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Death of a Prisoner: short documentary by Laura Poitras on Guantánamo detainee Adnan Latif

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:31:58 +0000

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, who is my colleague on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has a powerful short-form documentary film out today, via the New York Times' "op doc" series.

"Death of a Prisoner: The Tragic Return Home of a Guantánamo Bay Detainee" follows a journey to Yemen, to return the body of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif to his family. In 2012, he "died in solitary confinement at Guantánamo at age 36, after nearly 11 years of imprisonment there, despite never having been charged with a crime."

Mr. Latif’s death is under investigation by the United States military, which claims he committed suicide from an overdose of prescription medication complicated by acute pneumonia. But that’s hard to take at face value. Why was he placed in solitary confinement when he was suffering from acute pneumonia? How could he have overdosed on medication, given the strict protocols at Guantánamo? Why did it take three months for the body to be returned to Yemen? And finally, why are his autopsy and toxicology report classified and being withheld from his family?
These questions are not just about Adnan Latif. They also address the injustices that our government has instituted and normalized in the war on terror.

Read the rest of Poitras' account here.

And the video is also here on YouTube.

Today, it should be noted, is the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo as a terror detainee facility. What irony that Poitras' film was published by the Times on the same day as this pathetic op-ed arguing Gitmo should remain open.

Inside "Film City," Qatar

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:03:36 +0000

Longtime Boing Boing reader Jethro Stamps, a freelance photographer based in the middle east, shares a wonderful set of photographs he shot in Qatar at Film City, an old abandoned film set in the heart of the desert. "It's a very odd place indeed," he says, "made stranger by the fact no-one seems to know what any of it was ever used for."

More images and Jethro's story about the visit, below.

FILM CITY / Jethro Stamps.

Out on the deserted west coast of Qatar, well away from the construction and gridlock of the capital Doha, the scenery quickly turns bleak.

Over the course of two trips we planned to find and explore the fabled Film City, an old abandoned film set in the heart of the desert.

On the first trip we got lost and found nothing but some rocky outcrops, hewn into unlikely shapes by the coastal elements, along with a glorious sky (the final five shots in this set).

Our second trip saw us slightly better prepared and we found the lost set a mere five minute drive from our previous trip. It was significantly less interesting than we'd imagined.

So spotting a hut in the distance we drove to the next valley where most of these pictures where taken.

Old, abandoned round huts, solidly built, haphazardly scattered around the valley, one of which perched precariously on a seemingly inaccessible mound.

The only signs of life being a pair of abandoned boots, the occasional cairn and a skull and crossbones sprayed on one of the buildings.

There was a desert fox too, but it ran away. We have no idea what the huts were used for. Part of the film set perhaps?

All photos taken with a Canon 60D and a 17-40 f.4 L. The majority are HDRs taken using the excellent (and free!) Magic Lantern custom firmware tool.

All photos by Jethro Stamps. He's at jethro.stamps@gmail.com, if any assigning editors want to hire him for work!

(via BB Flickr Pool)

Crappy YouTube trailer leads to death of US diplomat and others in Mideast

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:36:09 +0000

Update: The whole thing sounds like a weird disinfo job. But, by whom and to what end? The AP has outed "Sam Bacile" as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian who claims the film supports the concerns of Christian Copts about their treatment by Muslims. On The Media notes that there's something fishy about the film dialogue. And Gawker has spoken to one of the actresses in the film, who says she had no idea what the film was really about.

The Associated Press identifies Sam Bacile as an Israeli filmmaker based in California who made an independently produced and financed anti-Muslim movie that's sort of "Birth of a Nation" meets "Bed Intruder." The YouTube trailer is embedded above, and it unapologetically attacks Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Bacile has no known prior history as a filmmaker.

His D-grade web trailer inspired (or, alternately, was used as cover for) attacks by ultra-conservative Muslims on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya. J Christopher Stevens, America's ambassador to Libya, and three American members of his staff were killed today in resulting violence.

From the Associated Press:

Speaking by phone Tuesday from an undisclosed location, writer and director Sam Bacile remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that the 56-year-old intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion. Protesters angered over Bacile’s film opened fire on and burned down the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan officials said Wednesday that Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed Tuesday night when he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff as the building came under attack by a mob firing machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

Bacile is a real estate developer in California who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew. “Islam is a cancer, period,” he told the AP. The video above is a trailer for his two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” which cost $5 million to produce and was, according to the director, backed by funding from 100 Jewish donors. There's an English version and an Arabic-dubbed version of the trailer here. Bacile reports that the entire film has been shown "once, to a mostly empty theater in Hollywood earlier this year."

Here is a list of other ambassadors who have died in the line of duty. Here is a Reuters slideshow of protesters outside the embassy in Libya.

Here, a longtime real-life and internet-space friend of Sean Smith, an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service stationed at the consulate writes about his life, legacy, and loss. Sean Smith was an EVE player and Something Awful forums moderator.

I’m clearly in shock as I write this as everything is buzzing around my head funnily and I feel kind of dead inside. I’m not sure if this is how I’m supposed to react to my friend being killed by a mob in a post-revolutionary Libya, but it’s pretty awful and Sean was a great guy and he was a goddamned master at this game we all play, even though a lot of people may not realize how significant an influence he had. It seems kind of trivial to praise a husband, father, and overall badass for his skills in an internet spaceship game but that's how most of us know him, so there you go.

Here's a thread at Something Awful that chronicles the live board reaction as news of Smith's death in the attack spread.

Below, via the Atlantic, a video of Ambassador Stevens at work

More: Boing Boing news archive for "Innocence of Muslims."

Dean Obeidallah: "Sacha Cohen's movie is a modern-day minstrel show"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:40:59 +0000

Comedian and former attorney Dean Obeidallah, co-director of the previously-Boinged documentary project, "The Muslims Are Coming!," is not a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie, "The Dictator." Regarding Cohen as "Gen. Shabazz Aladeen," the leader of a fictitious Arab country, Obeidallah writes: "Cohen, who is not of Arab heritage, plays this Arab character while sporting a long fake beard and speaking in a strong Arabic accent, which would be fine, except the character is showcasing the worst stereotypes of Arabs." (CNN.com)

Pizza Hut introduces a food-like pizza ringed with fractal cheeseburgers

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:00:21 +0000

Pizza Hut Middle East is pushing the envelope of edibility with their "royal" Crown Crust Pizza, which is a kind of hub-and-spoke bread-thing with cheeseburgers or chicken-cheeseburgers studded around a central, pizza-like wheel. A pair of suitably horrific TV ads round out the chimeric, what-hath-man-wrought motif.

Crown Crust Pizzas Add Cheeseburger & Chicken Fillet Gems to Crust (via Geekologie)

Video: In Syrian hospital, doctors torture patients brought in from protests

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:10:39 +0000

Channel 4 News this week aired graphic video secretly recorded by an employee at a hospital in Syria. The video shows evidence that doctors there torture patients. On orders of the Syrian government, protesters must be brought to this military facility for "treatment."

Habibi: graphic novel is blends Islamic legend, science fiction dystopia, love and loss

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:11:53 +0000

Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi is an enormous and genre-busting graphic novel that blends Islamic mysticism, slave/liberation narratives and post-apocalyptic science fiction, creating a story that is erotic, grotesque, and profoundly moving.

Habibi is set in an atemporal Middle Eastern country that seems at times to be caught in classical times, but whose landscape is dotted with derelict jeeps, poisoned water awash in rotting consumer goods and other elements from out of time. Dodola, a child bride, is captured by slavers who murder her older husband, a scribe who had reared her on the stories, sutras and legends he was paid to calligraph. On the run, she rescues a younger slave boy, Zam, and the two become refugees together. They find a new home in the desert, a strangely out of place wrecked ship amid the sands, which they make into a snug home. Dodola raises Zam as her son, and to feed them both, she must prostitute herself to the caravans that pass by their hiding place.

When violence comes again -- when Dodala is enslaved to a capricious sultan's harem -- Zam is on his own, and is also soon in trouble. The story veers into Scheherazade territory as Dodola tries to charm the sultan into releasing her, but with the dark threat that usually lurks in the background in Scheherazade brought to the foreground. Zam is battered by life and circumstance, mutilated and enslaved, and still the two pine for each other.

Habibi is told in a dreamlike, non-linear, dense style, with asides for swirling Islamic legends, the theory and practice of magic squares, the hidden meanings in Arabic calligraphy, jumping from time to time and place to place, giving the book a deep, mythic resonance. The tale is epic and often horrific, but so well told that it grips you right through it's 670-odd pages.

I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.

Habibi

Update: Mike from Mother Jones sez, " we just posted (on Monday) a cool interview I did with Thompson about Habibi."