am not sure I can keep doing this.”

Crider asked Nabil when he would stop his hunger strike. 

Nabil told her, “I will consider eating when I see people leaving this place. Not before.”

O

n Guantánamo, iguanas are endangered. Killing one will get you a $10,000 fine. Military transport skids to a halt to let them cross the road. 

A few days before I left Gitmo, I sat at Camp X-Ray alone with Press Officer Forbes. We heard the first bars of the anthem from a loudspeaker. Forbes popped up, turned in the direction of the flag and saluted. Later that day, 106 hunger strikers, alone in their cells, would hear the call to prayer. They would turn toward Mecca and bow.  

The JTF and the detainees are enemies together, trapped on a horseshoe-shaped piece of Cuba. In Gitmo, only the animals are free.

Editor's Note: The above piece appears in the August print edition of VICE. On July 27, approximately two weeks after the issue went to press, the White House announced that it is planning to repatriate two unnamed Gitmo detainees back to Algeria. Nabil's lawyer, Cori Crider, told me that she is certain Nabil Hadjarab is one of them. On August 25, Nabil will step off a plane and plant his feet into an uncertain future on Algerian soil. Former detainees are kept under intense travel restrictions long after they are allowed to leave the base, and it’s highly unlikely he will be allowed to see his family in France.

“There’s a form they try to make you sign,” Cori told me when I interviewed her following the announcement of the first instances of repatriation from Gitmo in nearly a year. “I tell them not to sign it,” she continued. “It says, ‘I admit that I was al Qaeda or Taliban. I will not return to the battlefield. I will bring no claims against the US government.’” Nabil has been cleared for release since 2007, but the Department of Defense doesn't admit to making mistakes.

As of July 30, 68 Gitmo detainees are still on hunger strike. Forty-four are being force-fed. Out of respect for Ramadan, soldiers insert their feeding tubes at night.

@mollycrabapple

More from Molly:

Molly Crabapple Draws Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray

Molly Crabapple Sent Us Sketches from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Pretrial Hearings at Gitmo

New York Cops Will Arrest You for Carrying Condoms

In the buildup to Julian Assange’s run for the Australian senate, VICE was invited to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a rare in-person interview. Our visit coincided with the conviction of Bradley Manning, the young US Army private whose alleged espionage put WikiLeaks on the map. Assange spoke to us about political payback, his plans for freeing the most famous whistle-blower in history, and why the world needs a WikiLeaks political party.

Watch the full-length interview tomorrow on VICE.com.

More about Bradley Manning and Julian Assange:

Bradley Manning Was Convicted of Espionage, and We Protested at the White House

The Torture of Bradley Manning

Julian Assange Isn't WikiLeaks

Click through to the next page for more from Lele Saveri and Francesco Igory Deiana.

More photo stuff from VICE:  

Interfearance

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Exogenesis

Yesterday it was announced that Sture Bergwall, formerly known as Thomas Quick, has been freed after spending 20 years locked up in mental institutions. He initially confessed to over 30 murders in Scandinavia and the last of his eight convictions came in 1994. Our friend Kristian Gidlund wrote the following article after the two met on May the 14th for the first (and probably only) time in their lives. Kristian is a 29-year-old journalist and drummer in the band Sugarplum Fairy. He suffers from terminal cancer and has, with his blog and book, helped thousands of Swedes to acknowledge death as a natural part of life.


Sture Bergwall and the author. (Photo by Caisa Ederyd)

In Sweden, Thomas Quick used to be considered to be the worst serial killer in existence. A predator with his sights set firmly on young boys, who he allegedly sexually abused before stabbing them to death with a knife. He was considered a living demon—evil personified—and he lived 20 minutes away from where I lived, in the valleys of Dalarna.

One day he escaped from the Säter Hospital, the psychiatric clinic where he was locked up, convicted of eight murders—among other things. I remember the panic among all the kids in the schoolyard. Our parents picked us up from school and we had to play inside for the rest of the day.
   
Twenty years later and I’m facing death. For real this time. The cancer that was discovered in my body has forced doctors to remove my stomach and my spleen. It has forced me to go through two dozen sessions of chemo treatments while feasting on my existence. I’m fading away. I’m headed towards death.

During the past two years, I’ve been blogging about my inevitable demise, and the blog has grown to become quite well-read in Sweden. One day, a comment popped up on one of my entries from Thomas Quick, the walking demon. "I recognized myself in your destiny," he wrote. "It was an existential recognition. You were standing in front of death, with the cancer. I used to have death by my side and I lived in a valley of death. Although I can sense life today, I can still fully understand your situation of facing the end of life."

Thomas Quick—who has now reverted to his birth name of Sture Bergwall—speaks softly. He's tall, much taller than I'd expected. And he stands with his arms behind his back when I enter the visiting room of the clinic. I sense insecurity behind his eyes as he surveys the room and looks back to me as if he's searching for something in particular. He smiles gently, dresses well, snuffs portions of Swedish tobacco snus, and drinks his coffee without sugar.

In one of the corners of the room are some boxes containing an assortment of toys. In another corner, two wardens await, observing our meeting, occasionally checking back to the headlines in their gossip magazines.

"I feel so much more alive today than how I have in many, many years," Bergwall started. "I have the years of Thomas Quick, and then I have the seven silent years. They were really seven completely silent years, when I was living here without any contact with any other human being, wandering in my cell and the corridors. I had no contact with anyone from the outside."

Since 2010, Sture had been exonerated from seven of the eight murder cases that he previously confessed to. He says that he initially confessed to the murders because he wanted a higher rank within the prison walls. At the time, he had become heavily addicted to medication, which were fed to him when he collaborated with police during the investigations.

When I spoke to Sture, he was waiting for the final murder charge against him to be dropped. 


Sture Bergwall, formerly known as Thomas Quick

VICE: How has your view of death changed since you withdrew your confessions? 
Sture Bergwall: I think my view of death changed in a very obvious way. Or rather, my relationship with death. I am no longer scared of death. I was always scared before, but ever since this new era began, I'm no longer frightened. I'm calm and safe in my everyday life. It might have something to do with the fact that I am calm in front of death. That might be it.

When I was young, I worked at a care home where an old lady was about to die. She had been very religious her whole life. I was sitting by her side a few hours before she passed and she opened herself up to me and said she was scared and started screaming, "I don't want to die!" She changed completely when death came so near her. Her calm disappeared and turned into panic. It was so shocking to me. A very dramatic experience.

Did it scare you?
Yes, it did scare me.

Do you think she lost her faith right there and then?
Yes. And I think I lost my faith in that very moment. For sure.
   
How is your relationship with Thomas Quick today?
It's nothing. Except for the fact that I have to deal with what happened during the years with him. That is something I work on all the time. This constant guilt. The constant problem of my life. Thomas Quick affected so many people. Thomas Quick affected my family, my siblings, and my siblings' children. Thomas Quick affected the relatives of dead people, people who had been troubled by severe crimes. I will always have to deal with that.

You say you don’t have any relationship with Thomas Quick today—is that even possible?
No, I have to relate to that all the time. But now, Thomas Quick is dead. And first and foremost, Thomas Quick was a fictional character. That makes it possible for me to relate to him so he doesn’t kill me today.

Even if you consider him dead, can you still feel any remorse over what he did?
Absolutely. It’s a part of my everyday situation, to carry that weight. And you have to be clear about that—I carried Thomas Quick's language, Thomas Quick's gestures and so forth.

When we talk about this remaining conviction, I get the feeling that you have a certain sense of confidence that you'll be freed.
Yes, I do. I didn't make the last two appeals. And the Court of Appeal has approved a rising in my case. This essentially means that I’m going to be freed from the charges.

What is the first thing you will do when you finally become a free man?
The first thing I will do is to walk straight ahead. My goal is to be the one opening the door and then walking straight ahead. And to walk on the road all by myself.

Being so close to freedom, aren't you terrified that you will stumble on the finishing line?
No. This is the safety that I have. I’ve been so sure in this process. I could never have imagined that it was going to take so long, but I’ve been sure all the way.
   
You’ve been locked up in here for 23 years, and because of it you’ve lost a lot of things in life. What do you miss the most?
I miss that I haven’t seen people grow up or grow old. And something else you mentioned on your blog: the grief. You mourn the life you’re not going to have and I mourn the life you never had.

I think about this recognition you talk about, too. Because perhaps, in a strange way, I feel that we have a point of reference. In a way, we both get closer to this point in two completely different ways, me with my illness that will eventually take my life, and you who, up until recently, were considered to be the most feared serial killer in Swedish history.
Why yes, that's exactly how it is. But I find that these meeting points are very interesting and they make everything very interesting. It's like this junction where we meet makes it all very alive.

Yeah, that's what made me feel this meeting could be interesting, because we have crashed into each other, in a way. If you think about it, our situations are very different, but when we're here, right now, we are both in the same situation. When we started emailing each other, I almost got the feeling that we both viewed death in the same way. Or perhaps what we both think will happen after death. I think we both had a very similar perspective. Maybe not as a physical journey, more like a psychological state of mind when you travel in space, through the galaxies.
Yeah. I thought it was awesome when you told me in an email that you were reading this book Kosmos, which is a book I constantly turn to.

Yes, that surprised me. I believe that when I die I will begin a journey, which all sounds very abstract and odd when you talk about it. But I think I'll travel through space and get a feeling—a mixture between an orgasm and sinking down in a warm bath. And something will give me all the answers to everything I ever wondered. Riddles dissolve. How does that fit into your picture of death?
I recognize myself in that. The first time I heard you talking about this was on TV, and my tears fell. This was because I recognize that way of thinking, and to be able to imagine is an important ability to have. To be able to say that it might not happen that way, but that it also might. To dare to have both perspectives—I think that's full of consolation.

I grew up in Borlänge, where—and I guess the attitude was the same all over Sweden—you were considered a demon, the most terrifying man in the country. As a child I was afraid of Thomas Quick. What do you think when I tell you that?
It’s hard, but at the same time I have to admit that this is the way it was. But it was also as if Sweden needed a demon. Somebody to point at and to be scared of. To fulfill that need… that’s spooky.
 
But the image of Thomas Quick that society had was based on your own confessions.
Exactly, absolutely. To have been the tongue who said all those things is incredibly hard today. But for the sake of my own context, for the sake of love, I have to adapt to it in a good way. And by "a good way," I mean acknowledging that, yeah, that’s how it was.

The author.

I told you that I grew up being afraid of Thomas Quick. Looking back at that time today, are you afraid of Thomas Quick at all?
No, I'm not. And that's rooted in the fact that he was fiction. But it scares me that he took on this role in the limelight. There was a group of people who wanted him convicted and locked up, no matter the costs. Today, my siblings tell me, "You were sick, you had a certain need to be protected, and society didn't sort that out for you. It was rather the opposite—society took advantage of your needs instead." That is frightening. Thomas Quick himself isn't frightening. Society's way of dealing with him is.  

So it's rather the interpretation of him that's frightening?
Yes. This thing with pushing for him to be convicted and so forth.  

What are you scared of the most?
That my brother will die. He has had cancer and a couple of heart attacks. He must be alive when I get out of here. After that, he can die.

Do you remember your first love?
Yeah, I do. It was at high school. I fell in love with a classmate. It was a guy and I remember it very, very well. But I could never tell him that I was in love because you couldn’t do that in 1964. Homosexuality was still classified as a disease. There were no closets to come out from.

What did you do with this love?
I romanticized it—wrote love letters, poems, and novels and was at the same time desperate.

Did he ever find out?
No, he didn’t.

When I leave Sture at the heavily guarded facility, I walk out with mixed emotions. I came there to meet the most hated man in Sweden—a man who scared the shit out of me as a child. But with the hospital entrance behind me and the mirror-black lake of Ljustern in front of me, I wonder who it was I actually met: a man thrashed by the Swedish system of justice, or a hoaxing maniac who can get anybody to believe anything he says?

I still receive messages from Sture. He often writes just one line: "All the best thoughts to you."

I never know what to answer.

More stuff about murderers:

The Huayno Murders Sentence

Murders in K-Town

Did a Murderer Just Give Himself Away on Yelp?