The Sea-Watch 3, which is operated by the German NGO Sea-Watch, was one of several vessels that convened at the scene that morning. Besides a Libyan coast guard vessel, a French army ship hovered in the periphery, and a Portuguese patrol aircraft and an Italian navy helicopter followed from above. Nevertheless, in the next three hours, over 20 people would slip between the waves to their deaths.

The Libyan coast guard reached the sinking pontoon boat first, but did not move to rescue the half-dozen people scattered and drowning in the water nearby. It radioed to the Sea-Watch 3 to keep away. It did not lower a dinghy into the water to save the people being tossed about in the swells. Its crew stood on deck, many simply watching. One man filmed on his cellphone.

This was par for the course; the captain onboard the Sea-Watch 3 that day, a German woman in her early 30s named Pia Klemp, refers to the “so-called Libyan coast guard.” When we spoke last week via Skype, she described the Libyan coast guard as essentially Libyan militias, a product of the country’s violent civil war, which have been empowered by the European Union to do everything possible to prevent migrants from reaching the shores of Europe. The Libyan coast guard was “trying to pull [people] from the sinking rubber boat on to their decks to kidnap them to bring them back to Libya,” Klemp told me of that morning. “We could see them whipping these people, threatening them, shouting at them.”

Under Klemp’s direction, the Sea-Watch 3 lowered its two dinghies and began to pull people from the water. As the European vessels stood by, according to Klemp, as well as a video of the scene analyzed by Forensic Architecture, the Libyan coast guard interfered with its rescue, at one point hurling potatoes at the Sea-Watch boats. Nonetheless, 59 times that day, the Sea-Watch crew pulled a person to safety.

Among the 59 survivors was a mother whose 2-year-old son could not be resuscitated. In the days that followed, with Klemp at the helm, the Sea-Watch 3 was forced to linger in international waters, his tiny body still aboard. European authorities had not helped save the migrants from the sea; now they would not let the ship into port. Having no morgue, the Sea-Watch crew put the boy in a freezer. “The European warships did not want to take either the living people nor the dead boy from us, while at the same time, the European authorities on land denied us a port of safety,” Klemp told me.

“The European warships did not want to take either the living people nor the dead boy from us.”

This was not Klemp’s first brush with abject horror in the Mediterranean. A few months prior, another rescue ship she captained, the Iuventa, had been seized by Italian authorities. It turned out that Klemp and nine crew members had been under secret investigation for a year by far-right, anti-immigrant authorities. Iuventa’s crew learned that the Italian government intended to prosecute them for apparently aiding illegal immigration through their rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The Iuventa 10, as they’re called, estimate that they, alongside hundreds of onboard volunteers, have assisted more than 14,000 people in distress at sea. Each crew member could face 20 years in prison.

I spoke with Klemp about her rescue operations, the European Union’s policy of deterrence, her trial, and the criminalization of humanitarian aid around the world. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’re from Bonn, Germany, and you’ve worked as a dive instructor and also helped run an organization that aims to stop illegal fishing. How does a person from Bonn come to be interested in the ocean in this way? 

My seafaring career started off when I joined the marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd. I have a very big love and feel a very strong connection to the ocean, especially to all the life in the ocean, so I wanted to do all I could possibly do from land to protect the marine environment, to stop illegal whaling and to stop illegal fishing, and all these horrendous things that we do to the biggest ecosystem on Earth without taking at all into consideration the consequences this has for this environment and ecosystem, but also for ourselves. So I decided to join Sea Shepherd and this is how I ended up on ships.

Were you raised in a family with political tendencies, or did you come to politics on your own?

I’ve definitely been very, very lucky with my family. They’re all very, very conscious people, very aware of the privileges that we have without having done anything for it, or even more the other way around — that these privileges that we have in the Western world, or so-called first world, are based on the exploitation of others, and that whenever you are in a position where you are able to help, it is your responsibility to do so.

We’re talking a couple days after the news broke that another German rescue boat captain Carola Rackete was arrested and then released, after she docked the Sea-Watch 3 on the island of Lampedusa against the orders of Italian authorities. What do you make of her case? Do you know her personally? Do you have some sense of solidarity with her?

Carola is a very dear friend of mine. I can unfortunately not say that I was surprised when I heard that she’s been arrested, because very obviously the European and especially the Italian authorities are playing a politically motivated game to stop, deter, and harass the actions of human rights defenders. I was very happy about her release and also the reasoning by the judge that very obviously the state of emergency on board the Sea-Watch 3 was actually what was happening and that therefore, the ship, the crew, and the captain Carola had all the rights in the world to bring the ship and the people on board to land. Nonetheless, there’s still an investigation against her.

“The European and especially the Italian authorities are playing a politically motivated game to stop, deter, and harass the actions of human rights defenders.”

You said that the Italian government is trying to deter search-and-rescue operations such as your own. Given the 20 years in prison that you’re facing, and the potential prosecution that Carola and many others face, have the Italian authorities been successful in their effort?

They’ve unfortunately been quite successful on many different levels. If we look at the number of NGO ships operating in the Central Med, where just two years ago there were more than 10 ships doing the search-and-rescue missions, there are hardly any today because all of them have to face problems on many different levels. You’re not allowed to enter port, you’re not allowed to leave port, ships are confiscated, flags withdrawn, crew investigated. There’s been a lot of stuff happening on this line of criminalizing the work of the NGOs and with that is a secondary result that it gets harder and harder to find crew. As a captain, you are the person with the overall responsibility, so the authorities will always pick you, and of course it gets more difficult to find people that will want to do that job. To put themselves in this exposed position.

Also, the merchant shipping industry, they changed their routes. We know about many cases where boats in distress are being ignored by other ships because the crews fear the repression and having to wait weeks and weeks and weeks in front of the European port before they can bring the rescued people to land. In that way, [the Italian government] has unfortunately been very successful with the consequence of a lot of people dying, drowning, in the Mediterranean, and also a lot of people being stuck in the detention camps in Libya, where torture, rape, death are daily methods.

Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been a vocal proponent of the effort to crack down on migration and criminalize search-and-rescue operations. Part of the rationale behind his position, which includes removing rescue boats from the Mediterranean, is that these boats create a “pull factor” for migrants. That is, their mere presence off the coast invites migrants to embark on the treacherous journey because they know they will be rescued and might have a chance of making it to Europe. You’ve been out on the water. Have you seen this kind of thing happening?

This accusation of NGOs being a pull factor is something that the right in Europe just keep repeating. Just because something gets repeated, and shouted louder and louder, doesn’t mean it gains any more truth. There have been several studies that disproved this allegation, that very clearly said that NGOs are not a so-called pull factor. Also, if we just look at it with a bit of common sense, the NGO vessels were the answer to all these thousands of people in maritime distress on their way to Europe, and not the other way around.

We also see now where there’s hardly any NGO ships around, there are still all these boats coming, so there’s definitely no correlation in that sense. The only reason why people are taking this very often deadly route across the Mediterranean Sea are the reasons that they have to flee their homes and their home countries. Second, and more importantly, there is no safe and legal way to come into Europe to take up their human right of seeking asylum.

When does your trial start?

That is a very good question that I would love to be able to answer. We are still in limbo, waiting for the day that the charges will be pressed. That is, of course, part of this big political criminal charade to try to drain us, to put a bigger financial burden on us, to keep us from our actual actions on board for all the time that this trial is not happening, which in the end will most definitely end with an acquittal for all of us.

We don’t see that there’ll be too much of an urge or a rush from the side of the Italian authorities to start this. The longer this takes, the better it actually is for them. So we don’t expect charges to be pressed before the end of the year. And if that happens, that’ll be probably another six months until the court case would actually start.

You have rescued potentially thousands of migrants, including the mother whose 2-year-old boy did not survive. How do you deal, if at all, with grief or trauma in your work?

It’s not very much on my mind. These things happen, unfortunately, regardless of us being there and seeing it or not.

“Me, I can always go back to my perfect little privileged world in Germany if I choose to. And these people have nothing and nowhere to go.”

What I really wonder is how [the people we rescue] deal with their grief and the torture, the hardship, and the denial of any kindness and human decency from anyone else — how they deal with that. A lot of these people have been on the run for years and years and years. They’ve had to go through Africa, see a lot of their family members die in the desert, and they end up in these detention camps in Libya where the situation is absolutely horrendous. There’s almost no words for the situation, for the status of the people in these camps, when they’re at gunpoint forced onto these wrecked boats, which are completely unseaworthy. Like, the moment you set foot on them, they’re drifting around the Mediterranean Sea, no water, no navigation equipment. Not even enough fuel on board to get anywhere. They’re completely left alone, then they have to fear being intercepted by the Libyan militias, then they are denied a port of safety in Europe.

I think the much more interesting question is, how do all these people that have to endure real hardship deal with it? Because they’re so far away from any point of being able to rest and to breathe. Me, I can always go back to my perfect little privileged world in Germany if I choose to. And these people have nothing and nowhere to go. And we don’t want to give it to them.

There are some similarities between your case and the case of Scott Warren, the American humanitarian who faced 20 years in prison for providing two migrant men food, water, clothing, and shelter for three days last year. I wondered what you made of Warren’s case. Do you have a message for him and the other people facing prosecution for aiding migrants? 

Well, I surely hope that they feel the solidarity as much as we do and feel also empowered through other cases of solidarity. In Europe it is unfortunately the same as the U.S.-Mexico border, where racist, if not fascist, systems are trying to be re-established, where we have a very clear divide between people that deserve to live and those that don’t deserve to live.

If these imperialistic capitalist states see that they’re left with no choice but to criminalize those people that act in solidarity, that show basic human decency, then I think that shows that we’re doing something very right. And I hope that they also feel that, and see that there’s many of us, and that it doesn’t make a difference if it’s a land border like Mexico and the U.S., or if it’s the Mediterranean Sea — there’s a lot of people out there that are trying their best to show solidarity and assist those that are in need and a lot of people that are ready to stand up and fight for this. 

Correction, July 10, 1:35 p.m.:
This post has been updated to clarify that, collectively, volunteers working with the Iuventa 10 have rescued 14,000 people, not that the Iuventa 10 specifically have.

The post From the Mediterranean to Mexico, Capt. Pia Klemp Believes Rescuing Refugees Is Worth Facing Prison Time appeared first on The Intercept.

More migrants than usual have been leaving Libya for southern Europe in small crafts in the last month and falling into danger along the way, according to Haidi Sadik of Sea-Watch, a nonprofit that does search and rescue.

“Our civil reconnaissance aircraft called Moonbird has been flying missions throughout the year, including in May, and has seen a significant increase in the number of boats in distress from the air,” said Sadik.

“We’ve definitely also seen an increase over the last few weeks,” said Maurice Stierl, who helped found Alarm Phone, an activist collective that runs an emergency hotline for migrants in distress in the Mediterranean.

According to the Missing Migrants Project, at least 107 migrants died this May crossing the Mediterranean, up from 60 in April. And though far fewer migrants overall compared to this time last year are making the trip, a greater portion of those who do attempt the crossing are dying.

In the first six months of 2018, 791 of the 70,531 people who attempted the Mediterranean crossing to Europe — 1.1 percent — died. Since January of this year, 35,122 people have attempted the crossing, and 543 have died — 1.5 percent overall, per the Missing Migrants Project.

Another factor in the sudden uptick in crossing attempts is the recent increase of violence in Libya, the country through which thousands of migrants fleeing violence and poverty have passed on their way to Europe. Last month, Amnesty International voiced concerns that the lives of hundreds of migrants and refugees in detention centers in Libya were under imminent threat as fighting between armed militias in the area drew closer.

But Sam Turner, Médecins Sans Frontières’ head of mission for Libya, says the increased death rate in the Mediterranean is of particular note. “That’s a really key point in terms of challenging the narrative that the actions taken to prevent people from crossing the central Mediterranean … [are] leading to fewer deaths,” he told The Intercept. About 1 in 13 migrants making the crossing in the central Mediterranean region in the first five months of this year died, says Turner; last year for the same period, the number was 1 in 58.

Meanwhile, according to data compiled by Matteo Villa, a researcher at the think tank Italian Institute for International Political Studies, the number of migrants returned to Libya by the Libyan coast guard or others increased nearly tenfold from April to May, with an estimated 1,224 migrants being returned to the war-torn country in May, compared to 130 the month before. This is the greatest number of people returned to Libya since July 2018.

On Monday, two human rights lawyers filed a 244-page complaint with the International Criminal Court, or ICC, accusing European Union governments of knowingly sending thousands of migrants to their deaths in implementing their deterrence-based migration policies.

Omer Shatz, one of the lawyers who co-authored the request for the case to be taken on by the ICC, said that there used to be four major actors in the Mediterranean dealing with migrants crossing in boats: European governments, NGOs, commercial vessels, and the Libyan coast guard.

Commercial vessels, which once rescued migrants from the water, now avoid doing so to evade being implicated in an increasingly politicized act. “You can guarantee that you will end up in a political standoff without somewhere to disembark these people despite the fact that you have simply engaged in a humanitarian act,” said Turner.

NGOs, according to the ICC complaint, became critical actors in the Mediterranean after the EU’s 2014 decision to decrease its search and rescue operations. Yet “EU and Italian actors launched a broad political persecution against rescue NGOs, which includes intimidation, defamation, harassment, and formal criminalization,” the complaint reads. As The Intercept has reported, rescue ships have been seized and volunteers arrested.

With the support of the EU, last year Libya established a search and rescue region beyond its territorial waters, expanding the bounds of where the country coordinates and executes search and rescue operations. As the EU has scaled down its involvement, the principal actor on these waters has become the Libyan coast guard, said Shatz.

The Libyan coast guard does save lives every day, says Turner, but they can’t keep up with the number of attempted crossings, and the people they do save are sent back to dangerous and deadly conditions. (Libyan coast guard officers have also been accused of abuse themselves.) “Any rescue conducted by the Libyan coast guard results in a de facto forced return; the same place they were fleeing is the place they’re taken back to,” says Turner.

According to an Alarm Phone report published May 21, European authorities have refrained from assisting certain groups of migrants in distress in an apparent attempt to defer search and rescue responsibility to the Libyan coast guard. “Over the last two months … we had to witness several severe human rights violations at sea, including forms of push-back, refoulement, and non-assistance,” the report reads.

Alarm Phone’s Stierl added that migrants seem to be changing their tactics of survival in response to the policies. “They only call when they’ve gotten further into European search and rescue zones,” he said.

Alarm Phone shared an edited portion of a recent entry in its logbook with The Intercept that detailed one such event. On May 29, according to the book, the hotline made contact via satellite phone with a boat carrying about 100 people.

The Alarm Phone entry for 1:20 a.m. on May 30 reads:

Talked with the boat again – again we cannot promise when coastguards are coming. He says: “It is so fucking inhumane what they are doing with us. We are here in the sea for more than a day now. They came with airplanes helicopters and everything. They know where we are and they just wait for the Libyans to come tomorrow to pick our corpses. Those who will still be alive will maybe then also go into the water because they want rather to die than to go back to Libya. Why can’t they let any fisher boat save us and then at least to avoid people to die. They can bring us to whatever shitty prison. But this situation here is so inhumane, you cannot imagine how we suffer.” We tell him that we will stay with them until the end, whatever happens. We promise that we call the coastguards and inform the public to raise pressure. He thanks us for being with them.

The group, according to Alarm Phone, were ultimately rescued by the Italian navy, which means that they became among the few these days to head for an Italian port. But the rescue took too long, Alarm Phone maintains.

“The @ItalianNavy vessel P490 had monitored the boat in distress yesterday already & could have rescued them nearly a day ago. This act of #non-assistance risked the lives of 90 people,” wrote Alarm Phone on Twitter.

The post Amid Spike in Migrants Crossing the Mediterranean, Europe Is Still Delaying Rescues appeared first on The Intercept.

The plan, which is currently under review by the Office of Management and Budget and could result in a formal change as early as September, would modify the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2016 Equal Access Rule. That rule, issued by the Obama administration, required single-sex or sex-segregated shelters to admit people based on their gender self-identification.

Civil rights advocates have slammed the Trump administration for the proposal, which could have particularly dire consequences for transgender people. Thirty percent of transgender people have at some point experienced homelessness, and transgender people of color are more than three times as likely as the total U.S. population to be living in poverty, according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.

Shelters could consider factors such “privacy, safety, practical concerns, religious beliefs, any relevant considerations under civil rights and nondiscrimination authorities, the individual’s sex as reflected in official government documents, as well as the gender which a person identifies with” in deciding whether a person should be admitted to a shelter, an abstract published about the rule reads.

The plan’s references to “privacy” and “safety” are transphobic dog whistles, said Sharita Gruberg, policy director for the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress. “This myth that trans women are a threat to the health and safety of other people in shelters … that’s just not true.”

“It is clear that HUD intends to give taxpayer-funded shelters license to turn away trans people experiencing homelessness based on the religious beliefs of the provider.”

The proposal would also allow shelter providers to consider their own religious beliefs when deciding whether to admit a person experiencing homelessness. In explaining the change, HUD blasted the 2016 Equal Access rule for offering “no flexibility for faith-based shelter providers with deeply held religious convictions.”

This is just the latest in a litany of policy changes to impact transgender people under President Donald Trump. In August, the Department of Labor published a directive allowing federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire employees based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services gave South Carolina’s foster care program permission to turn away prospective parents with different religious beliefs, which could also affect LGBTQ parents. In March, the Pentagon announced the beginning of its plan to bar transgender people from serving in the military.

“This is a heartless attack on some of the most vulnerable people in our society,” said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, in a statement. “The programs impacted by this rule are lifesaving for transgender people, particularly youth rejected by their families, and a lack of stable housing fuels the violence and abuse that takes the lives of many transgender people of color across the country.”

A HUD spokesperson said that the federal government shouldn’t dictate a shelter’s admission decisions. “The previous Administration issued a rule in 2016 mandating that single-sex or sex-segregated shelters admit individuals based solely on a person’s self-identification of sex. Under this 2016 rule, women’s shelters are required to admit biological males who self-identify on a given day as female, and men’s shelters must admit females who self-identify as male. It is HUD’s belief that shelters should be able to decide for themselves how to define sex consistent with state and local law,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Ian Thompson, a senior legislative representative in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office, condemned HUD’s Thursday statement, calling it “vile and disgusting.” “Never once does HUD even acknowledge the basic humanity of trans people or recognize what it means to be transgender,” Thompson wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Based on this, it is clear that HUD intends to give taxpayer-funded shelters license to turn away trans people experiencing homelessness based on the religious beliefs of the provider.”

The announcement came just a day after HUD Secretary Ben Carson testified before the House Financial Services Committee. In response to a series of questions from Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va., about the 2012 and 2016 Equal Access rules, Carson stated, “I’m not currently anticipating changing the rule.” It is unclear whether Carson knew that his department was set to modify one of the rules the next day.

“I don’t know if he was speaking out of ignorance or malice, but I know his department is acting on both ignorance and malice,” said Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager at the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Equal Access rules make a meaningful difference in access to shelters for transgender people, said the Center for American Progress’s Gruberg. She cited a 2016 phone survey conducted by the Center for American Progress and the Equal Rights Center, which found that only 30 percent of shelters in Connecticut, Washington, Tennessee, and Virginia said they would house a transgender woman with other women. The states with gender identity nondiscrimination protections — Connecticut and Washington — were twice as likely to help a transgender caller access an appropriate shelter.

Even when they can access shelters, transgender women are uniquely vulnerable to abuse. According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 70 percent of transgender survey respondents who stayed in a shelter in the year prior reported some form of mistreatment, including being harassed, sexually or physically assaulted, or kicked out because of their gender identities. They were also four times less likely to own a home than the overall U.S. population.

This news comes on the heels of several incidents of deadly violence touching the black transgender community. In just the past week, three black transgender women died after being shot, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Claire Legato, 21, shot in Cleveland last month died on April 15; Muhlaysia Booker, 23, was killed in Dallas on May 18; and Michelle “Tamika” Washington, 40, was killed in Philadelphia on May 19.

The post The Trump Administration Wants to Make It Harder for Transgender People to Access Homeless Shelters appeared first on The Intercept.

Two people were injured last week when an airstrike hit about 100 meters away from the Tajoura migrant detention center, where some 500 migrants and refugees are being held, said Amnesty. Three days later, another airstrike hit near the facility, which is east of the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Weapons are being stored in a warehouse in the same compound as the detention center, suggesting that some fighters are using the compound as a military complex, according to Amnesty’s sources.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesperson Charlie Yaxley said Wednesday at a press briefing that the agency is very concerned for the approximately 3,300 refugees and migrants held in detention centers close to the fighting. “UNHCR is in a race against time to urgently move refugees and migrants out of detention centers to safety, and we urge the international community to come forward with offers of evacuation, humanitarian corridors, whatever it takes to get people out of harm’s way,” he said.

In the past week, he added, 944 people have left the Libyan coast in boats, and 65 have drowned. Of those who survived, the majority were returned to Libya, leaving hundreds of migrants wedged between life-threatening danger on both sides.

“All these refugees from all over Africa are stuck in this really dangerous situation where they have nowhere to go,” Philippe Nassif, advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty USA told The Intercept.

Libya has been in a state of conflict since 2011, when the U.S. and other NATO countries intervened in a popular uprising to topple dictator Moammar Gaddafi. A collection of tribes grappled for control in the wake of Gaddafi’s death, establishing rival fiefdoms across the country. Eventually, those groups formed armed militias.

Cmdr. Khalifa Haftar, who heads the Libyan National Army, a political faction loyal to the Tobruk government in Libya’s east, announced a sudden attack on Tripoli on April 4. The military advance came in spite of a U.N.-mediated peace effort between the internationally recognized government of Libya, known as the Government of National Accord, and Haftar’s own group in the eastern half of the country. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres was in Libya when Haftar’s advance was announced, and he expressed concern at the military action, saying that he was leaving the country “with a deep concern and a heavy heart.”

The LNA said that it was attempting to restore security and fight gangs and terrorists, but Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj of the Government of National Accord described the attack as a coup.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a statement on April 7 condemning Haftar’s advance; however, in an apparent policy reversal, President Donald Trump spoke with Haftar on the phone April 15 and praised him for his “significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources,” according to a White House statement. According to the statement, the two also “discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”

At a Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing yesterday, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., asked a panel of independent experts whether they could characterize the State Department’s position on who the U.S. is supporting in Libya. They answered with silence.

Millions of people have fled violence and poverty in the Middle East and Africa in the last decade, and for many, Libya has represented a significant waypoint on the journey to Europe. As European countries have tightened their borders in response to the influx of migrants, EU institutions and member states have also poured millions of euros, according to Human Rights Watch, into the Tripoli-based government’s effort to intercept boats leaving the country and detain people who are fleeing. Human Rights Watch describes conditions in these detention centers as “nightmarish,” and says people there “face inhuman and degrading conditions and the risk of torture, sexual violence, extortion, and forced labor.”

Libya’s internal conflict has made the situation worse. Last month, for example, the Guardian published video footage of an incident in which militias believed to be part of Haftar’s forces opened fire at the Qasr Ben Ghashir detention center south of Tripoli. The Guardian reported that at least two people were killed.

Amnesty International said in yesterday’s statement that the attempt to take over Tripoli has also resulted in “unlawful attacks that could amount to war crimes,” and called for international prosecutors to investigate. Since the beginning of Haftar’s offensive, more than 454 people in the country have been killed, and 2,154 have been injured, according to the World Health Organization.

According to Amnesty, an eyewitness said civilians were killed last month in attacks in residential areas of the Abu Salim district of Tripoli. Amnesty could not determine the perpetrator of these attacks, but stated that Abu Salim residents believed that LNA forces were responsible. “As the battle for Tripoli unfolds, the warring parties have displayed a shameful disregard for civilian safety and international humanitarian law by carrying out indiscriminate attacks on residential neighborhoods,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Amnesty International, in the statement.

Although the Obama administration led the intervention against Gaddafi, Amnesty USA’s Nassif told The Intercept that the U.S. has largely been disengaged from the conflict since 2012. (The hundreds of U.S. drone strikes in Libya in recent years have been aimed at Islamic State militants and in some cases Al Qaeda.)

“There is a real demand among the Libyans for the United States to reinsert itself here … and push these sides to stop the fighting, at the very least.” He added, “The United States government has a unique ability to be able to do that right now, and we’re hoping Congress will lead the effort.”

The post Migrants Trying to Reach Europe Are Trapped in Libya — Between Militias and the Sea appeared first on The Intercept.

In “Combat Obscura,” a new documentary set in Afghanistan, Marines don’t do what they normally do in American-made documentaries about war – they don’t echo narratives of God and country, kill bad guys, and win hearts and minds. In “Combat Obscura,” Marines shoot guns and patrol, but they also insult women, shake their weapons at children, die needlessly and with little dignity, murder innocent people and cover it up. At one point in the film, a Marine points his gun at children passing by on donkeys. “Where’s the fucking Taliban? Where’s the fucking Taliban?” he screams in their faces. They look back in fear and incomprehension. The Marine hands one of the boys a chocolate bar, but it does not feel like a kindness.

The Intercept talked to Lagoze about why he made the documentary, the legal process that preceded the film’s release, and his feelings about having taken part in the war. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you decide to enlist in the Marines right out of high school, when you were 18?

I think I was just kind of directionless. I had this preconceived notion that going to war would give me a perspective on life that I wouldn’t get somewhere else. And I always wanted to cover the war as a journalist. I wanted to go to grad school and stuff. I was a huge movie buff when I was a kid, and I saw “Full Metal Jacket” a bunch of times, and I was like, “Oh, you can just join the Marine Corps, they’ll give you a camera, and you just film for the military.'”

I think the military offered that easy, very direct path to another place. A lot of people think the military’s just these patriotic kids — guys that just want to serve their country. But it’s a lot of kids that are just on the fringe.

Where were you deployed and when?

We were in the Sangin-Kajacki area of Afghanistan in 2011. And we didn’t know it at the time, because they don’t really tell you anything when you’re going to these places, but there’s a dam in Kajacki. It basically powers the whole Helmand province with electricity. It was missing a third turbine. It was heavily occupied by the Taliban. We had to clear a route there to fix the dam. The dam is still broken. It’s sort of a metaphor for the whole war, I guess.

Combat camera is sort of like a PR tool for the military. In 2011, when I was there, we were supposed to be transitioning out of Afghanistan and handing it over to the Afghan army, the Afghan people. My job was to document those images: Marines working with the Afghan army, giving candy to kids — hearts and minds type of stuff. The big three no-nos were no cursing, no shots of guys smoking cigarettes, and they have to be in full gear. And then no casualties. That was a big one, not too much bloodshed. Because it was supposed to look like it was over, we were pulling out. This was eight years ago. And we’re still there.

What was your aim in making this documentary?

It’s supposed to be a poem. We want to give people the experience of the war, the uncertainty of it, and the paradoxes. And it’s sort of a meditation on what it’s like to be a soldier, how absurd this war is — there wasn’t even a definition of what the outcome was going to be, what winning would even look like, or anything, really. And just the waste of life.

That’s really all I can do. That’s all I can hope for. I don’t want people to come away with some kind of answer to the conflict. I think when you see civilian documentaries about it, you sort of get that kind of closure, in some sense, like, okay, it’s all about camaraderie, or it’s all about the guys and being out there with one another. And oh man, they’re going to be so fucked up when they come back. No. I really want to unsettle people and put them in that moment.

That makes me think of a narrative choice that you made, which was not to do any kind of “Where are they now?” interviews, and not have voiceovers.  Why didn’t you use devices like that?

Well, people always want that. I’ll tell you: A lot of [the Marines in the film] are in jail. Some of them are doing okay, and some of them are not. And some of them are dead. Some of them killed themselves.

But this whole myth of the trauma hero of American war narratives — I didn’t want to do that. Every American war narrative tends to revolve around, Johnny’s got this naive notion of war, and he goes over and it’s not what he expected, and it’s total chaos and horror, and then he comes back, and he has no way to express what it was like. When I first set out to make the film, I did interviews with a lot of the guys that were in the film, in the present. When I started to get rid of that, I think that’s when it became more honest.

I want people to question them. Not just sympathize, but question, and look at who we were sending to fight these wars. I mean, it’s an all-volunteer military. It’s not like we were drafted. We all grew up watching “Full Metal Jacket,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon.” These are anti-war films that I think had the reverse effect on a lot of us, because we have this whole reified notion of war and trauma, and going to war, and that you’re going to learn something by going to combat. And it takes away from the actual reasons we’re over there.

What was it like when you would bring the camera out when Marines were smoking weed, for example? Was there resistance to it?

A lot of the guys in the film had been on multiple deployments, and they were getting out of the military. They were done with the Marine Corps; they hated the Marine Corps. [Some] of them had gotten DUIs and gotten into trouble. They were sick of it. And they were getting out in a few months, so some of them didn’t care at all and they wanted me to film.

And then other guys were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?” But as a Marine, you can just be like, “Oh, fuck you,” and just do it. And you can see some of the guys in the film — they want to rap, they want to be on camera. I wasn’t going to show it to the command, so they weren’t worried about that.

Another theme in the documentary is masculinity. Can you talk a little bit about that, and if your perception of it has changed since you were in Afghanistan?

It would actually be interesting to go see what the Marine Corps is like now that women are in combat roles, because when we were there, they weren’t allowed in the infantry. They could serve other jobs, but they couldn’t be in active combat. So the Marine Corps that I knew was extremely toxic. Even boot camp. The drill instructors would literally tell you that your girlfriends are whores and they’re cheating on you as we speak. So they instilled this innate hatred of women from the beginning.

It’s hard to imagine what fighting a war would look like if there wasn’t toxic masculinity involved in the training process. Because you’re being trained to kill people, and to not be thoughtful about those things, and to basically be excited to go to war.

Tell me about your decision to portray the shooting of a Marine, Jacob Levy. Was that a complicated one for you?

Yeah, definitely. I felt guilty for a long time for just filming it.

Instead of intervening?

Or just maybe not recording it. Just being like, “You know what, I’m not even going to film this. People don’t need to see this.”

There’s filming it, and then there’s showing it. Filming it, okay. You were there, this was my job to film, sure, whatever. But then showing that and not sanitizing it at all, and sort of emphasizing it almost —I think it is the longest sequence in the film — was definitely a tough decision.

I talked to his mom. All the guys that were there go to see her every year on his birthday, and on the day that he died, too, so she has this cult of veterans. She’s like a super Gold Star Mom, and so getting her permission was really important, but it’s always going to feel kind of exploitative.

Ultimately, you think of all the documentaries that have come out about Afghanistan or Iraq, they tend to show a lot of dead Iraqis, dead Taliban, dead Afghan women, children. It’s like there’s no problem to show that, but then when there’s a dead U.S. soldier, that’s off limits. We didn’t want to value one life over the other.

So you got permission from Levy’s mother to put that in the film. Did you have to get releases from everybody who appeared in the film?

Not everyone. I was moving around so much to each platoon that I didn’t know everyone. But the guys smoking weed, I wanted to make sure they didn’t have government jobs now, which would get them in trouble. The statute of limitations has passed so it’s not like they could be retroactively dishonorably discharged if they’d been honorably discharged. I talked to lawyers about that before anything.

There wasn’t really anything else that was illegal. The dead civilian — they were cleared to shoot that guy, even though he was unarmed. So that tells you a lot about what goes into the rules of engagement in Afghanistan.

The guy chasing the kids with the pistol, he has a wife and kids, so I wanted to be like, “Are you going to want them to see this?” And he was like, “Yeah, man.” A lot of them are at a point where they want to be judged to a certain degree. Stop saying, “Thank you for your service.” It doesn’t make sense. It’s totally absurd.

“Combat Obscura” trailer Video: Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

How did you get the footage home?

Maybe you’re thinking that the military’s this really organized body that keeps track of everything, and it’s not. It’s just as disorganized as any other business or bureaucracy or government institution. Everyone had cameras, so they weren’t looking through other people’s cameras. They were mainly looking for guys bringing drugs back, bringing weapons like AK-47s that they had found from dead Taliban. There was one guy who tried to bring a grenade on the plane back, which is obviously not a good idea for a lot of reasons. So they weren’t like, “Alright, everybody take out their cameras now.”

If you had been through that experience, you’d almost died filming a lot of the stuff, you’d want to keep it. It was a diary of our experience, and I wasn’t just going to throw that away.

Did you have a legal process as you got closer to releasing the film?

I reached out to a lot of different people along the way. One of them was Phil Klay, who wrote “Redeployment.” He’s a National Book Award winner, and he was public affairs in the Marine Corps around the same time that I was there. And I was like, “I want to get this released somehow, but I don’t want to deal with the Marine Corps itself, because I know that they would just flip out.” So he told me about the review process at the Pentagon. And I sent it to the Pentagon, they cleared it, it was unclassified.

But then the Marine Corps heard about it. The Pentagon sent it to the Marine Corps. The [Naval Criminal Investigative Service] was calling me, and different people at the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps Entertainment [Media] Liaison Office wanted to meet with me. And that’s when I was like, I need to get a lawyer or something.

[The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University] kind of took me in pro bono. Without them, I’d be in a whole bunch of legal trouble. And they got another legal firm involved called Jenner & Block that does a lot of pro bono stuff. Once I had them in my corner, I think just their presence had an effect on the Marine Corps. Right now, they’ve publicly stated that they’re not pursuing legal action.

You mentioned your guilt about filming a fellow Marine being shot. Do you feel guilt about participating in this war? And if so, how have you dealt with that?

Absolutely. The veterans that are actually honestly reflecting about it [have] a lot of conflicted feelings. On the one hand, you went there and you made it out alive, and it’s such a transformative experience at such a young age that it’s hard to disconnect from the emotional experience you had there and the friends that you lost, and the buddies who left body parts there. It’s hard to disconnect from that and go, “Our presence there was not just a waste, but my presence there probably could have made things worse.” I know a lot of vets who are unwilling to come to that because while they were out there, they truly felt that they were helping Afghans, because they were fighting against the Taliban.

But you have to think about it: While we were there, we created an almost uninhabitable environment for the Afghan civilians. Because before we were there, they were oppressed by the Taliban. While we were there, they were caught in the middle between two oppressive forces. And how many times did we bomb their houses? How many times did we mistakenly kill innocent people?

I can find myself debating with someone whether we should stay in or leave Afghanistan. The Afghan army has lost more soldiers the past two years than we did the entire time we’ve been there. They’re getting absolutely massacred by the Taliban. And these guys have lost their whole families to this conflict. This is going to haunt them forever — they’ve paid the ultimate sacrifice. Not U.S. troops. The Afghans themselves have lost more than we have by a landslide.

And some of them don’t want us to leave, because if we leave, then they’re done. Because they don’t want the Taliban to win, to go back to what it was before we were there. But there are civilians there that are like, “What are we going to do? A perpetual standoff? A conflict that’s never going to end?” And they’re just caught in the middle.

The personal aspects of the film where you can hear me, or where I’m asking questions, or where I’m filming in a certain way — we left that stuff in the film because of my responsibility and the role that I played and the guilt that I feel about it. I’ve been dealing with it by making this movie.

I want there to be some accountability. I don’t want people just to look at the soldiers and Marines as hapless victims that were sent out there, and it was just the big politicians that are responsible. No. I think the soldiers are responsible, the politicians are responsible, but also the American people are complicit. Our tax money funded the war. It’s not just the soldiers and the politicians. It’s the everyday citizens. We’re all responsible because we didn’t really give a shit. We didn’t notice it. We didn’t pay attention.

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