Vimeo / Medill Reports – via Iframely

Video: Askar and Asef Askar talk about how they got into MMA and how they hope to destroy the negative stereotypes cast on Arabs and Muslims (Michael Bacos/Medill)

CHICAGO — Askar Askar and his brother Asef were teenagers when they came to the United States from Palestine in 2001 to reunite with their father.

They were bullied in school because of their ethnicity. So Askar’s dad enrolled him in tae kwon do in Chicago, while Asef decided to bulk up by lifting weights until he decided to take a tae kwon do class, too.

Then one day, when walking home from the class, they stumbled across an LA Boxing gym and decided to take up MMA.

“We went in and got our asses whooped the first day,” said Askar. “It was a straight-six-month period of getting destroyed.”
The brothers decided to quit, but one of the coaches berated them, inspiring them to give it another shot.

Years later, they have moved on from beating bullies.

Now, they are moving into the professional ranks.

Askar racked up a 7-2 record in the amateur MMA ranks and won his first professional fight Saturday in Michigan City, Indiana. On the same card, Asef improved to 4-0 as an amateur and retained his Hoosier Fight Club featherweight title.

Being Palestinian, Asef said, is great preparation for MMA.

“Palestinians go through wars everyday,” he said. “We’re some of the toughest people out there.”

Askar has experienced his share of racism during his first few fights for Hoosier Fight Club.

“Every time I walked out, I got booed,” said Askar. “You get that one guy that’s pretty racist and starts yelling, spitting and being judgmental against us. The biggest thing is, you ignore it and prove them wrong in the cage.

“Just because you think a guy with a long beard, long hair and a turban blows up stuff doesn’t mean it’s all of them. I want to prove everyone who thinks we’re a terrorist wrong.”

The Palestinian community in Chicago has thrown its support behind the Askar brothers –including an estimated 500-1,000  fans at their fights in Indiana.

They hope to become so popular that Palestinians will fly to the States to watch them fight.

“Sports helps you fit into American culture,” says Asef. “It shows that just because we’re Arab, we’re doing what everyone else is doing. It’s not like we stick to one thing because we’re from a certain culture or background.”

WASHINGTON – Nineteen Medill graduate students and four alums, all part of the school’s National Security Journalism Specialization Program, embedded at the National War College for two days in early November, attending lectures and seminars with senior military and government officials who both inspired and challenged the students.

Our visit began Nov. 5 at the gates of Ft. McNair at 0715 (military time), an historic post that now houses the War College and other graduate programs that are part of National Defense University. War college Dean David Tretler explained the rigorous one-year graduate program, saying those nominated by their service or government agency were tapped based on future leadership potential. Among the college’s graduates are Colin Powell and Dwight Eisenhower.

The speaker for that day’s lecture was Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command; he also is a National War College alum. Afterward, we participated in small group seminars with the college’s students to discuss issues of cybersecurity and military strategy.

A campus tour and lunch buffet afforded us even more quality time with the senior military and government officials, where we engaged in deep discussions regarding global politics, economics and security. I had the opportunity to meet a female Army officer who has had four deployments to Afghanistan; we discussed topics ranging from her experience serving overseas, to health crises facing India’s population, to my aspirations as a journalist interested in social justice, security and health issues.

Our first day at the college ended with a panel discussion covering issues between media and military to better inform our stories. Defense reporter Kristina Wong of The Hill noted the difficulty of reaching sources and accessing necessary information, while Col. Edward W. Thomas, Jr. noted the potential security problems facing the nation should the wrong information be reported.

The second day of our visit included a lecture on defense diplomacy by Col.l Robert Timm and additional time in our seminar groups. The visit concluded after a working lunch where expert professors and military personnel touched upon issues of energy and oil, Europe’s impending economic decline and China’s growing naval strength as part of a strategy to assert power and territorial dominance in the region.

The Medill National Security Specialization students, most in their first quarter of the graduate program, had the rare chance to not only learn about our nation’s security challenges and threats from top experts, but to witness first-hand how senior military and government leaders learn to think strategically about the U.S. role in dealing with those issues. That understanding will certainly inform our reporting as we move forward through Medill and into the professional journalism world.

Our  visit began Nov. 5 at the gates of Ft. McNair at 0715 (military time), an historic post that now houses the War College and other graduate programs that are part of National Defense University. War college Dean David Tretler explained the rigorous one-year graduate program, saying those nominated by their service or government agency were tapped based on future leadership potential. Among the college’s graduates are Colin Powell and Dwight Eisenhower.

The speaker for that day’s lecture was Adm. Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command; he also is an alum. Afterward, we participated in small group seminars with the college’s students to discuss issues of cybersecurity and military strategy.

A campus tour and lunch buffet afforded us even more quality time with the senior military and government officials, where we engaged in deep discussions regarding global politics, economics and security. I had the opportunity to meet a female Army officer who has had four deployments to Afghanistan; we discussed topics ranging from her experience serving overseas, to health crises facing India’s population, to my aspirations as a journalist interested in social justice, security and health issues.

Our first day at the college ended with a panel discussion covering issues between media and military to better inform our stories. Defense reporter Kristina Wong of The Hill noted the difficulty of reaching sources and accessing necessary information, while Col. Edward W. Thomas, Jr. noted the potential security problems facing the nation should the wrong information be reported.

The second day of our visit included a lecture on defense diplomacy by Col.l Robert Timm and additional time in our seminar groups. The visit concluded after a working lunch where expert professors and military personnel touched upon issues of energy and oil, Europe’s impending economic decline and China’s growing naval strength as part of a strategy to assert power and territorial dominance in the region.

The Medill National Security Specialization students, most in their first quarter of the graduate program, had the rare chance to not only learn about our nation’s security challenges and threats from top experts, but to witness first-hand how senior military and government leaders learn to think strategically about the U.S. role in dealing with those issues. That understanding will certainly inform our reporting as we move forward through Medill and into the professional journalism world.

Vimeo / Medill Reports – via Iframely

CHICAGO — The 2015 Welcome Home Warrior Summit took place at the UIC Pavilion on Saturday.

The event was designed to help bridge the gap between military and civilian life for veterans transitioning out of the service. Government offices, employment services and universities were on hand to give veterans the resources they need to create successful post-military lives.

Army veteran James J. Flagg created the Warrior Summit Coalition after his own frustrations with the Veterans Administration system while attending the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“In a six months timeframe, we created a task force at UIC’s campus that centralized all services for military vets,” Flagg said.

It is that philosophy that led to the creation of the Welcome Home Warrior Summit.

Government agencies including Gov. Bruce Rauner’s office and the Cook County Recorder of Deeds were present to educate veterans of their state benefits.  Non-profit organizations were also there to give veterans a way to continue serving after the military. When some veterans leave the service, they may feel a loss of purpose.

Organizations like The Mission Continues team veterans and the communities to tackle various projects together. This way, veterans feels integrated within a community while fulfilling their desire to serve a greater good.

Veterans still face a tough time with post-military life, especially when interacting with other civilians.

“The customs that we’re so used to while in the service, you have to get that mentality out of your head,” Marine vet John Aranda said. “The way we interacted with each other in the military is something we can’t do in the civilian world.”

A UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter being operated by B Company, 43rd Assault Helicopter Battalion, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, lifts off after having a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV) sling loaded to it by Soldiers on the ground assigned to Dog Company, 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 4th Infantry Division and Lithuanian Land Forces Soldiers assigned to the Grand Duchess Birutė Uhlan Battalion (BUB), during exercise Uhlan Fury being held at the Gen. Silvestras Zlikaliskas Training Area, Pabrade, Lithuania, Aug. 10, 2015. The U.S. units are in Europe as part of Atlantic Resolve, a demonstration of continued U.S. commitment to the collective security of NATO and to enduring peace and stability in the region. U.S. Army Europe is leading Atlantic Resolve enhanced land force multinational training and security cooperation activities taking place across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria to ensure multinational interoperability, strengthen relationships among allied militaries, contribute to regional stability and demonstrate U.S. commitment to NATO. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. James Avery, 16th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

That’s because the US Army chose Oshkosh Defense to manufacture about 55,000 joint light tactical vehicles (JLTVs) that will become the successors to Humvees and mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs). The initial contract awarded to Oshkosh on Tuesday is for $6.7 billion and 17,000 vehicles. The total contract, valued at up to $30 billion, could provide the Wisconsin-based company with work through 2040.

The new offering provides underbody and side-armor protection similar to a tank’s, but retains the on-ground and in-theater mobility of an all-terrain vehicle. The vehicle’s reduced weight allows it to be transported by Chinook helicopters and amphibious vessels, a feat that was largely impossible with MRAPs.

Thousands of MRAPs were purchased in response to the traditional Humvees’ failures to sufficiently protect troops from the widespread use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by Iraqi insurgents in the mid-2000s. It was not unusual for soldiers to stack sandbags on the floors of the vehicles for added protection — and still have to contend with canvas for doors. The introduction of the MRAP solved the protection problem, though it came at the expense of battlefield mobility.

“Our JLTV has been extensively tested and is proven to provide the ballistic protection of a light tank, the underbody protection of an MRAP-class vehicle, and the off-road mobility of a Baja racer,” John M. Urias, president of Oshkosh Defense, said in a statement.

The new vehicle reflects the military’s various needs in modern warfare — protecting troops from roadside bombs, traversing mixed terrain quickly, transporting vehicles within and between combat theaters.

The Humvee, which has been the military’s go-to vehicle for decades, was born in 1979, when AM General began early design work on the M998 Series high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle — or HMMWV, pronounced “Humvee” — to replace the legendary Army Jeep. In 1983, the company was awarded an initial contract worth $1.2 billion to make 55,000 Humvees.

The Humvee has since accompanied troops in Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But now the mainstay military vehicles are being sold off by the dozen, with the bidding starting at $7,500.

In the early ’90s, AM General began production of the Hummer, the Humvee’s commercial spinoff. General Motors later assembled, distributed, and marketed the vehicle before it was discontinued. The last new Hummer was sold in 2010.

The Pentagon dismissed the Humvee’s original manufacture’s design concept for the JLTV, along with an offering by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it was disappointed that the Army and Marine Corps did not select its design.

“We believe we presented a very strong solution and await the customers’ debrief to hear more detail regarding the reasons behind this selection before making a decision about a potential protest,” the statement said.

If the defense goliath chooses to protest the Pentagon’s decision, the Government Accountability Office, which has a forum to resolve disputes over awards of federal contracts, will review the military’s decision.

AM General also expressed disappointment in the decision and is “considering all available options,” a company spokesman said in a statement.

The competition to win the multi-billion dollar contract began in 2012. Each competitor provided 22 prototypes for the JTLV program. These were then tested over a 14-month period.

“I am tremendously proud of the JLTV program team,” Heidi Shyu, the assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, said in the announcement. “Working with industry, they are delivering major improvements in protected mobility for soldiers and have succeeded in executing a program that remains on-budget and on-schedule.”

Oshkosh is scheduled to begin manufacturing the vehicles in the first quarter of 2016 so the Army can start getting the trucks in the field by 2018.

Published in conjunction with

DFID Burma (Courtesy of the UK Department for International Development)

WASHINGTON – Conflict and poverty are key factors in the emergence of disease worldwide according to Dr. Peter Hotez, who is President Barack Obama’s appointed science envoy focused on global health and vaccine development.

Hotez is one of four presidentially appointed scientists tasked with taking on a major scientific challenge on behalf of the United States.

“The forces of poverty and conflict are driving the emergence of disease,” said Hotez in a recent interview. He is finishing a book on the topic and has focused much of his work on the issue in his role as dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College in Houston and as the President of the Sabine Vaccine Institute in Washington.

He looks back and various instances of pandemics and disease outbreaks and points to either poverty or conflict – or often both – as the root cause for the impact on human life.

“One of the reasons Ebola came out of West Africa…was that those countries had emerged out of 10 years of devastating conflict with a complete breakdown in public health infrastructure, human migrations, deforestation,” said Hotez. All those forces combine to create the perfect storm that allowed Ebola to flourish. This is not new. This has been a recurring theme that we have seen since the 1970s.”

He believes the next Ebola will be the diseases coming out of areas occupied by ISIS. The Middle East and North Africa will be the next big wave of catastrophic epidemics “and it would be nice if we could be proactive about it for once,” said Hotez.

He went on to describe that there is a critical failure in the pathway toward vaccine development. The institutions that are responsible for strategic preparations are lacking the ability to make products. For instance, the Ebola vaccine was sitting with completed science for more than 10 years but with no manufacturer until it was too late said Hotez.

“That really was a terrible failure.”

Though the community still has a long, said Hotez, they are now working with the Saudis and the Malaysians to build vaccine infrastructure through public-private partnerships.

The refugee camps for those fleeing ISIS have become a hot bed of Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that causes scarring skin ulcers and can be fatal, said Hotez. The disease is transmitted through a bite from a sand fly and with the hastily set up refugee camps, piles of trash have made a home for the insects.

“There has been an explosion in cases coming out of the conflict zones,” he said.

The WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office, based out of Cairo, is responsible for surveillance in the camps receiving refugees from the ISIS areas. The problem is they only get a glimpse of what is spilling out of the conflict zones and coming across the borders, said Hotez.

There have been more than 100,000 new cases of Leishmaniasis in the last 18 months and the locals call it “lepo evil,” said Hotez.

He said that the major driving force in disease is human behavior.

“Everyone is focusing on climate change right now but I think it’s actually social forces that are far more important,” said Hotez.

“IED Baghdad from munitions”. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IED_Baghdad_from_munitions.jpg#/media/File:IED_Baghdad_from_munitions.jpg

WASHINGTON – Chemicals are an important part of modern society but, in the wrong hands, they can be deadly weapons. The government has recognized this danger and taken on the act of trying to protect the American people by protecting the stocks of chemicals across the country.

Since the 9/11 attacks the United States has collectively feared a repeat terrorist attack on domestic soil. In, then-President George W. Bush called for the creation of what is now called the Department of Homeland Security to address and attempt to resolve this very fear.

Part of that effort includes the work done by the Office of Infrastructure Protection, which has a mission to work with the chemical industry to protect critical infrastructure, including chemical facilities, from terrorist attacks.

A key piece of the critical infrastructure that needs to be protected is chemical facilities.

“We are talking about things where people could turn a facility into a weapon much like the terrorists in 9/11. They took something that we would not have expected to be used as a weapon and turned it into [a weapon]. And this presents a significant concern for the department,” said Todd Klessman, a senior policy advisor at the Department of Homeland Security.

He said there are two main concerns when it comes to chemical site facilities. The first is the prevention of an attack directly on the facility. Some of these sites are located in heavily populated urban areas. A release of a toxic gas or substance would result in many people injured or dead. Experts point to the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984, in which a gas leak at a pesticide plant killed at least 3,787 people and injured more than 550,000 others.

The second concern is a terrorist stealing chemicals to build a bomb elsewhere, Klessman said at a talk about chemical weapons and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington based think tank.

Acknowledging this infrastructure vulnerability, Congress authorized the creation of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program in 2007 and reauthorized it for an additional four years in 2014. This legislation gave DHS regulatory authority over “high-risk chemical facilities.” The first task was to determine what that category meant.

“What we decided was that it didn’t really matter what type of facility these chemicals were at. The chemicals will present threats or risk based on their nature, not necessarily the type of facility,” said Klessman, in an interview.

The department developed a list of 325 chemicals of interest and set out to base their regulator efforts on this list, rather than on categories of facilities. Each of the chemicals on the list presented a security risk in at least one of three categories:

• Release hazards – Toxics, flammables and explosives
• Theft aversion hazards ­– Precursors to chemical weapons, explosives, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or weapons of mass destruction
• Sabotage hazards – Chemicals that when mixed with water will turn into toxic hazards

This results in DHS regulating a large swath of industry that is not just limited to what would traditionally be classified as chemical facilities. Alongside the many manufacturing facilities regulated are mines, education facilities, prisons and wineries.

Once the department has determined that a facility is within the highest risk category, it works with a company to implement an appropriate security plan. There are about 3,000 facilities in the high-risk category with only 111 falling into the highest risk group.

“Rather than give prescriptive standards and tell a facility that they must have this type of fence or they must have this type of camera system, we’ve identified 18 areas of security and asked the facility to tell us how they are going to address this,” said Klessman. This allows the facilities to build up on what they already have in place and recognizes that this is not a one size fits all security solution.

“It also makes it so that the terrorists cannot simply read our manual and determine how they can overcome our security,” he said. “If we had a requirement of a ten foot fence then the terrorist could just go build an 11-foot ladder.”

She is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive Islamist group through which Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi rose to power. Morsi was removed by a military coup just a year after taking power in 2013 and his group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was banned on Dec. 25, 2014, and labeled a terrorist organization by the military-led government.

“I am not really interested in marches anymore,” Sarah said. “We are depending on the other work more,” referring to torching police cars and threatening police forces.

After months of seeing many family and friends killed, beaten and imprisoned by the security forces, Sarah had decided peaceful protest was not sufficient.

Sarah was a believer in peaceful means of protesting and calling for change, even though oppression is not new to her family. Her father is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood member, as is her mother. Her father was detained a number of times under former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule. But she never had those radical thoughts back then.

What she was exposed to throughout the past few years since the uprising has taken her to a different level. She went from so much hope for change and a better life to this – embracing violence as a means of change because she believes it’s the only viable option.

Sarah is not alone. There are thousands of young men and women in Egypt who have similar stories.

As the government intensifies the crackdown on dissent, radicalism among youths in Egypt spreads. This comes at time when militants are carrying out more sophisticated attacks in Egypt.

Egypt is creating a new generation of terrorists, a bomb that’s going to explode in the face of not only Egypt, but also the whole region.

I talked to Sarah a few months ago and wasn’t surprised by what I heard. In a phone interview, she said that many of her close friends are longing to join ISIS, they are just waiting for the right moment. They are desperate, and they have no hope, faith or trust in the system, she said.

Thousands of the Muslim Brotherhood members and their supporters staged two huge sit-ins (Rabaa and El Nahda) in Cairo and Giza to protest the removal of Morsi. http://bit.ly/1HTzbzO

Supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi push to get a free meal in the tent city near the mosque in Rabaa, in Cairo, Egypt. During the holy month of Ramadan Muslims refrain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset. (Amina Ismail/MCT)

Sarah’s husband is a journalist who was arrested while covering the Rabaa massacre, one of the sit-ins the Egyptian military stormed in August 2013, killing hundreds.

He was beaten and put in solitary confinement for months during a year of imprisonment, with no formal charges brought against him. Sarah’s sister, who is a Brotherhood member, was arrested, beaten by security forces and forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded and filthy prison cells for participating in a protest.

Sarah also was among the protestors in Rabaa. As much as she disagreed with Morsi’s performance during his one year in power, she believed that the only way he should be removed from power is through elections.

I bumped into her at the makeshift morgue in Rabaa, when I was covering the dispersal of Rabaa on August 14, 2013 for McClatchy News Service.

She was sobbing in front of a room that was packed bodies of protesters, killed by security forces.

Bodies lie in a makeshift morgue in the basement of Rabaa field Hospital, near the sire of one of the two sit-ins on behalf of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Wed, August 14, 2013. This is where I bumped into Sarah. (Amina Ismail/MCT) http://gtty.im/1UTdoBy

Some of her friends were among those who were covered in blood and lying on the ground in this room.

Former Defense Minister Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi took power in June 2014 after a presidential election in which he won more than 96 percent of the vote. Human rights have been suffering since his election. Sisi “has overseen a reversal of the human rights gains that followed the 2011 uprising,” according to Human Rights Watch 2014 report.

“Egypt’s human rights crisis, the most serious in the country’s modern history, continued unabated throughout 2014.”

A soldier stands guard Monday, Nov. 18, 2013 near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt at a memorial to those killed two years ago in clashes with security forces. Then protesters were demanding an Egypt no longer governed by the military. (Amina Ismail/MCT) MCT http://bit.ly/1IOyk4j

Nearly 2,600 people have been killed in violence in the 18 months since the military ousted Morsi in 2013, according to the National Council of Human Rights.

Hundreds of them were killed in one day — Aug 13, 2013.The carnage of that day was called “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,” as described by Human Rights Watch.

Bodies of protesters killed during clashes lie on the floor of a field hospital in the Rabaa district of Cairo. Dozens also were wounded, many with gunshots to the head or chest. (Amina Ismail/MCT)

Scene in front of the morgue the next day (Amina Ismail) http://bit.ly/1E0eNlB

Bodies of protesters killed by Egyptian security forces lie on the floor in front of Zeynhoum Mourge is Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Aug 15, 2013. (By Amina Ismail)

Thousands of mass arrests, abuses and torture continue to happen, though the government has never issued official numbers of arrests. According to estimates by Amnesty International, citing local human rights groups, 22,000 people have been arrested since Morsi’s ouster. Local human rights activists believe that the numbers are as high as 41,000 of people arrested, sentenced or incited.

Egypt’s jails are packed with unlawfully detained prisoners; many of them university students who were arbitrary arrested during protests or for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of the prisoners have been tortured, stripped naked, beaten and then dumped in inhumane overcrowded prison conditions, with no formal charges brought against them.

Detainees, including a journalist, are held in a Cairo courtoom. (Amina Ismail)

Along with mass arrests come mass trials and mass sentencing. In March 2014, 529 people were sentenced to death, in a trial that lacked basic due process protection. There was just one court session before the judge ruled on this case.

With mass trials and mass death sentences, hope for justice fades. For decades, the judiciary has been the arm of the regime.

Sisi promised to restore order and stability in Egypt.

However, since Sisi took power, terrorist attacks and violence of armed groups have dramatically escalated.

Just in the past couple of months there has been a mounting series of attacks in Egypt.

This week, the self-proclaimed Islamic State group’s branch in Sinai released a video threatening to behead a Croatian hostage if Egyptian authorities did not release all the “Muslim women” in prisons. The Croatian, who identifies himself as Tomislav Salopek, was captured on July 22 in Cairo.

The violence continues. The county’s top prosecutor was assassinated in Cairo an unknown militant group calling itself Tahrir Brigades’, militants in northern Sinai have carried an attack on soldiers killing tens of them, and the latest major attack was on the Italian Consulate’s compound in downtown Cairo, in which ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombing that resulted in the death of a man, immense damage to the building and rupture of the underground water pipes.

Sisi’s dictatorial and repressive policy is resulting in the expansion of insurgency in Egypt; Islamist youth are resorting to violence, like Sarah.

After the disposal of Morsi, hundreds of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership were arrested, leaving thousands of youth with no guidance. The leadership structure of the well-organized group was ruptured.

It isn’t just the regime that is cracking down on the Islamists, the society is also discriminating against them and the media are perpetuating this sentiment.

After the court outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, identifying or being seen as a member of the group or even a sympathizer has became tantamount to being a terrorist. The government and media have portrayed the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood as a fight against terrorism. Media in Cairo have encouraged regular citizens to report Muslim brotherhood members to the police. TV channels have broadcasted hotlines for citizens to call upon their suspicion. The media in Egypt is controlled by the government.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a discussion at George Washington University on the dangers and motives of foreign fighters from Europe and the U.S. who travel to the Middle East to join ISIS.

Muslims in European societies, especially in France, are not fully integrated. They are often marginalized, poor and discriminated against — motives that drive European Muslims to go to fight in the Middle East, according to Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College London. Neumann was one of the speakers of the three-member panel.

“Imagine you are a 20-year-old Muslim in a deprived suburb of Paris and you know that you don’t have a lot of opportunities in French society,” Neumann told the audience.

“You look at the fighters’ pictures with guns, amongst brothers, who are seen as heroes in that society, who are incredibly successful and powered and admired. Yet, six months ago, looked like someone like you with no prospects in European society, with no hope and probably a life of petty crime ahead of himself.”

With social media today, it is easy to communicate with those people and create personal ties and identity, Neumann added.

Neumann’s point carries weight outside of Europe, too. Don’t Egyptians have stronger motives to join militant groups? At least, in Europe there aren’t mass arrests, torture, extreme poverty and high illiteracy rates.

The Egyptian authorities should stop relying on mass arrests, torture and death sentences to fight radicalism and shut dissent, because in fact it is contributing to the instability.

Neumann talked about the importance of integrating returning foreign fighters from the Middle East into the society — at least those who haven’t committed major crimes.

He referred to a story not widely known about the late Osama bin Laden, who was a foreign fighter in Afghanistan before he became an international terrorist. After the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan and ended the war in 1980, he tried to reconcile with the Saudi government and he offered his services to help fight the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Bin Laden didn’t have a game plan for the next 10 to 20 years. In short, he was not re-integrated into civil society.

“I think it is the same for a lot of foreign fighters who decided to return to their home countries, but they are keeping their options open,” Neumann said.

One would wonder, if the Saudi government reconciled with Bin Laden in the 90’s, would 9/11 unfold the way it did?

This is similar to the foreign fighters returning to Europe; they should be reintegrated into the society.

In Egypt, also, the government should start reconciling with the Islamist youth and reintegrate them back into the society.

Neumann had another interesting suggestion: every European country should have a hotline that parents could call – one not answered by police.

“Ninety-nine percent of parents don’t want their kids to go to Syria and die, but they often don’t call the police because as much as they don’t want their children to die, they don’t want them to go to prison for 20 years,” he said.

This suggestion could also work in Egypt, but first, the regime should start building trust with its people and put aside all the political disputes.

In 2013, Sarah warned of violent escalation if the regime continued to crackdown on dissent.

The government “is creating terrorists,” she said back then.

Unfortunately for Egypt and the world, her prediction has come true.

(Some of the quotes I’ve used in this blog are taken from a story I wrote for McClatchy Newspapers in 2013: http://bit.ly/1IOyk4j)

“You’re seeing sort of these odd historic partnerships grow,” Jerry Hendrix, the director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security, told VICE News. “All this means that the South China Sea isn’t going to be settled in the way that China desires it to be any time soon.”

China is the most active country that has declared dominion over islands in the South China Sea and reclaimed land by piling dredged sand on top of narrow reefs, but it’s not the only one. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines have all engaged in this, just to a far lesser degree. As of June, the Chinese had reclaimed more than 2,900 acres of land, according to the US Department of Defense. In comparison, the Philippines had built up only 14 acres.

“China has now reclaimed 17 times more land in 20 months than the other claimants combined over the past 40 years, accounting for approximately 95 percent of all reclaimed land in the Spratly Islands,” wrote the Department of Defense in the Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy, which it released last week.

Some in the Philippines are wary of Japan because of its occupation of the country during World War II, as well as of the US owing to the Philippine-American War and its Cold War military presence in the region. Despite this, the Philippine government sees the strategic advantage of fostering these partnerships.

“The government, recognizing its strategic position, would love to see the US visit regularly — like on a weekly basis,” Hendrix remarked. In exchange, the US can further project its influence toward Asia, which has been the focus of a pivot in foreign policy on the part of the Obama administration.

It is a lot like the local convenience store that gives the cops free coffee when they come by. The increased police presence this encourages helps to deter criminals from robbing the place. Even if the storeowner isn’t always on the best terms with the cops on the beat, it’s still better to give away some coffee than it is to get robbed.

In April 2014, the US signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the island nation. The agreement would allow US troops to build facilities and store gear in the country, and to conduct joint training exercises with the Philippine military.

“The EDCA facilitates increased bilateral defense cooperation activities by providing the US access to [Philippine military] facilities and areas on a rotational basis,” Department of Defense spokesman Commander Bill Urban told VICE News. “The US government is not building any bases in the Republic of the Philippines.”

Earlier this year, Japanese and Filipino forces began joint military exercises for the first time. Already they have conducted two maritime exercises under the guise of humanitarian assistance and disaster response, but recent talks of establishing a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) indicate that this is the beginning of a burgeoning defense relationship between the two Asian countries.

The VFA would involve the exchange of military equipment and technology, as well as training and personnel exchanges, said Philippine Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin. Talks just started, however, and the Philippines’s last VFA, with Australia, took seven years to become official.

But not everyone in the Philippines is so thrilled about the new military cooperation, and both the VFA and EDCA are being legally challenged by local Filipino activists.

There is a natural resistance within the Filipino population to a foreign military presence. World War II episodes like the Bataan Death March, in which thousands died when Japan’s military brutally forced 76,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war to walk 66 miles, are still deeply resented by some Filipinos, Hendrix said.

Two former Philippine senators spoke out against Japanese military aid in Juneat the press club in Manila. Former Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani advocated for the creation of a self-supporting military and expressed grave caution about the cooperation with Japan.

“Don’t forget they invaded us,” Shahani said. “I watched the Japanese enter the Open City of Manila. And I cried. To see foreign troops enter your native land is one of the most humiliating experiences. I hope you will never experience that.”

But Japan has worked hard to rebuild its reputation in the post-WWII era, particularly with initiatives that offer economic assistance as well as disaster relief.

The US relationship with the Philippines has also changed in the past few decades. In 1992, after almost a century on the island, the Philippines kicked the US military out of Subic Bay Naval Base in the East China Sea as part of its effort to become militarily self-sufficient.

Nevertheless, the US says it still has the Philippines’ back.

“Our commitment to the Philippines is ironclad. We are in constant and close touch with our Philippine ally,” David Shear, assistant secretary of defense for Asian-Pacific security affairs, told VICE News during a Pentagon news conference. “There should be no doubt, either in the region or among our Philippine friends, about the strength of the American commitment and of the strength of the American deterrence.”

The Philippine government’s resources have grown strained as it deals with domestic terror attacks by Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda-linked militant group. Abu Sayyaf has been taking hostages and is holding at least nine people, according to the government-run Philippines News Agency.

“The Philippine Navy has a need for just about everything,” Douglas H. Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told VICE News. “They have never been able to maintain a viable navy or air force.”

Both Japan and the US have already provided the Philippines with equipment, including deeply discounted ships and planes. In 2011, the US refurbished two Coast Guard Hamilton-class cutters at a cost of $25 million and then gave them to the Philippine Navy free of charge. In 2013, it increased military aid to the Philippines by two-thirds.

More recently, in June, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III signed a deal with a Japanese shipbuilder to buy a fleet of 10 patrol vessels. The Japanese government financed the deal with a low-interest $150 million loan.

The Philippines’ military relationships are now anchored largely on China’s continuing reclamation and militarization of islands in the South China Sea.

“It is becoming increasingly clear why China desires to establish its hold over the islands and water in question,” Hendrix wrote in a recent piece for Defense One. “Despite arguments about energy and food supplies that may lay in abundance below the waters of the South China Sea, Beijing’s actions make increasingly clear that it seeks control for its own military advantage and to establish dominance over the other nations in the region.”

Published in conjunction with

(Taylor Hall/MEDILL NSJI)

You’re going to Guantanamo.

There’s a war court hearing, you’re a journalism student and you’ve been selected to go.

For years you have associated this word – Guantanamo – with torture, and a queasy tightening in your chest. The physical reality of Guantanamo, the place, never really occurred to you before this moment. It always seemed light-years away, physically and metaphysically.

But there’s no time to process this or critically assess any of the assumptions you carry because now there’s an onslaught of forms to fill out, and you need to make a photocopy of your passport by noon or you won’t be guaranteed a spot on the chartered military flight.

“The Defense Department will facilitate media access to the maximum extent possible, in an effort to encourage open reporting and promote transparency,” one form reads.

Six paragraphs down: “the Department of Defense is the sole release authority for all military information contained in all media.”

Later: “Failure to comply with these ground rules could result in permanent expulsion… of the parent news organization from further access to GTMO or to military commissions.”

The rush of rules and dizzying down-is-up rationales has only just begun.

Hurriedly you read it and pen your initials to the 13 pages, effectively forfeiting your ability to talk to certain people (detainees, Haitian and Jamaican contract workers, others) and to take certain photos (of detainees, military personnel, gates, power supplies, security measures) in the name of national security. I should read this over more carefully later, and maybe with a lawyer, you think, knowing you won’t.

You have a week to prepare, so you read up on the detainee’s case, meet with Pentagon defense lawyers, study the history of the military commissions, watch a documentary about the detention camps, and buy some bug spray.

You brush up on the history. The U.S. scored the land for the Navy base in a deal with Cuba in 1903 for $2,000 in gold a year, and still pays a pittance in rent. Washington also made sure only it could terminate the agreement.

Then came the 9/11 attacks, the “war on terrorism” and the Navy base became home to the infamous Joint Task Force prison camps, which opened in 2002 to house those captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the early feverish days, there were more than 600 prisoners held there. Now the camps are down to 116 prisoners, the last of whom arrived in 2008.

Too soon the day arrives, and you’re waiting with your luggage in line at Andrews Air Force Base, not fully grasping that the men and women chatting freely in line with you wearing khaki shorts will soon transform into uniformed military legal teams, inevitably unavailable for comment.

Media board the flight first and sit cloistered in the back. You sit next to Carol Rosenberg, a Miami Herald reporter who has covered Guantanamo longer than anyone else.

She is working on the flight, striking up conversations. You listen.

Upon landing you are introduced to your military handlers for the week. They are white men in their thirties with young children back home. Most served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are new to Guantanamo and will be here for nine months. They seem like good people, as military guards who read over your shoulder and decide which of your pictures to delete each day go.

You and your media colleagues work from a windowless room in an old converted warehouse where you assume (correctly, you think) that everything you say and do is monitored. There’s a key code to the door that only your military handlers know.

They give you a press badge emblazoned with a bold “M” and tell you to never take it off, even when you’re running or smoking or at dinner (all of which are necessarily accompanied by military handlers).

You ponder the Foucauldian panopticon nature of things for both detainees and media here, and reflect on the Joint Task Force Guantanamo motto: “Safe. Humane. Legal. Transparent.”

Your guards are, practically speaking, inescapable, but at least they are nice. You know they are just doing their job.

In a turn that comes unexpected to you (but not to Carol Rosenberg) you are informed Sunday evening that the military hearings you planned to cover Monday-Friday have been put on hold until Wednesday. You are given no explanation for the delay.

In the meantime, your military handlers scramble to find you things to do.

You ask to see the detention camps. The guards suggest snorkeling.

You visit many parts of Guantanamo in your non-commission downtime: the radio station, the windmills that power the self-sustaining base, the old lighthouse.

You marvel at the incredibly unremarkable quotidian nature of this small town base – surreal precisely because it is so normal.

You expected some sort of unsettling psychic footprint from the terrorist masterminds and torture incidence rate. Instead you eat fajitas and drink craft beer at the base’s Irish bar, O’Kelly’s. In your notes one night, you write that the dining experience was “average.”

The next morning you visit the original detention center that was tossed together to jail the first detainees back in 2002. Camp X-Ray, as it was known, was closed in April 2002 following outcry over human rights violations.

You are shown the old dog kennels, which were the only constructions in the camp with air conditioning. You walk through rows upon rows of empty chicken wire cages, once used to house America’s most wanted. You are told that nearly 300 men once lived in these 8 foot by 8 foot cells, and were confined for all but 30 minutes of recreation time each day. You explore the original interrogation and interview buildings. Like the other facilities in Camp X-Ray, they are now completely defunct and overgrown, but someone has moved all of the furniture from the small wooden buildings into one room, and now all the rotting chairs are idly stacked and overturned. You can’t help but wonder what conversations were had in these chairs. You pick rusty bullet casings out of the dry ground. When you ask about them, you are told they were probably used to teargas detainees.

You leave and go straight to McDonald’s for a McGriddle and a large iced caramel latte. The drive from the infamous detention camps to the familiar golden arches takes five minutes. There is nothing remarkable or ceremonious about your passage through these overlapping normal and (to you) non-normal worlds.

On Wednesday morning the hearings commence.

You’re given a choice. You can sit in court with pen and paper and watch in person from a glass observer box while audio is piped in on a 40-second delay. Or you can sit in the media hangar and watch the delayed feed on TV and have access to your laptop and the Internet.

You choose to go see the court.

It’s set up like a regular courthouse, except you can’t bring anything with an on/off switch inside, and there are chains on the ground near the defense tables for shackling prisoners down should they become ‘difficult.’ There is a cartoonishly large red light next to the judge, which you have been told could light up at any time if top-secret matters are accidentally discussed and they need to cut audio in the observer room where the media sit.

According to the Military Commissions Act of 2009, certain aspects of the Constitution do not apply in this court.

During the hearing you see Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, alleged former senior commander of al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The Mosul, Iraq native is accused of masterminding attacks on American, Canadian, German, British, Estonian and Norwegian forces.
He is also accused of ordering an attack on a medical helicopter attempting to recover casualties from the battlefield, providing a reward to the Taliban for assassinating a civilian United Nations worker, and destroying historic Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
He is wearing clean white traditional clothes and his beard is long and grey. His voice is deep and when he speaks he sounds collected, dignified, well educated. You hear another reporter describe him as “almost elegant.”

You have studied his track record of war crimes carefully. Shouldn’t you be registering some sort of visceral response as a result of being physically near someone allegedly responsible for such gratuitous cruelties? You don’t.

The hearing is a dizzying blur in legalese: you learn that the prosecution dumped new evidence on the defense team Sunday night that raised potential conflict of interest issues. In the middle of the hearing, Hadi announces he wants new temporary legal representation.

At one point, the judge and defense realize that they’ve been reading from different versions of the Commissions manual. Eventually, the military judge postpones the proceedings indefinitely until everything can be sorted out. You understand now how these things have managed to drag on for many years, with no end in sight.

With hearings canceled, there is even more time to kill.

You attend a “South of the Border” themed all-you-can-eat dinner event. A group of teenaged mariachis from Orlando performs. Someone at your table brings up how good the sailing is here this time of year.

As you drink a margarita, you remind yourself that six hours ago you sat within earshot of someone who took direct orders from Osama bin Laden.

Later, you get to see the holding areas where they keep the prisoners before they appear in court. There are body cavity searching chairs, which look sort of like grey plastic thrones and restraint chairs, which look like a cross between a hospital gurney and a straight jacket. The rooms are a cloying yellow that immediately gives you a headache. When you ask who chose the color, you are told that yellow is calming.

There is a grill outside. You ask if they grill often.

“We have to be here 24/7, so…” your tour guide says. You wonder how long it takes for Guantanamo’s non-normal and normal worlds to completely collapse in a way that is routinized and totally palatable.

As you board your return flight the next day you wonder – given all of the institutional roadblocks – how you could ever produce meaningful coverage that adequately reflects this place’s complexities and contradictions in a way that amounts to more than a been-there, done-that dispatch from a place where the U.S. appears to have no foreseeable exit strategy and most of the country seems to have moved on from.

Soon it will be time to chat with the men and women in their polo shirts and shorts who couldn’t talk to you when you were all in Guantanamo.