Is Torture Making a Comeback?

/ China Won the Encryption Wars

SNAKES
10.11.2017

Trump’s jet-setting White House may be the most corrupt in U.S. history

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FEATURES

16 26
THEY HAVE A HUNCH
Detainees kneel in a holding area at
Camp X-Ray, a facility at the U.S. prison
at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002.
The Swamp American
COVER CREDIT
Photo illustration by C.J. Burton
Runneth Over Torquemada
for Newsweek Donald Trump vowed to end The brutal interrogation program
On plane, from left: Secretary of D.C.’s cronyism and corruption, at Gitmo spread to Abu Ghraib.
Education Betsy DeVos; Louise
Linton, wife of Secretary of the
but ethics experts say his One man who couldn’t stop
Treasury Steven Mnuchin; Mnuchin; administration is the sleaziest ever. it fears it will happen again.
President Donald Trump
Below: Tom Price, former secretary
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8 NEWSWEEK.COM N O V E M B E R 10, 2 017

 “You’ll be paid based on how well
you work with robots.”» P.12

TECHNOLOGY

Solace of
Quantum
China is leading the world in
developing unbreakable encryption
by using quantum physics

the nazis knew secret communication
was the key to world domination. Their prize
technology was the electromechanical Enigma ma-
chine, an encryption device that allowed German
tank divisions, embassies and even submarines to
send scrambled radio messages to the Reich during
World War II. They believed their system was un-
breakable. It was—until a young British mathema-
tician named Alan Turing realized that the signal
could be unscrambled if he could create a machine
to systematically try thousands of key combina-
tions that would eventually hit upon an intelligible
message. The result was the world’s first computer.
Britain’s ability to read Germany’s secret codes was
GET T Y; TOP: DANIEL LEAL­OLIVAS/A FP/GET T Y
finding out. In a world of unbreakable encryption,
all human electronic communication could be-
come entirely private—with mind-boggling conse-
quences, both good and bad, for cybersecurity.
On September 29, that world came significant-
ly closer to reality. A team of cryptographers and
physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences
held a half-hour video call with their counterparts
in Vienna using quantum encryption, a technol-
ogy that makes it impossible to hack or overhear
communications. The new encryption standard “is
what has me most excited and most worried, of all
recent technological innovations,” says a senior U.K.
intelligence official not authorized to speak on the

a crucial factor in the Allies’ victory.
Now, thanks to a technology called quantum
encryption, the dream of perfectly secure com-
munication is real. It could help free the world
from online fraud and identity theft,
hacking attacks and electronic eaves-
dropping. It could also enable terror-
ists and criminals to communicate
clandestinely—and governments to OWEN MATTHEWS
hide their secrets without anyone ever
record. “It’s a world-changer.” And at the moment,
experts say, while the major technical innovations
in quantum technology are still being produced at
Western institutions, it’s the Chinese who are far
ahead in terms of implementation.
The Beijing-Vienna call was made
over a conventional Skype-type inter-
BY
net connection. What was revolution-
ary: a secure encryption key generated
@owenmatth in a quantum device mounted in a

NEWSWEEK.COM 9
Periscope
Chinese satellite. And the quantum
physics that created the key means
any attempt to break the code can be
detected. “Quantum crypto is as close
to unbreakable ciphers as one can
possibly get,” says Artur Ekert, the
inventor of the model on which the
Chinese based their system.
Ekert’s encryption method is based
on an extraordinary effect known as
quantum entanglement. The phe-
nomenon is so inexplicable that even
the man who discovered it, Albert
Einstein, was baffled; in 1935, he de-
scribed the effect as “spooky action
at a distance.” Here’s how it works:
Two particles of light—known as
photons—in separate locations can
be made to precisely copy each oth-
er’s behavior even when separated by
vast distances. Exactly how this hap-
pens is still not understood, but the
phenomenon was demonstrated in
lab conditions back in 1984. What’s
remarkable about September’s Bei-
jing-Vienna experiment is that scien-
tists were able to use quantum entan-
glement to make a secret key com-
posed of a string of data bits appear
simultaneously in different corners
of the Earth. What’s more, the Chi-
nese team, led by physicist Jian-Wei
Pan, has linked base stations, satel-
lites and fiber-optic cable to transmit
the quantum keys across the country.
“It’s a spectacular demonstration,”
says Charles Clark, an adjunct pro-
fessor at the University of Maryland’s
Joint Quantum Institute.
Until now, all cryptography had
basically relied on creating mathe-
matical puzzles that were beyond an
enemy’s technological capabilities to
solve. Today’s standard for encryp-
tion—so-called public key technolo-
gy, which is the basis of all internet
authentication and supposedly se-
cure communications applications
such as WhatsApp—is more com-
10 NEWSWEEK.COM
TECHNOLOGY
plex than Enigma. But it relies on the
same principles. The key that both
users need to encrypt and decrypt
the signal is generated by a comput-
er and distributed to both parties.
But given enough computing power,
someone can potentially crack the
key. Quantum encryption offers a dif-
ferent paradigm. “Unlike mathemat-
ical systems,” says Ekert, “quantum
crypto relies on the laws of physics,
which cannot be broken.”
Quantum key distribution de-
vices—as the generators of these
unbreakable keys are called—have
the potential to change the world’s
e-commerce and data protection for
the better by eliminating hacking
and identity theft. But it’s no coin-
cidence that the biggest investors in
quantum encryption have been the
world’s armies and spooks—nota-
bly the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army and the U.S. Department of De-
fense. “The motivation for quantum,
as in all things good and beautiful, is
military and intelligence,” says Clark.
Any nation that masters the technol-
ogy first will have a “major short-
term advantage” in the strategically
crucial world of communications.
That’s exactly what Pan has done,
persuading the Chinese government
to invest several hundred million
dollars into putting a quantum ap-
paratus into space, as well as install-
ing enormous infrastructure on the
ground. Pan’s equipment is mounted
in a satellite called Micius—named
after a Chinese philosopher in the
fifth century B.C.—and is in low-
Einstein described
the effect as “spooky
action at a distance.”
Earth orbit at an altitude of 300
miles. Micius’s low orbit means that
users not linked to China’s fiber-op-
tic system have to wait until the sat-
ellite comes overhead to receive the
secure quantum key that allows them
to initiate communication with the
other key holder back in China. Ac-
cording to a senior security source
with direct knowledge of China’s en-
cryption efforts, at least 600 top Chi-
nese ministers and military officials
use quantum-encrypted links for all
confidential communications.
Within five years, Pan told Science
and Technology magazine in August,
China will launch a new satellite or-
biting at an altitude of 20,000 kilo-
meters and covering a much larger
part of the Earth’s surface. A Chinese
manned space station, planned for
2022, is scheduled to carry an exper-
imental quantum-communications
payload that human operators can
maintain and upgrade. The ultimate
goal is a set of geostationary satellites
that span the world.
So far, only China has invested
the billions of dollars needed to
bring quantum encryption to re-
al-world use. “The barriers to entry
are quite high—basically, it needs
a state-level entity,” says Clark.
Ringing Earth with quantum-en-
abled communications satellites
“is a moon-shot, Manhattan-project
scale project,” says one senior West-
ern cybersecurity expert and gov-
ernment adviser, referring to the
major technological effort required
to get men on the moon and devel-
op the American atom bomb. “And
today, we [in the West] just don’t
have politicians with the vision to
commit resources on that scale to
any kind of long-term scientific
program.” (The official did not wish
to be quoted by name.)
The U.S., China and Russia are
N O V E M B E R 10, 2 017

engaged in a huge, hidden arms race
for mastery of cyberwar weaponry,
from viruses capable of hijacking
phone and electrical systems to the
old-fashioned spies’ game of stealing
the enemy’s secrets. In the short term,
the new era of quantum encryption
won’t plug the world’s main vulner-
ability—which is not inadequate en-
cryption but a lack of basic internet
security. Systems as sensitive as those
FROM TO P: XINHUA/AL AM Y; JIN LIWANG/X INHUA/ALAMY
of the Democratic National Commit-
tee and even the White House were
protected by flimsy passwords and
feeble antivirus software—vulnera-
bilities exploited by Russian-backed
cybercriminals in a series of recent,
election-related hacks.
And as former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden
showed, the current goal of most
Western intelligence gathering is
not data—as in the actual content of
QUANTUM LEAP At left, a quantum
communications satellite in Jiuquan,
China. A team led by Jian-Wei Pan,
below, recently held a call using quantum
encryption, which makes it impossible
to hack or overhear communications.
devices. At each end, those messages
can still be overheard by, say, bug-
ging the room.
Yet quantum encryption is a pro-
foundly disruptive technology. If the
basic building blocks of global com-
munication are made secure, “then
a major systemic risk to our global
information and communication in-
frastructure, upon which we depend
for just about everything, will be off
the table,” says Michele Mosca of the
Institute for Quantum Computing at
the University of Waterloo, Ontario.
“This doesn’t mean we [will be] per-
fectly safe online, or entering an era
of unbreakable online security”—but
areas of potential cybervulnerability,
such as credit card transactions, da-
tabases and every form of electronic
communication, could be plugged by
quantum encryption. That could also
help terrorists and criminals.
“Everyone wants their own secrets
safe, but in the business of gathering
intelligence, it’s very inconvenient
if others are using unbreakable en-
cryption,” says Taylor.
What is clear is that the Chinese
team has proved not only that quan-
tum key distribution works but that
emails and phone conversations— any nation serious about establish-
as much as metadata, or informa- ing fully secure communications
tion on who is talking to whom and needs to commit vast sums to the
when. Even in a quantum-encrypted project. “Western countries could
world, that metadata will still be easily follow,” says quantum pioneer
available. Plus, as Emily Taylor, an as- Norbert Lütkenhaus, a professor at
sociate fellow of the London-based the University of Waterloo. If they
Institute of Strategic Studies, ex- have the vision to do so. “Whoever
plains, regardless of how perfect controls information controls the
the quantum encryption system is, world,” says Ekert.
two humans still have to send and By that logic, the future belongs
receive their messages on electronic to Beijing.
NEWSWEEK.COM 11
Periscope
DISRUPTIVE
AI or Die
If you can’t work with robots, you probably won’t work
uber’s fight to operate in
London starkly shows how ar-
tificial intelligence (AI) can quickly
eviscerate the value of hard-earned
human knowledge. The city’s move to
boot Uber is not much different from
Donald Trump rejiggering environ-
mental rules to help American coal
miners keep their jobs. We are now
asking a hard question of society: Do
we want government to protect us
from having our employment out-
looks narrowed to working as over-
educated TaskRabbit serfs putting
together other people’s Ikea tables?
Uber is in court appealing an or-
12 NEWSWEEK.COM
der that would kick it out of London,
where city officials ruled that Uber
drivers are not safe enough and—even
worse to the British—too rude to be
allowed on London’s streets. Uber’s
new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has
apologized to Londoners for “messing
up” and hopes to make amends.
But London’s ruling is only tan-
gentially about Uber’s reputation
as an asshole company. It’s really
to protect a generation of local taxi
drivers who have invested enormous
amounts of time and personal wealth
in filling their heads with what is
now nearly useless information.
Anyone who wants to get a license
to drive one of London’s black cabs
has to master what’s famously called
the Knowledge, which is one of the
most ridiculous mental challenges
ever imposed on people who will
wind up making about $60,000 a year.
A prospective driver has to memorize
every street, building, park, statue
and trivial landmark in central Lon-
don, and be able to perfectly recite
the fastest route between any two
spots in the city. The test is so difficult
that brain scientists have studied the
city’s cab drivers and discovered that
the memorization gives their brains
an enlarged posterior hippocampus,
which apparently is not painful.
CLO CKWISE FROM LEFT: C OLIN A NDE RSON/GET T Y; OL I SCA RFF/G ET T Y; SCOT T OLSON/GET T Y; JAY SHAW BAKER/NURPHOTO/CORBIS/GET T Y
The requirement for the Knowl-
edge has been in place for more than
150 years. It long made sense in an ag-
onizingly complex geography, where
a wrong turn could leave a driver lost
in a maze of medieval streets. Master-
ing the Knowledge means studying 40
hours a week for two, three or even
four years. The only way, then, for Lon-
don to have enough cab drivers—be-
cause who would want to go through
this?—has been to guarantee they’d
be paid decently. As a result, London
has the highest taxi fares in the world.
Enter Uber, which navigates with
GPS. When a driver picks you up, your
destination is already on the driver’s
phone, which can dictate turn-by-turn
directions. Without GPS, no car ser-
vice could compete with the efficient
routes of a Knowledge-able black cab
driver. But with GPS, even immigrants
new to London can navigate the city
well enough. In the past couple of
years, the AI-based app Waze has tak-
en this capability to an-
other level. Waze learns
BY
from the movement of
all Waze users in a city,
KEVIN MANEY constantly finding better
@kmaney routes, understanding
N O V E M B E R 10, 2 017
traffic patterns and knowing about
jams and accidents in real time. Now
a new driver can outshine a veteran
driver by simply downloading an app.
Getting started requires no huge sunk
costs, no grueling hours of study. So
these upstart drivers don’t need the
guarantee of high wages for life. That
means they can underprice black cabs.
London’s black cab drivers are
watching technology sweep away
their livelihoods. The loss they feel is
growing familiar across other profes-
sions. “I’m upset because what I had
to go through now comes on your
phone,” Mick Smith, a London cab
driver for 28 years, told CNET. “It’s not
about competition—it’s about going
through the same process.” It’s an
understandable reaction but also un-
realistic. AI has made that process un-
necessary. Even crueler, the knowledge
Smith built up of London’s streets isn’t
useful for much of anything else.
This is happening all over. Gold-
man Sachs and many of the biggest
hedge funds are all switching on
AI-driven systems that can foresee
market trends and make trades bet-
ter than humans. One Goldman Sachs
trading office has been whittled from
600 people to two. AI can read X-rays
better than radiologists. A great
deal of the work done by lawyers is
heading for the AI trash bin. Like the
Knowledge, these are professions that
HAIL THE
CONQUERING TAXI?
Khosrowshahi, below,
has apologized for
rude Uber drivers,
but the real issue is
whether London will
protect its cab drivers
from technology
that makes their
highly specialized
knowledge of that
city’s streets useless.
require loading up your head with a
lot of data and rules, and then mostly
just executing. AI can do that now.
Of course, there’s another side to
this. AI is making all these services
cheaper and easier to access. Uber
brought cheaper rides to London.
And hey, if we could all get a law-
yer in an app, who but the lawyers
would be crying? Those who invest-
ed in obtaining their knowledge get
hurt, but many more people benefit.
Is that bad? When are jobs for a few
more important than economic or
other upsides for many? Figuring
that out is going to tie lawmakers in
knots for a generation.
Then again, Uber in London shows
how AI can open opportunities for
those who partner with the technol-
ogy rather than fight it. You want to
be an Uber driver armed with Waze,
not a traditional driver insisting your
brain alone is better. You want to be
a radiologist who can harness AI to
make faster, more accurate diagnoses,
or the lawyer who focuses on creative
legal arguments while deploying
AI to do all the grunt case research.
As futurist Kevin Kelly puts it in his
book The Inevitable, “Our most im-
portant thinking machines will not
be machines that can think what we
think faster, better, but those that
think what we can’t think. You’ll be
paid in the future based on how well
you work with robots.”
AI will keep getting better and
more pervasive. Heck, Elon Musk
started a company called Neuralink to
make AI chips that we can just embed
in our skulls. An Uber driver wouldn’t
have to use a phone and an app—just
plug Waze into his or her brain. Suc-
cess will go to those who see such
advances as an opportunity. If it feels
like a threat, you might want to start
lobbying the government for protec-
tion. Or sign up for TaskRabbit.
NEWSWEEK.COM 13
 Periscope
Ksenia Sobchak wants to go from reality TV to presidential politics. And why not?
ksenia sobchak’s instagram
isn’t your usual presidential
candidate’s social media feed. Snap-
shots of five-star hotel breakfasts,
selfies of Sobchak hanging out in a
helicopter and fashion shots of the
blond socialite posing in a diapha-
nous sequined dress don’t exactly
suggest a person ready to wrest
power from Russian President
Vladimir Putin. Yet in late October,
the 35-year-old former reality-TV
presenter and Playboy cover girl
declared she would stand against
Putin in next year’s elections as the
candidate of not only Russia’s liberal,
Western-leaning intelligentsia but
also, as Sobchak puts it in a campaign
video, “everyone who is fed up with
the thieving and abuse of power.”
Sobchak’s campaign is more than
just political—it’s personal. Her late
father, Anatoly Sobchak, was mayor
of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s,
and one of his deputies was an un-
known former KGB lieutenant-colo-
nel named Vladimir Putin. Sobchak
senior’s administration was a beacon
of Western-style reform—and Putin
was the behind-the-scenes fixer for
Russia’s most liberal city government.
“There’s no question that [Putin] be-
trayed her father’s legacy,” says a
close friend of Ksenia Sobchak. “Her
political career is, for her, a way of
honoring his memory.”
Sobchak has known Putin and
his family since her early childhood.
Though the persistent rumor that Pu-
tin was her godfather isn’t true, she
is one of the few people in Russian
14 NEWSWEEK.COM
POLITICS
Russia’s Trump
politics to have known Putin since
he was a near-nobody. As recently as
September, Sobchak was able to meet
Putin, interviewing him for a televi-
sion program she is making about
her father. After the cameras stopped
rolling, she spoke to Putin about her
planned presidential run—not to
ask permission, by her own account,
but because she “thought it was the
right thing to tell him to his face that
I plan to stand against him.”
Many Russian liber-
als accuse Sobchak of
being a stooge—a token, BY
tame candidate playing
the Kremlin’s game. The OWEN MATTHEWS
real leader of Russia’s @owenmatth
liberal opposition, anti-corruption
firebrand Alexei Navalny, has been
blocked from running, ostensibly
because of a string of convictions for
organizing unsanctioned protests. In
reality, the Kremlin judged Navalny
too dangerous a candidate “not be-
cause he would win but because of
what he would say if given airtime”
on state-controlled TV, says Mark Ga-
leotti, a senior researcher at the In-
stitute of International Relations in
Prague. “You have to remember that
many of [Putin’s administration] re-
member glasnost all too well—they
saw what happened when the Com-
munist Party allowed the opposition
the freedom to kick away founda-
tions of the regime.”
Sobchak, by that logic, is a safer
candidate. “The Kremlin is trying to
find safer ways to sex up the [presi-
dential] campaign—and Sobchak is
ideal,” says Galeotti. “She’s dabbled
enough in opposition politics. But
I can’t see her...ripping into cor-
ruption, naming names, discussing
crooked deals. Whether there’s an ex-
plicit deal or not, she is a product of
the elite. She understands the rules
of the game and is able to stay just on
the right side of the line.”
Nonetheless, Sobchak has had her
run-ins with the authorities. She was
a prominent leader of the wave of
protests that followed Putin’s return
to the presidency in 2012—masked
police raided her apartment, and in-
vestigators threatened her with tax
evasion charges. Putin “is someone
who divides people into ‘with us’
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

and ‘against us,’” Sobchak told News-
week at the time. “I respect him as a
person. He has done a lot for Russia….
FROM LEFT: REU TERS; SERGEI KAR PUKHIN/RE UTERS; DMITRY SERE BRYAKOV/AFP/GET T Y
But he probably believes that I am no
longer ‘with him,’ and I am feeling
the consequences of that now.”
The charge that Sobchak is in
some way still “with” Putin has been
encouraged by the Kremlin, with
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov
describing her as a “talented person”
who “fulfilled all criteria” to run for
president. Sobchak calls the praise
a spoiling tactic. “The authorities
have decided to suffocate me with
affection,” Sobchak recently told
The Guardian. “It’s a very clever tac-
tic. They’re doing everything to make
it look like we’re together.”
Her campaign videos give no in-
dication she will be soft on Putin.
Sobchak slams Russia’s “collapsing
education and health care systems”
VYING AGAINST VLAD Sobchak,
left, has known Putin and his family for
decades through her father, Anatoly,
opposite. And some claim that Navalny,
below, is the real leader of the opposition.
and “monstrous corruption and
propaganda” in a carefully produced
video filmed in her designer kitchen.
“People in power continue to steal.
Priests and police tell us what to read
and think,” she says. “If we don’t do
something, we will be arrested for our
views...and our children will grow up
dreaming of leaving the country.”
Sobchak’s trump card is her fame,
after years of presenting reality TV
shows—including the Big Brother
clone Dom-2—and her status as a sta-
ple of gossip magazines. Polls say she
enjoys a 95 percent name-recognition
rating, says Sobchak adviser Anton
Krasovsky, a former campaign man-
ager for billionaire Mikhail Prokhor-
ov, whose 2012 presidential campaign
was widely seen as Kremlin-sanc-
tioned. “Nobody apart from Putin
himself has that kind of recognition.
She is like Donald Trump—she spent
her whole life becoming a public
figure.” By comparison, Navalny has
“officially 5 percent name recognition,
which is probably in reality closer to
15 percent,” according to Krasovsky.
Navalny has a spiky relationship
with Sobchak. When she recently in-
terviewed him for the internet-based
opposition TV channel TV Rain, he
coldly squashed her for mixing up
a name. Navalny has yet to endorse
her candidacy and is still running
his own campaign. Even without his
“The Kremlin is backing, Sobchak may prove to be a
trying to find safer more difficult candidate than Putin
bargained for. “Sobchak breaks the
ways to sex up fourth wall—she can address voters
the [presidential] directly and expose the stitch-up
campaign—and that is Russian politics,” says Gale-
otti. “She could be more corrosive
Sobchak is ideal.” than the Kremlin expects.”
NEWSWEEK.COM 15
DONALD TRUMP VOWED TO END THE CRONYISM AND CORRUPTION IN D.C., BUT ET
 THE
SWAMP
RUNNETH
HICS EXPERTS SAY HE IS RUNNING THE SLEAZIEST ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY

OVER BY

P H O T O I L L U S T R AT I O N BY
Alexander Nazaryan

C.J. Burton

NEWSWEEK.COM 17
 HE’D PROMISED TO
BUILD THE WALL.
TO MAKE AMERICA
GREAT AGAIN.
TO LOCK HER UP.
Now, in the last weeks of his presidential campaign,
Donald Trump needed one more stirring slogan.
And since he was badly trailing Democratic can-
didate Hillary Clinton, it would have to be a mar-
keting marvel worthy of Mad Men’s Don Draper,
one that encapsulated the vague yet compelling
promise of his candidacy—its worship of Amer-
ican ideals and its total break from them.
On October 17, 2016, the Trump-Pence campaign
released a five-point plan for ethics reform that fea-
tured lobbying restrictions. The plan was called
“drain the swamp.” Trump tried out the phrase that
day at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He used it the
next day at a rally in Colorado. “We’re going to end
the government corruption,” he vowed, “and we’re
going to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” He
then recited a litany of accusations regarding Clin-
ton and her private email server, calling her “the
most corrupt person to ever run for the presidency.”
“Build the wall” had been the raw opening cry of
Trump’s campaign. “Make America great again” was
its chorus. “Drain the swamp” was its closing num-
ber. But while talk of a border wall thrilled Trump,
he was apparently never too worked up about the
festering bog that was the nation’s capital. He ad-
mitted as much in an October 26 rally in Charlotte,
North Carolina: “I said that about a week ago, and
I didn’t like it that much, didn’t sound that great.
And the whole world picked it up.… So ‘drain the
swamp,’ I didn’t like it. Now, I love it, right?”
18 NEWSWEEK.COM
“Drain the swamp” fit perfectly with Trump’s con-
stant complaints about the “rigged system,” thereby
excusing what some said was going to be a historic
defeat. As the campaign concluded, Trump turned
himself into a martyr for American democracy, wag-
ing a principled but doomed campaign.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a
“third Obama term.” Winning endowed the things
Trump said during the campaign with an import
they’d previously lacked. And while many under-
stood that his “rigged system” was just an excuse,
“drain the swamp” sure sounded like a promise.
So as the presidential inauguration approached,
“THEY’VE anticipation bubbled through the sulfurous nexus of
MADE A Capitol Hill politicians, special interest groups and
MOCKERY their K Street lobbyists, the media, the establishment
OF THE and just about everyone else who had dismissed
EXECUTIVE Trump and his slogans as a publicity stunt. There
ORDER was now a question, rather urgently in need of an
answer: Was he serious about all that “swamp” stuff?
AND OF
Not really. Former House Speaker and Trump
ETHICS IN supporter Newt Gingrich admitted to NPR on
GENERAL.” December 21 that “drain the swamp” was never a
promise. “I’m told he now just disclaims that,” he
said. “He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want
to use it anymore.”
Someone from the Trump campaign must have
placed an angry call, because the former speaker
soon tweeted that he’d overstated the case. But
that didn’t kill the story. That same day, Politico
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017
 CORRUPTION

wondered if “drain the swamp” would be Trump’s
“first broken promise.” It cited the access-peddling
lobbying firm of Trump’s first campaign manager,
Corey Lewandowski, as well as the consulting firm
with troubling foreign ties run by his incoming
national security adviser, Michael Flynn. “Trump
and his allies have engaged in some of the same
practices they accused Hillary Clinton of exploit-
ing and vowed to change,” Politico wrote.
Now, a year after the election, many observers
believe the swamp has grown into a sinkhole that
threatens to swallow the entire Trump administra-
tion. The number of White House officials facing
questions, lawsuits or investigation is astonishing:
Trump, being sued for violating the “emoluments
clause” of the U.S. Constitution by running his
Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.;
Paul Manafort, the second Trump campaign man-
ager, for allegedly accepting payments from pro-Rus-
sia interests in the Ukraine; Flynn, for undisclosed
lobbying work done on behalf of the Turkish gov-
ernment; son-in-law and consigliere Jared kushner,
FROM TO P: C HIP SO MODEVILLA /GET T Y; GEO RGE FR EY/GET T Y; WHITE HOUSE, PREVIOUSE SPREAD: BOB STEFKO/GET T Y
reputation as a Civil War general is tarnished in part
by the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which Treasury De-
partment officials stole taxes from alcohol distillers;
members of Harding’s administration plundered oil
reserves in Teapot Dome, a rock outcropping in Wy-
oming that has lent its name to the most notorious
example of government corruption in American
political history. In both cases, the fault of the pres-
SWAMP MONSTER ident was in his lack of oversight. As far as Dallek is
On the campaign trail, concerned, something more nefarious is at work in
Trump vowed to “end the White House of Donald Trump.
government corruption”
and “drain the swamp in “What makes this different,” Dallek says, “is that
Washington, D.C.” Clinton, the president can’t seem to speak the truth about a
his Democratic opponent, host of things.” Trump isn’t just allowing corruption,
he often implied, was
the embodiment of in Dallek’s view, but encouraging it. He summons a
establishment muck. pungent adage: The fish rots from the head.

for failing to disclose $1 billion in loans tied to his

real-estate company; and at least six Cabinet heads
being investigated for or asked about exorbitant
travel expenses, security details or business dealings.
An allegation, of course, not proof that there’s
corruption, but when has the American body pol-
itic ever awaited certitude before passing judg-
ment? “The most corrupt presidency and admin-
istration we’ve ever had,” says Zephyr Teachout, a
Fordham University law professor who authored a
book titled Corruption in America: From Benjamin
Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.
Trump supporters say corruption charges are
partisan smear tactics. “President Trump came to
Washington to drain the swamp and is following
through on his promises,” White House deputy press
secretary Raj Shah says, citing Trump’s executive or-
der on ethics, the elevation to deputy status of ethics
lawyers in the White House counsel’s office and “un-
precedented steps to rein in waste of taxpayer funds.”
But according to the presidential historian Robert
Dallek, no American leader has acted with more un-
adulterated self-interest as Trump. Dallek says that
in terms of outright corruption, Trump is worse
than both Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding,
presidents who oversaw the most flagrant instances
of graft in American political history. Grant’s stellar

Disgusting Displays of Wealth
on june 29, secretary of veterans affairs david
Shulkin sent a memorandum to top managers
in his department. “Essential Employee Travel”
outlined a new process by which travel would be
approved and documented. “I expect this will re-
sult in decreased employee travel and generate
savings,” he wrote.
Two weeks later, Shulkin and his wife, Merle Bari,
flew to Copenhagen. With them were three VA
staffers and one staffer’s husband. There was also a
six-person security detail. “The 10-day trip was not
entirely a vacation,” reported The Washington Post.
But it wasn’t a three-day conference in Tulsa either.
Shulkin planned the trip so that it began with meet-
ings in Denmark and ended about a week later with
meetings in London. In between, there was watch-
ing tennis at Wimbledon, visiting medieval castles,
touring and shopping. A tourist from Madison,
Wisconsin, told the Post she spotted Shulkin and
company “whisked to the front of the line” at an
attraction in Copenhagen. One of Shulkin’s taxpayer-
funded security guards, she said, was hauling a
“large number of shopping bags.”
The Post noted that taxpayers reimbursed Bari
for her expenses, which may have been as high as
$3,600 per day. Although some of the other mem-
bers of the party paid for their travel, taxpayers nev-
ertheless incurred significant costs associated with
flights and security. Perhaps it is naïve to expect a
Cabinet head to Skype into international gatherings,
but the previous VA head, Robert McDonald, hadn’t
needed to take a single trip abroad to do his work.
Shulkin is one of six Cabinet members being in-
vestigated for (or at least, being asked uncomfortable
questions about) travel or security expenses:
→ The inspector general of the Environmental
Protection Agency is investigating its administrator,
Scott Pruitt, for what The Washington Post says are
“at least four noncommercial and military flights”
in the past eight months that cost the government
more than $58,000. Pruitt has also built himself a
$25,000 soundproof booth in his office, for reasons
that remain unclear. Pruitt’s personal security de-
tail includes high-ranking EPA investigators who are
supposed to be tracking environmental violations.
→ Steven Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs
banker who now runs the Treasury Department, is
being investigated for commandeering a govern-
20 NEWSWEEK.COM
CORRUPTION
ment jet so that he and his wife, Scottish actress
Louise Linton, could see the Great American Eclipse
in Lexington, Kentucky. That trip came to light
after Linton engaged in a social media spat with an
Oregon woman who was disgusted by the couple’s
displays of wealth. That same month, Mnuchin took
a U.S. Air Force C-37 jet from New York to Washing-
ton. The trip cost taxpayers $25,000, and while use of
David Shulkin military planes by government officials is common,
SECRETARY OF
VETERANS AFFAIRS
there are dozens of commercial flights daily that
cover the same route. Timothy Geithner, who was
President Barack Obama’s secretary of the treasury,
frequently flew coach when he made that trip.
→ Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, is being
investigated for travel expenses that include a
$12,375 chartered flight to Montana from Las Vegas,
where he had attended an event for a hockey team
owned by one of his benefactors. Zinke is being
investigated for two other chartered flights as well.
→ Elaine Chao, who heads the Transportation
Scott Pruitt Department, has used government planes on at least
LE FT, FROM TOP: PAUL MOR IGI/GE T T Y; MARK REINSTEIN/CO RBIS/GE T T Y; NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GET T Y; MARK WILSON/GET T Y
INSPECTOR GENERAL
OF THE EPA seven occasions, according to The Washington Post.
She is also facing questions about her ownership of
stock in Vulcan Materials, a building company that
would likely benefit from a $1 trillion infrastructure
plan Chao has been touting.
→ Rick Perry, the energy secretary, took a private
plane to visit “a uranium facility in Piketon, Ohio,” in
late September, according to Reuters. He once also,
the same outlet reported, flew into “a private airport
in Kansas that was within a 45-minute drive of Kan-
sas City International Airport.”
Steven Mnuchin → Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, pays for
SECRETARY OF her private flights (she is a billionaire) but uses secu-
THE TREASURY
rity from the U.S. Marshals Service, an unusual move
that will cost the American taxpayer about $1 million
per month. She is the first education secretary to
have such extensive protection in recent history.
Chiding chatter about the Trump administra-
tion’s high-flying ways began when Politico report-
ers Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan got a tip
that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom
Price was using private planes to jet around the
globe, infuriating already-demoralized HHS em-
ployees back home with grating dispatches from
Ryan Zinke Switzerland, Liberia and elsewhere. As Diamond
SECRETARY OF and Pradhan wrote, the “notoriously secretive
THE INTERIOR Cabinet secretary” had not been forthcoming
about his travel records, in keeping with the
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017
 Trump administration’s broader aversion to re-
leasing records unless forced to. They published
their initial story on Price’s private-jet travel on
September 19, their details dredged from the very
swamp Trump promised to drain: costly chartered
flights to Philadelphia, when Amtrak would have
sufficed, as well as a trip to the Aspen Ideas Fes-
tival, a potent symbol of the elitism Trump had
denounced during the campaign.
Trump was furious, and Price resigned at the end
of the month, after offering to pay back $52,000 of
his travel costs. The total cost of his taxpayer-funded
jaunts is estimated to be $1 million.
This behavior is outrageous—but also puz-
zling, since Trump’s Cabinet has been estimated
to be the wealthiest in American history. These
were people, we’d been told, who were sacrificing
lucrative private-sector posts to work in the ser-
vice of the American people. Now, those very same
“forgotten Americans” were paying for Mnuchin,
worth as much as $500 million, because he appar-
ently didn’t want to go through airport security.
RIGHT, FROM TOP: MICHAEL REYNOL DS­PO O L/GE T T Y; ALEX WONG /GE T T Y; WIN MCNAMEE/GET T Y; ZACH GIBSON/GET T Y
In his Cabinet are many people who went to Ivy
League universities, worked for Fortune 500 cor-
porations. They had to know better. And if they
didn’t, how can we trust them?
“Power and stupidity are close companions,” said
Teachout when I asked her how so many Cabinet
members could make the same mistake, and so fre-
quently. “They are living in a world in which they
can’t see the ways in which they are being corrupted,”
she speculated. “You’re so powerful that you don’t
even understand that a chartered flight isn’t a right.”
A senior White House official noted that it had
not been the White House’s job to micromanage
Cabinet-level travel plans in prior administrations.
Now, those plans need approval from Chief of Staff
John Kelly. David J. Apol, who heads the Office of
Government Ethics (OGE), recently wrote a mem-
orandum that said he was “deeply concerned that
the actions of some in Government leadership
have harmed perceptions about the importance
of ethics.” But Apol’s dismay, however welcome, is
not enough for all those who believe the Trump
administration is unwilling to face up to its ethical
shortcomings. “You don’t see any shame here,” says
E.J. Dionne Jr., the Washington Post columnist and
co-author of the new book One Nation After Trump.
“And that’s really disturbing.”
The Great Enabler
on the morning of november 9, teachout was
dealing with a personal political loss: The night
before, she had lost to Republican John Faso for a
House of Representatives seat in the Hudson River
Valley, north of New York City. Teachout had run
an anti-corruption campaign, while Faso was a
fairly conventional Northeastern Republican who
Elaine Chao never resolved his apparent unease about Trump.
SECRETARY OF
TRANSPORTATION
Voters apparently did not mind.
Sometime that day, she spoke to an anti-Clinton
person who may have voted for Trump. “I just want
to put a stick in the stream,” he told her. The vote a
small act of defiance, since New York State was safely
Democratic. But even a small vote can be telling. By
possibly casting a ballot for Trump, the man indi-
cated his profound exasperation with the political
system, as well as his conviction that only a whole-
sale reimagination of what government did—and
how—could make Americans believe in government
Rick Perry again. Even if it wasn’t clear what Trump meant by
SECRETARY OF “drain the swamp,” the image strongly evoked a righ-
ENERGY teous cleansing, a renewal of the tired, infertile land.
“The language of corruption is incredibly power-
ful,” Teachout says, and Trump’s campaign harnessed
that power to great effect. But the transition to gov-
erning presented new challenges, foremost among
them questions about the inscrutable, transnational
Trump Organization, which has included everything
from a line of steaks to a new hotel in the heart of
D.C., in a building leased from the very federal
apparatus he now controls.
Betsy DeVos On January 11, just days before the presidential
SECRETARY OF inauguration, Trump held a press conference at
EDUCATION Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to address
ethics issues surrounding his administration. “I
could actually run my business and run the gov-
ernment at the same time,” he boasted. His tax law-
yer, Sheri Dillon, described a vague arrangement
in which Trump would not manage his businesses,
but also not disassociate from them. On a table
next to Trump were stacks of papers, presumably
relating to his finances. A reporter’s photograph
suggested the papers were blank, just for show.
“The tone was set by the president when he
Tom Price
(Former) decided not to divest,” says Walter Shaub Jr., who’d
SECRETARY OF HEALTH been appointed by Trump’s predecessor, Obama,
AND HUMAN SERVICES as the head of OGE, and who remained in that
post during the transition and first five and a half
NEWSWEEK.COM 21
months of Trump’s tenure. He says this admin-
istration “came in unprepared for the rigors” of
working within the federal government, “unaware
of the fact that there are many requirements and a
culture of accountability to the public.”
Shaub blames a lot of the ethical lapses on White
House counsel Donald McGahn II, whom he charges
with fostering an anything-goes atmosphere by
interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed
Trump to skirt them. “He has been the great enabler.
And he has been an amplifier of the message that
ethics doesn’t matter.” McGahn did not respond to
a Newsweek request for comment.
A senior White House official who was only
authorized to speak on background disputed the
assertion that the Trump administration has not
made ethics a priority. He says the lawyers working
on ethics issues in the White House are “not shrink-
ing violets” and points to the elevation of their office
to deputy status, presumably giving those lawyers
greater sway. The office is headed by Stefan Passan-
tino, deputy assistant to the president and deputy
“IT’S AN
counsel to the president, who, upon his appoint-
ETHICS
ment, was praised by Howard Dean, a former Dem- CALAMITY would tell you.… I’m going to give a free commercial
ocratic primary candidate for the presidency and OF A KIND WE here. Go buy it today, everybody.”
governor of Vermont. “I have a lot of confidence HAVE NEVER This seemed a flagrant violation of ethics rules,
that he will be clear about what the ethical and SEEN IN which prohibit elected officials from endorsing a
legal boundaries are in his advice to the White MODERN commercial enterprise. Shaub sent a letter to Pas-
House,” Dean said at the time. PRESIDENTIAL santino, informing him that “there is strong reason
One person who worked with Passantino in the HISTORY.” to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Stan-
early days of the administration described him as dards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is
courteous and eager about toiling in the govern- warranted.” Passantino wrote back that Conway
ment’s employ, a welcome contrast to the surly at- “made the statement in question in a light, off-hand
titudes of some other high-ranking Trump officials. manner while attempting to stand up for a person
At the same time, this individual says Passantino was she believed had been unfairly treated and did
diligently figuring out how to dismantle regulations. so without nefarious motive or intent to benefit
He notes that among Passantino’s previous legal cli- personally.” In a footnote, Passantino interpreted
ents is Gingrich, who was sanctioned by the House federal rules to conclude that Shaub’s office, OGE,
of Representatives over ethical violations. did not have oversight over the executive office of
A telling episode took place on February 9, the president, meaning that he could not sanction
when senior administration counselor Kellyanne Conway over the endorsement.
Conway went on Fox & Friends to defend Ivanka Shaub was stunned. “The assertion is incorrect,
Trump, the president’s daughter. Ivanka also runs and the letter cites no legal basis for it,” he wrote
a fashion business, but Nordstrom’s had recently Passantino. To him, this was evidence that the
dropped her line after protests by liberal activists Trump administration sought not only to disre-
who sought to have the department store sever gard ethics rules, but to actively dismantle them.
all affiliations with the Trump family. Conway He quit OGE on July 6 and deemed the admin-
defended Ivanka, speaking on live television from istration he was leaving behind “pretty close to
the White House: “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I a laughingstock.” He has been making similarly

22 NEWSWEEK.COM N OV E M BE R 10, 2017


withering critiques on social media and CNN,
which he joined as a contributor in September.
Shaub’s migration to cable news has annoyed
supporters of President Trump. Another CNN reg-
ular is Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics law-
yer for George W. Bush and is vice chair of the group,
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washing-
ton, suing Trump over the emoluments clause. An-
other CREW member, its chair and sometime CNN
commentator, is Norman Eisen, who occupied the
same position in the White House of President
Obama. The White House senior official I spoke to
expressed dismay at this “machinery” of outrage,
calibrated perfectly to a liberal viewing audience.
When I raised these concerns to Shaub, he
laughed them off as “deeply cynical.”
It’s a Swamp Thing; You Wouldn’t Understand
the most significant action by trump to drain
the swamp was taken a week into his presidency.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GET T Y
On January 28, he signed Executive Order 13770,
titled “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch
Appointees.” All such appointees had to pledge
that they would not lobby the agency to which
they were appointed for five years after leaving it;
they would abide by restrictions regarding contact
CORRUPTION
with agency officials; would not lobby foreign gov-
ernments after working for the administration;
would not accept gifts from lobbyists; and would
follow other regulations.
Shah calls it “the most sweeping Executive Order
in U.S. history to end the revolving door” between
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the lobbying firms of
K Street, singling out the injunction against foreign
lobbying. In some ways, the order is similar to what
was in place during the Obama administration.
But Eisen thinks the widespread granting of eth-
ics waivers by the administration—that is, permits
to violate the new rules—completely undermine
the executive order. “They’ve made a mockery of
the executive order and of ethics in general,” he
cried out when I called him, claiming that the
Trump administration has “virtually no standard”
on how such waivers are granted. Fourteen such
waivers had been granted as of May 31.
While Trump officials have described the exec-
utive order as being not much different from the
one that guided the Obama administration, Eisen
finds that assertion preposterous: “It’s an ethics
BROKEN PROMISES calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern
Trump signs an
executive order on presidential history.” In June, a liberal super PAC
ethics commitments called American Bridge 21st Century found 74 lob-
in the Oval Office in byists working in the administration, 49 of them
January. The order was
supposed to end the in agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients.
revolving door between The new deputy administrator of the EPA, for ex-
the White House and ample, is former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler.
lobbying firms, but critics
say the president has “This will not take away one vote,” says Sam Nun-
completely undermined it. berg, a longtime Trump associate who was fired
from the presidential campaign in 2015.
That may be the case. It may also be shortsight-
ed. Painter, the former Bush lawyer, is a Republi-
can “Never Trumper” who endorsed Clinton in the
general election. He thinks Trump isn’t just evis-
cerating ethics laws but destroying the conserva-
tive movement that, for decades, preached moral
responsibility and fiscal prudence. “This,” he
laments, “could be the end of the Republican Party.”
As for the “drain the swamp” plan, with its vi-
sion of purified Washington? I managed to find
the link to the original press release and, feeding
it into my browser, was transported to those late
October days when pundits mused about whether
Clinton would take Arizona and whether Trump
would start a television network of his own.
The link loaded, but the page was empty.
NEWSWEEK.COM 23
 SETTING THE COURSE
Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New
Era guides China’s future development

T
XINHUA

he 19th National Congress of the

Communist Party of China (CPC) was
held on October 18-24, enshrining Xi
Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics for a New Era into the Party
Constitution.
In his report delivered at the opening
session of the congress, Xi Jinping, General
Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, paint-
ed a promising outlook for the future of the
world’s second largest economy. He spelled out
a two-stage development plan for the country
in front of more than 2,300 delegates.
China will basically realize socialist mod-
ernization in the first stage from 2020 to 2035
before developing China into a great modern
socialist country that is prosperous, strong,
democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious
and beautiful in the second stage from 2035 to
the middle of the 21st century.

Xi Jinping Thought
A main function of CPC’s national congresses is
to summarize and advance the Party’s theory on
development. At this year’s congress, the Party’s
new theories combined are defined as Xi Jinping
Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
for a New Era.
What deeply impressed Shi Taifeng, a delegate
to the 19th CPC National Congress, was Xi’s re-
mark that socialism with Chinese characteristics
has entered a new era. “This is a new historic junc-
ture in China’s development,” Xi said.
“The judgment is a historic contribution made
by the 19th CPC National Congress, as it is about
the direction and path of China’s future develop-
ment,” said Shi, who is also secretary of the CPC
Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regional Committee.
“Based on this, Xi Jinping Thought on
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a
New Era delivers new theories, new thoughts
and new strategies for China’s development in
all aspects. During the process, the strong lead-
ership of the CPC is especially important,” Shi
said.
Xian Hui, a delegate to the 19th CPC
National Congress and Chairwoman of Ningxia
Hui Autonomous Region, sees the thought

The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China opens at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on October 18
By Lan Xinzhen
as a summary of the governance concepts,
thoughts and strategies put forward by Xi in the
past five years, as well as a development of the
CPC’s guiding ideologies of Marxism-Leninism,
Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory,
the Theory of Three Represents and the
Scientific Outlook on Development.
New mission
Xi said in his report that this new era will be an
era of building on past successes to further
advance the cause of the CPC and the country,
and of continuing in a new historical context to
strive for the success of socialism with Chinese
characteristics.
“It will be an era of securing a decisive
victory in building a moderately prosperous
society in all aspects, and of moving on to all-
out efforts to build a great modern socialist
country. It will be an era for the Chinese people
of all ethnic groups to work together and work
hard to create a better life for themselves and
ultimately achieve common prosperity for ev-
eryone,” said Xi.
His remarks indicated that China will adhere
to the path of socialism with Chinese charac-
teristics under the leadership of the CPC; it will
realize the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation;
and China’s peaceful development, prosperity
and revival are beneficial to humanity.
But the new era also brings challenges. The
CPC has clearly realized that, as socialism with
Chinese characteristics has entered a new era,
the principal contradiction facing Chinese so-
ciety has evolved to that between unbalanced
and inadequate development and the people’s
ever-growing needs for a better life, while previ-
ously it was the gap between the ever-growing
material and cultural needs of the people and
underdeveloped social production.
The main reason for the CPC to redefine the
principal social contradiction is that science and
technology progress is transforming China from
a big manufacturing country to a manufacturing
power, whose productivity is no longer “back-
ward,” said Zhou Tianyong, Deputy Director of
the Institute for International Strategy at the Party
School of the CPC Central Committee.
In his report, Xi explained the change. He
said China has seen the basic needs of more
than a billion people met, has basically made it
possible for people to live decent lives, and will
soon bring the building of a moderately pros-
perous society to successful completion. The
needs to be met for the people to live a better
life are increasingly broad. Not only have their
material and cultural needs grown; their de-
mands for democracy, the rule of law, fairness
and justice, security and a better environment
are increasing.
Xi said while China’s overall productive ca-
pacity has significantly improved and in many
areas leads the world, the problem is that the
country’s development is unbalanced and inad-
equate. This has become the main constraining
factor in meeting the people’s increasing needs
for a better life.
As the principal social contradiction has
changed, so will the CPC’s historical mission.
The report noted that realizing the great dream
of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is the
CPC’s historical mission in the new era. The mis-
sion, according to the report, demands a great
struggle with many new historical features, a
new great project in Party building, and a great
cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
“The great struggle, great project, great
cause and great dream are closely connected
and are mutually reinforcing. We must see that
as history progresses and the world undergoes
profound changes, the Party remains always
ahead of the times; that as history progresses
and we respond to risks and tests at home and
abroad, the Party remains always the backbone
of the nation; and that as history progresses
and we continue to uphold and develop so-
cialism with Chinese characteristics, the Party
remains always a powerful leadership core,”
said Wang Yongkang, Secretary of the CPC
Xi’an Municipal Committee in northwest China’s
Shaanxi Province.
China has two Centenary Goals, which
are to complete the building of a moderately
prosperous society in all aspects by the time
the CPC celebrates its centenary in 2021, and
to turn China into a modern socialist country
that is prosperous, strong, democratic, cultur-
ally advanced and harmonious by the time the
People’s Republic of China celebrates its cente-
nary in 2049.
In his report, Xi gave a more detailed road-
map for accomplishing the second goal.
“Unleashing and developing the productive
force is a fundamental task of socialism. These
measures will undoubtedly inspire creativity
and vitality throughout society, and bring about
more efficient, fairer and more sustainable de-
velopment of higher quality,” Shi said.
The report stressed the very purpose of devel-
oping socialist democracy is to give full expression
to the will of the people, protect their rights and
interests, spark their creativity, and strengthen
institutional guarantees to ensure the people run
the country.
Xi said, “The political system of socialism with
Chinese characteristics is a great creation of the
CPC and the Chinese people. We have every con-
fidence that we can give full play to the strengths
and distinctive features of China’s socialist democ-
racy, and make China’s contribution to the political
advancement of mankind.”
Shared future
The path, the theory, the system, and the culture
of socialism with Chinese characteristics have kept
developing, blazing a new trail for other developing
countries to achieve modernization, Xi said in the
report. It offers a new option for other countries
and nations who want to speed up their develop-
ment while preserving their independence; and it
offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to
solving the problems facing mankind.
Over the past few years, Xi has proposed to
build a community of shared future for mankind
on various international occasions, and it has also
been incorporated in a UN resolution.
The world is undergoing profound develop-
ment, transformation and adjustment, but peace
and development remain the call of our day.
Meanwhile, the trends of global multi-polarity,
economic globalization, IT application and cultural
diversity are advancing; changes in the global gov-
ernance system and the international order are
speeding up; and international forces are becom-
ing more balanced.
And yet, global economic growth lacks en-
ergy, the gap between rich and poor continues to
widen, conflicts arise often in some regions, and
unconventional security threats like terrorism, lack
of cybersecurity and climate change continue to
spread.
“We call on the people of all countries to work
together to build a community of shared future
for mankind, to build an open, inclusive, clean and
beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal
security and common prosperity,” Xi said in the
report.
He also pointed out that to make new and
greater contributions to humanity is the CPC’s
abiding mission.
The report said that China will continue to play
its part as a major and responsible country, take
an active role in reforming and developing the
global governance system, and keep contributing
Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to global
governance.
“China’s development
does not pose a threat to
any other country. No matter
what stage of development
it reaches, China will never
seek hegemony or engage in
expansion,” Xi said. ■
Scan QR code to visit Beijing Review’s website
Comments to yanwei@bjreview.com
 CLOCKWORK ORANGE
At left, detainees at
Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray. At
right, Rumsfeld, the
defense secretary. The
U.S. military created a
battle lab at Gitmo to test
out brutal interrogation
measures, then employed
them in Iraq in prisons
such as Abu Ghraib.

26 NEWSWEEK.COM N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

 THE U. S. MILITARY ’S BRUTAL
AND INEFFECTIVE INTERROGATION
PROGRAM STARTED AT GITMO
THEN SPREAD TO ABU GHRAIB.
by ONE MAN WHO TRIED TO STOP IT
MARK —AND FAILED—NOW FEARS
FALLON
LE FT: PET T Y O FFIC ER 1ST CLASS SHANE T. MCC OY/U. S. NAVY/GET T Y; RIGHT: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GET T Y

Photog raph by N A M E G O E S H E R E 27

h at the fuck? who are these gu ys?”
It was February 2002, and I was giving
Bob McFadden a tour of Camp X-Ray, a
crude detention center on the far corner of
the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
As the deputy commander of the Defense
Department’s Criminal Investigation Task
Force at Gitmo, I oversaw the investigation
and interrogation of suspected militants.
The goal: to probe their networks and bring
them to trial. As I explained to McFadden, a former colleague at the
Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the job was, well, complicated.
Nearly all the Gitmo detainees had been nabbed in Afghanistan.
We housed them in outdoor mesh cages made of fencing material.
Each cage had two buckets, one for drinking water, the other for
human waste. It was sort of like a high-security, low-rent zoo.
By the time McFadden arrived, the camp was getting over-
crowded. We asked for better facilities but were told to “hang
tight” because Gitmo was just a temporary holding site. In the
meantime, I showed my old friend around, warning him about
the camp’s more eccentric characters. One guy, whom we nick-
named Wild Bill, would chuck his shit at you if you got too close.
Another, Waffle Butt, would press his bare ass against the mesh
any time someone got near him.
None of that bothered McFadden. He’d been inside plenty of
nasty places. But as soon as the detainees realized he spoke Arabic,
they began yelling at him: “Please, please, mister, mister! There’s
been a mistake! There was a mix-up.” McFadden talked to some
of them, and I could see his face getting more and more trou-
bled. Finally, he grabbed a list of detainees, scanned the names,
looked at the mass of prisoners in front of him and shouted out,
“None of them are Arabs!” The detainee list was full of Afghan and
Pakistani names such as Iqbal and Khan. Whoever they were, they
weren’t part of the core Al-Qaeda network—the Egyptians, Saudis
and other Arabs whom U.S. intelligence been tracking for years.
In the fall of 2001, the primary justification for invading
Afghanistan was to capture Osama bin Laden and his inner cir-
cle. That hadn’t happened, but our military hadn’t given up on
the chase. Helicopters were still dropping flyers offering $5,000
bounties for Taliban or Al-Qaeda members. Most of the Afghan
and Pakistani groups hunting down militants were just after the
reward; they didn’t care if they nabbed an innocent man.
The vetting process for determining who might be a militant
was equally dysfunctional. Some militants had used a popular
model of a Casio digital watch as a timer for bombs; wearing one
eventually became suspect, and detainees were actually held at
Gitmo because they had been wearing a Casio watch.
When I was setting up the task force, I was promised I’d be deal-
ing with “the worst of the worst” of Al-Qaeda militants. But it soon
28 NEWSWEEK.COM
GITMO
became clear that McFadden was right—we didn’t have them. This
was not the job I had signed up for. And soon it would require me
to do things against my values and against the values of America.
‘I’d Bring Back Waterboarding’
more than a decade after i showed mcfadden around gitmo,
I watched with horror as the Republican candidates for pres-
ident debated one another in Manchester, New Hampshire. It
was February 6, 2016, and they were discussing waterboard-
ing—a now-banned procedure that involves simulating drown-
ing. Jeb Bush was against it, and Ted Cruz danced around the
issue. But Donald Trump took a firm stance. Dressed in a baggy
blue suit with an American flag pin on his lapel, Trump praised
harsh interrogation techniques. “In the Middle East,” he said,
“we have people chopping the heads off Christians. I would
bring back waterboarding, and I would bring back a hell of a
lot worse.” People in the crowd applauded.
Trump, of course, went on to win the election and move into
the White House. And despite the objections from senators such
as John McCain, a former torture victim and prisoner of war,
he’s continued to praise waterboarding as an effective and nec-
essary interrogation tool. He’s also talked of reopening secret
CIA prisons and expanding Gitmo, where detainees remain
forever prisoners in an interminable war.
I don’t know if Trump will ever do such things, but if he does, he
will be playing right into Al-Qaeda’s strategy. When bin Laden and
his jihadi followers attacked the World Trade Center and the Penta-
gon on September 11, 2001, they wanted to terrify Americans, to get
them to throw away their ideas of democracy, equality and the rule
of law. Facing a shadowy enemy and a new type of warfare—one
that occupies a psychological, not just physical, terrain—we did
just that. We allowed the enemy to change who we were.
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017
 It’s a change I know about firsthand. During my time at
Gitmo, I watched the amateurish architects of America’s tor-
ture program develop bogus, brutal interrogation techniques—
ones they borrowed from the Chinese Communists. Not only
did they fail to get detainees to talk; they also treated them as
subhuman—all under Washington’s watchful eye, and with its
tacit—and sometimes explicit—encouragement.
Most Americans know about the CIA’s enhanced interro-
gation program: how the agency waterboarded suspects and
subjected them to other brutal and ineffective interrogation
techniques, from slapping to sleep deprivation. What fewer
people realize is that the U.S. military did much of the same,
creating a battle lab at Gitmo to test out these harsh measures,
then employed them in Iraq in prisons such as Abu Ghraib.
I tried to stop this abuse. Others did too. Unfortunately, we
failed. It’s a failure I fear we’ll someday repeat.

The 20th Hijacker

during my first months at camp x-ray, we had bribed the navy’s
construction crew with two cases of beer to get them to build
us interrogation rooms. They were basically four-sided plywood
boxes with doors and a few chairs inside. There was no privacy,
making the camp a horrible place for interrogations.
Some of the detainees didn’t talk; we called them “head hang-
ers.” Even though we knew they weren’t going to say anything, we
FROM TO P: THE DARKRO OM PHOTO GR APHY; ROBE RT GIROUX/GE T T Y; UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GET T Y;

couldn’t let it be known that anyone could skip out on interroga-

tions by not talking. So we’d just sit in the room for three hours with
the head hangers, asking them a question every 30 minutes or so.
PET T Y OFFIC ER 1ST CL ASS SHANE T. MCC OY/U.S. NAVY/GET T Y; PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GET T Y

The Saudis were the most dedicated head hangers, but one
Saudi national who arrived in mid-February was different.
Mohammed al-Qahtani claimed he was a falconry enthusiast who
had simply been in Afghanistan when the war began. It was prob-
FIRE AND SMOKE
ably a cover story, so we let him talk and talk until we had enough
Fallon, above, claims
that after Osama bin little bits and pieces of his story to build a mosaic. As our task
Laden’s attack on force and the FBI looked into him more closely, and using those
September 11, 2001,
tiny clues, we realized he was one of our most valuable detainees.
America violated
many of its cherished We knew 19 men carried out the 9/11 attacks, but a growing
principles about body of evidence suggested there were supposed to be 20. On
democracy, equality
three of the four hijacked flights, four “musclemen” controlled
and the rule of law. A
prime example: Gitmo. the crew and one pilot. The fourth plane only had three; on
that flight, the passengers fought back and the plane crashed in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Al-Qahtani, we surmised, using Immi-
gration and Naturalization Service flight data and other sources,
was supposed to be the 20th hijacker.
At the time, there was a lot of pressure to produce intel.
Everybody wanted to know where bin Laden was hiding and
how to prevent more attacks. Al-Qahtani, we realized, could have
valuable information. Unfortunately, for him and for us, he had
attracted the manic attention of Major General Michael Dunlavey.

NEWSWEEK.COM 29
 In February, not long after McFadden arrived, the Army started
a new joint task force to take over intel gathering. The way I
understood it, my team would continue to do criminal inves-
tigations, and we’d help them. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary
of defense, had picked Dunlavey to run this new intel team at
Gitmo. (Neither responded to requests for comment in time for
publication.) The choice was an odd one. Dunlavey was a reservist
who had done his drilling in signals intelligence at the National
Security Agency, which meant his training had very little to do
with the human intelligence collection we were doing at Gitmo.
The first signs of trouble surfaced only a week after Dunlavey
arrived on the base. The general introduced himself to one of
my colleagues by pointing to the two stars on his collar this way:
“I’m here now, and I’m in charge!” Later, as I was having drinks
with a few colleagues at the Gitmo tiki bar, enjoying the stun-
ning view of the bay, Dunlavey pulled up with his car windows
down, blaring “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters.
Dunlavey’s actions might have just seemed silly, but he was BALLAD OF BRUTALITY
Dunlavey, above,
the commanding general at a military facility during an unpre- implemented harsh
dictable global war. When people on the base started calling him interrogation techniques
Cocoa Puffs—after the cereal’s ad line: “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa on detainees at Gitmo.
Among them: Blaring
Puffs”—I could tell that discipline was at risk of breaking down. loud music to keep them
My main concern with Dunlavey, however, was how he handled awake and using dogs to
interrogations. My team was packed with experts who had been frighten them, Fallon says.
doing interrogation for a living. We all agreed some of the best
ways to conduct interrogations involved surprising a detainee
with kindness, developing a rapport with him or convincing
the prisoner you knew more about his life than you really did.
Despite what you might see on television or in the movies, torture
often leads detainees to give you unreliable information. They’ll
say anything to make the pain and discomfort stop.
But Dunlavey’s team used very junior staff, usually reservists
in their early 20s—and they hadn’t been properly trained. Most
had never been in an interrogation room with a bad guy before.
The reservists had been trained in the techniques described in
the Army Field Manual. The program wasn’t grounded in sci-
ence and was mostly ineffective. Even worse, the techniques
weren’t designed to deal with someone from a non-Western
culture. While my team members would sit on the floor and
drink tea and talk to detainees about soccer to gain their con-
fidence, Dunlavey’s interrogators would walk into a room with
a shopping list of intelligence requirements. Some did so with
an almost comical self-confidence. One guy even wore a cowboy
outfit into a session, including a vest and chaps.
They had the swagger, but Dunlavey’s team members failed
miserably once they tried to stare down a detainee. They just read
generic questions off a list, and the interrogations went nowhere.
Eventually, a detainee would put his head down and stop talking.
Unfortunately, Dunlavey had a very handy excuse for his group’s

30 NEWSWEEK.COM J U L Y 0 7, 2 0 1 7

failures. In 2000, British authorities had found a computer file
during a raid on the house of a suspected militant in Manchester,
England. On the file was a manual—later known as the Manchester
Document—that laid out how Al-Qaeda militants should wage war.
Among the tactics discussed: details on what treatment to expect
if captured—and advice on resisting and lying to captors. When
detainees at Gitmo refused to cooperate, Dunlavey’s interrogators
were quick to blame “classic Manchester resistance tactics!”
We had no proof that detainees were actually trained in such
techniques. But these reputed tactics inspired psychologists
James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two CIA contractors, who
consulted on the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
(Jessen did not respond to a request for comment; Mitchell says
the CIA’s techniques were effective, though I strongly disagree.)
At Gitmo, Dunlavey’s team was drawing a similar conclusion as
the CIA contractors: That America needed to get tougher.
Broken Soldiers and False Confessions
FROM TOP: TIMES PUBLISHING COMPANY, ERIE, PA. COPYRIGHT 2017; JOSHUA S. HIGGINS/USMC/GETTY; JOE RAEDLE/GETTY; CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY
as we continued interrogating al-qahtani, dunlavey noticed
our task force had its own psychologists watching our interroga-
tions and consulting on how we could make the sessions better.
He decided his group needed the same type of expertise.
But instead of asking for our help, in early June 2002, he
sought assistance from psychologists who had no expertise in
real-world interrogations. But like Mitchell and Jessen, they had
experience with a U.S. military program called SERE (Survival,
Evasion, Rescue and Escape). The program’s goal was to teach
service members how to deal with being tortured. It was modeled
on how the Chinese Communists interrogated Americans during
the Korean War (many had elicited false confessions).
The general’s team was planning to interrogate al-Qahtani,
using techniques that looked suspiciously like Mitchell and Jes-
sen’s. And I hurried to stop them.
Because my team had identified al-Qahtani as a potentially
high-value target—an actual worst of the worst—I was able to
convince the Pentagon to create a pecking order for interrogating
suspects. We put the FBI at the top of it; I knew Xxxxx* from a
previous investigation and thought he was the best possible per-
son to take on the 20th hijacker. Xxxxx had an amazing knack for
developing rapport with subjects. He would sit on the floor with
them and discuss politics or religion in fluent Arabic. In the spring
of 2002, Xxxxx had used his rapport-based techniques while
interrogating a high-profile detainee xxxxxxxxxxx named Abu
Zubaydah, who gave up several important pieces of intel, including
naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind and
* This is an excerpt from unjustifiable means: the inside story of how the cia, pentagon, and u.s. government conspired
to torture, published October 24 by Regan Arts. The Defense Department has redacted certain portions of the manuscript, saying
it contained protected information that’s not approved for public release.
GITMO
disclosing information about dirty bomber Jose Padilla.
In July 2002, xxxxxxxxx and other FBI agents arrived at Gitmo,
hoping to match their progress xxxxxxxxxxx. Initially, they made
some moderate progress with al-Qahtani, gathering some intel as
well as evidence. Eventually, however, al-Qahtani stopped talking.
The general believed getting tougher was the best way to get
intel on Al-Qaeda, prevent attacks and save lives. And though I
didn’t know it at the time, the U.S. was prepared to change the way
we interrogated suspects—and the law governing it. On August 1,
2002, President George W. Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto
Gonzales, received a 50-page memo from Deputy Assistant Attor-
ney General John Yoo. The document was supposed to define what
constitutes torture. Acts that were intended to “inflict severe pain
or suffering” were illegal, the memo claimed, but they must be
of an “extreme nature” to qualify as torture. “Certain acts may be
cruel, inhuman and degrading,” the memo said, but are not torture.
So what is torture? The memo set an absurdly high bar. It in-
cluded the case of a man who was pistol-whipped into submission,
forced to play Russian roulette, left in a scorpion-infested cell, ran-
domly beaten and subjected to some unexplained surgical proce-
dure. Other cases that were considered torture included a nun who
was blindfolded, burned with cigarettes and raped, along with a
man who was doused in gasoline and burned to death.
Top lawyers at the CIA and Pentagon eventually received the
memo. But because I hadn’t known about it, I thought that my
adversaries were just poorly informed, that they didn’t under-
stand that coercive techniques were ineffective.
I didn’t realize I was fighting the White House.
NEWSWEEK.COM 31

America’s Battle Lab’
in august 2002, with support from the bush administration,
Dunlavey soon got his way. He took over the entire Gitmo opera-
tion, and life soon became much harder for detainees. The pris-
on was never a summer camp, but inmates had access to books,
including Korans, and food that was appropriate for religious
Muslims. Once Dunlavey officially took control, all that ended.
The general wanted to turn Gitmo into what would later be
called “America’s Battle Lab.” The psychologists and psychiatrists
on Dunlavey’s team would soon be trying out brutal, unproven
techniques on the detainees. And al-Qahtani was going to be
the group’s first guinea pig.
I was more frustrated than ever. Al-Qahtani was likely the 20th
hijacker. I didn’t like him, but I wanted to interrogate him the
right way, effectively and humanely. I did my best to stop Dun-
lavey. I spoke to my superiors and to legal advisers at the Defense
Department and the Navy. None disagreed with me, but they
were stymied or ignored by higher-ups at the Pentagon.
Dunlavey’s team and interrogators from the Defense Intelli-
gence Agency seized al-Qahtani from his cell and brought him
to a new one. They kept him there for days, blinding him with
bright lights and blaring music hours a day. Among the songs
they played on repeat to keep him awake was Christina Aguilera’s
“Dirrty.” Periodically, they also used large dogs to frighten him.
The techniques didn’t work. While Al-Qahtani had been talk-
ative, toward the end of the FBI investigation, he began to clam up.
But once the enhanced techniques began, he shut down completely.
Dunlavey’s team didn’t give up on trying to get him to talk.
On October 11, 2002, they requested the Defense Department
to authorize the approval of even rougher interrogation tactics,
including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. But when Dun-
lavey’s request made it up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the group’s
chairman, General Richard Myers, rejected it. The draft memos
from the Joint Chiefs staff stated, “We do not believe the pro-
posed plan to be legally sufficient.”
Dunlavey had lost. But supporters of harsh interrogation had
not been defeated.
Stripped and Forcibly Groomed
shortly after his request was rejected, the defense depart-
ment replaced Dunlavey with General Geoffrey Miller, an artillery
officer with no background in intel.
First impressions don’t always mean much, but from the
beginning, it was clear that Miller was a hard-ass. He had extremely
rigid posture and often ended his sentences with “hoo-ah.” The
more I listened to him, the more I worried he was going to be just
like Dunlavey—only more competent. (Newsweek was unable to
reach Miller for comment in time for publication.)
I was right. Miller wanted to immediately authorize a list of new
32 NEWSWEEK.COM
GITMO
WE ALLOWED
THE ENEMY
TO CHANGE
WHO WE WERE.
harsh interrogation tactics. “We’ve got to show [detainees] that we
have more teeth than they have ass, hoo-ah!” he would often say.
Not long after Miller took over, I realized that powerful people
were behind the push toward detainee abuse. I began emailing key
documents to trusted friends and told them to save them. I knew
that if things went sideways, I could be relieved of my command and
denied access to my office and emails. I needed to stash documen-
tary evidence of everyone’s actions at Gitmo at safe locations. I also
told our legal counsel to take notes and document every encounter
he had with the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel.
Later that month, al-Qahtani’s fate was sealed. Rumsfeld signed
the request that Dunlavey had initiated, authorizing most of the new
list of techniques (he did not authorize waterboarding, for example).
My team had been cut out of any decision-making, but we
still had access to an electronic interrogation log recording al-
Qaht ani’s tre atment . At the e arlier me etings, x x x x
xxxxxxxx. So I had our analyst send the log book entries up to
me every day. Miller’s team had no idea we had access to them.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Al-Qahtani’s interrogators knew he would have such an extreme
reaction. Many of the detainees were brought up in a culture where
women dressed very modestly. In some cases, they may have grown
up never seeing a woman in public without her whole body covered.
Open sexuality or nudity were shocking taboos. For Americans and
Europeans, the nature of this taboo might be imaginable only if they
inserted their siblings or cousins in the role of female interrogators
and imagined them stripping and rubbing up against them.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx
Medical professionals were direct participants in this treatment.
Begrudgingly at times, they had helped develop, recommend and
implement practices that were cruel, inhumane and degrading.
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

CHAIN OF COMMAND
After Donald Rumsfeld,
above, defense secretary
of George W. Bush, left,
authorized the harsh
techniques, he sent Miller,
top, to Iraq to “improve
interrogation” practices
FROM TOP: CHARL ES OMMANNEY/GET T Y; REU TE RS/PO OL /DAVID HU ME KENNERLY; LUKE FRAZZA/
in the country. The result:
brutality increased, Fallon
says, fueling anger over
AFP/GET TY; HAITHAM MUSSAWI/AFP/GET TY; COURTESY OF WASHINGTON POST VIA GET TY
the U.S. occupation.
They were there when the interrogators stripped al-Qahtani, forc-
ibly groomed him and made him wear a leash or act like a dog.
Day after day, however, it had become clear that these tech-
niques were not working. Al-Qahtani was no more forthcoming
with useful intel. Rather than turn him into a babbling chatter-
box of Al-Qaeda secrets, the harsh approaches served only to
harden his resistance.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Meanwhile, the brutal techniques Miller’s team was using had
begun to spread. In October, military personnel from Afghanistan’s
Special Mission Units visited Gitmo and learned what was going
on at the battle lab. They decided to adopt some of the techniques,
from degrading strip searches to frightening detainees with dogs.
Doing so, advocates claimed, posed little risk, yet some de-
tainees died in Afghanistan as a result of harsh interrogation
measures. In late November 2002, an Afghan named Gul Rah-
man died of exposure while in CIA custody after being left
chained to a wall in nearly freezing temperatures overnight.
A few weeks later, a 22-year-old taxi driver, known only by the
name Dilawar, and the brother of a Taliban leader, Mullah
Habibullah, were killed in the custody of their military cap-
tors. Both had severe blunt-force trauma on the back of their
legs from repeated blows from U.S. soldiers while in custody.
Harsh interrogation and abuse were becoming institutional-
ized. And soon they would spread to a new country: Iraq.
The Country Club
in the late spring of 2003, officials in washington were
worried. The White House had gone to war fearing Iraq’s Sadd-
am Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But now the U.S.
couldn’t find them. The timing was perfect for pitching harsh
interrogation techniques. If only we got tougher, the thinking
went, we could find those WMDs. Some U.S. military personnel
were doing just that; they had picked up the techniques at the
military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, or at Gitmo.
But the brutality increased after Miller visited Iraq in August
2003 on a mission to “improve” interrogation practices. The
men and women interrogating detainees were “running a coun-
try club,” he reportedly said. They were treating their prisoners
too leniently. Miller felt the U.S. needed to employ harsher mea-
sures—including shackling and sleep deprivation—to break the
Iraqis and get them to talk.
During this visit, the general quickly began pushing for these hard
measures. Among his first stops: the prison at Abu Ghraib. Saddam
had once housed—and tortured—many of his political enemies
NEWSWEEK.COM 33
Breaking Bad → THE FOLLOWING ARE SOME OF THE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES AUTHORIZED AT GITMO

ABDOMINAL SLAPPING STRESS POSITIONS

Interrogators were To physically weaken

permitted to use the back
PHOBIAS of their bare hands and
hit the detainees in the
Interrogators were instructed to learn what frightened center of their abdomen,
detainees and to exploit those fears by exposing over an item of clothing.
them to it. One common fear: dogs. In Abu Ghraib, This was designed to
they were infamously used to threaten detainees. shock and intimidate.
detainees, interrogators
placed them in stressful
positions. They were
not supposed to keep
them in any particular
position for more than
10 minutes at a time.

NUDITY WALLING

Interrogators forcefully Interrogators slammed

removed detainees’
clothing to degrade
and debilitate them.
Sometimes they sprayed
them with cold water
until they shivered.
detainees against
specially constructed
walls. The interrogators
were supposed to grab the
detainees by the collar
and not let them go.
DIETARY MANIPULATION
Guards would withhold food or give detainees a liquid
diet for a considerable amount of time. This, like
other measures, was intended to break the prisoner.

* This list comes from a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee Report and a 2002 Gitmo "Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure," released by WikiLeaks.

34 NEWSWEEK.COM Illustrations by T O D D D E T W I L E R

PAIN AND DENIAL
Ex-Gitmo detainees, above,
and right, talk to the press.
Below, Rumsfeld speaks
before the Senate Armed
Services Committee in May
2004. He apologized for abuse
at Abu Ghraib, saying: “I wish
I had known more sooner.”
FROM TO P: DA RRE N MCC OL LESTER /GE T T Y; TAR IQ MAHMO OD/AFP/GE T T Y; MARK WILSON/GET T Y
there. Now the U.S. was about to carry out brutal and degrading
interrogations in the same facility. “You’re too nice,” Miller
reportedly told Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a mili-
tary police officer who oversaw the detention operations at the
prison. “You have to treat them like dogs.” (Miller has denied
her account of their conversation.)
Following his visit, Miller sent six people from Gitmo to Abu
Ghraib to assist in implementing the new interrogation techniques.
On September 14, 2003, just a week after Miller left Iraq, Lieu-
tenant General Ricardo Sanchez issued a new policy at the prison
and elsewhere. It drew heavily on what Rumsfeld had green-lighted
for Gitmo. By October 25, the Defense Department had expanded
the interrogation repertoire to include the use of controlled fear,
environmental manipulation and isolation, among other things.
When my team at Gitmo heard about Miller’s visit, we couldn’t
believe it. None of these techniques had worked, and now
Rumsfeld was sending Miller to the front lines. We had alerted
the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel that his trip
would be a disaster. But Rumsfeld, we learned, had personally
selected Miller. There was nothing we could do.
GITMO
Months later, Rumsfeld put Miller in charge of all detention
operations in Iraq. The country had officially become Gitmo-ized.
‘They Didn’t Know What They Were Doing’
for miller and the department of defense, there was one
critical difference between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. At Git-
mo, it was easy to control the spread of information; the prison
was on a small slice of a Caribbean island. Abu Ghraib was just
outside of a huge city in the middle of a war zone. Civilians and
the press had tons of access to the area.
The ugly reports began in late 2003 and early 2004. British
special forces began telling the press that American private con-
tractors were using harsh interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib.
American service members said the same. Human rights groups
received hundreds of allegations of cruel, degrading and inhu-
man treatment at the prison. By the time Miller took over Abu
Ghraib, what had begun as a trickle of reports had grown into
something harder to contain. And the accounts of the detainees
were beginning to fuel a nascent Iraqi insurgency.
Miller, however, was not afraid to push back against the reports.
A few days after he took command, The Guardian reported that
detainees were being subjected to “sexual gibes and degradation,
along with stripping naked.” Miller confidently “confirmed that a
battery of 50-odd special ‘coercive techniques’ can be used against
enemy detainees,” according to the newspaper. While Department
of Defense lawyers and psychologists argued that these interroga-
tion tactics were technically legal, they were still horrific.
The world would soon find out about them.
‘My Deepest Apology’
on may 7, 2004, the media scrutiny of detainee abuse at Abu
Ghraib led the Senate’s Armed Services Committee to ask Rumsfeld
to testify before it. “I feel terrible for what happened to these Iraqi
detainees,” he said. “They are human beings. They were in U.S. cus-
tody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t,
and that was wrong. So to those Iraqis who were mistreated by
members of the U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology.” He
later added, “I wish I had known more sooner and been able to tell
you more sooner, but we didn’t.” It was an audacious performance
for someone who had picked Dunlavey and Miller to lead the Gitmo
battle lab and sent Miller to Abu Ghraib, among other things.
Despite media reports describing the abuse that occurred on
Miller’s watch, the U.S. went on to make his recommendations and
interrogation policies standard practice in Iraq and elsewhere. On
May 28, 2004, I decided to step down from my role on the Defense
Department Gitmo task force. My colleagues and I had failed to
bring Al-Qaeda militants to justice—or treat them humanely. In-
stead, America’s jihadi enemies had brought the U.S. down to their
level—their brutality had made us brutal too.
NEWSWEEK.COM 35
Horizons SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY + HEALTH

INNOVATION
early on a recent morning, woodsmoke
wafted above the murmur of village life in

The
Gorama, Sierra Leone, as Rupert Allen sat sweating in
the shade of a concrete veranda. A member of Missing
Maps—a humanitarian project that maps parts of the

Misplaced
world vulnerable to natural disasters, conflicts and
disease—Allen tapped away on a small laptop next to
a black goat and a small, tame monkey. Connected by a
smartphone hot spot, Allen was in charge of mapping

Billion
Ivan Gayton’s on a quest to put 1 billion
people on a map for the first time
the nearby area.
This summer, the Missing Maps team spent months
traveling to remote parts of Sierra Leone by motor-
cycle to chart them for the first time. Despite the
ubiquity of Google Maps, there are many places on
Earth where people and the terrain they live on hav-
en’t been mapped. Globally, over a billion people are
unaccounted for—literally not attached to a physical
address in cartography or databases, which means
they often don’t receive basic services. That number
is growing; by 2020, there will be 1.5 billion people
living in slums, the majority of whom are unmapped.
Accounting for these people is important not just to
better understand our world but also because there’s
a direct link between people being not accounted for
on maps and the risk of catastrophe for them—and,
as the Ebola outbreak demonstrated, for the rest of us.
Ivan Gayton, the founder of Missing Maps, says his
crew ventured so far into the bush in Sierra Leone
this summer that even local team members were
sometimes astonished when they came across villages
where their maps had showed blank spaces. “You’re
watching light dawn in their eyes, as they see no one

FROM LEFT: FR ANCESC A L EONARDI; BLE ND IMAGE S/GE T T Y

has ever been here—no one has ever cared enough to
come here,” he says. “There’s just people living in the
forest hacking their own roads with machetes, essen-
tially unknown to anyone.”
Gayton first became interested in cartography in
2010 when he was battling one of the worst cholera
epidemics in history in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince,
Haiti. Then a field logistician
for Doctors Without Borders,
Gayton and the other medics
BY
in Port-au-Prince asked all the
LOIS PARSHLEY patients who walked in where
@LoisParshley they lived. But because the

36 NEWSWEEK.COM N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

 By 2020, there will be

1.5 billion
people living in slums, the majority
of whom are unmapped.

NEWSWEEK.COM 37
Horizons
team didn’t have accurate maps of
the city, they couldn’t send help—to
trace contacts or find other sick peo-
ple—to the right places.
Knowing where patients are com-
ing from—and therefore being able
track the progress of a disease spa-
tially—may seem like common sense
now, but modern epidemiology
itself is comparatively new. It wasn’t
founded until 1854, when Dr. John
Snow mapped an outbreak of chol-
era in London. The developed world
has since taken spatial epidemiol-
ogy—the study of the distribution
of health outcomes—to an extreme.
By comparing geographic data to
medical records in Europe and the
United States today, health workers
can now predict life expectancy by
mailing address. But in vast swaths
of the world, it’s still impossible to
trace disease outbreaks even the way
Snow did more than 150 years ago,
because there are no accurate maps.
Back in Haiti, feeling desperate
about the fast-moving epidemic,
Gayton asked Google to help chart
which slums had cholera patients—
“like calling the Bat Cave,” he jokes.
Luckily, Google was already work-
ing with earthquake disaster relief,
like the Humanitarian OpenStreet-
Map Team that had been mapping
destroyed areas of Port-au-Prince.
With the use of these new maps, Gay-
ton was able to pin where groups of
patients were coming from and iden-
tify potential contamination sources,
such as infected wells. The effect was
like magic, he says. “The conversion
rate instantly turned around.”  hole through it, and the wards are
This success spurred Gayton
to help organize a map-making
collaboration between tech-in-
dustry volunteers like Google and
OpenStreetMap and nongovern-
mental organizations like Doc-
tors Without Borders and the Red
38 NEWSWEEK.COM
INNOVATION
Cross. Missing Maps now regularly
holds “mapathons,” in which volun-
teers look at satellite photos to find
towns and villages in regions at risk
of disease or conflict. That data are
then sent to locals in those areas,
who often go out with printed cop-
ies of the satellite images and label
street names and neighborhoods in
their own language. (To be useful,
the maps have to be locally relevant.
Imagine a doctor trying to locate a
patient in a slum without knowing
how to spell or even pronounce the
street names.)
Over the past few years, Missing
Maps has made much progress, but
in many places satellite photos are
either obscured or inaccurate. That’s
why Gayton decided to privately
fund an expedition to Sierra Leone
this summer, collecting donations
but mostly paying out of his own
pocket. For weeks, a small team on
“You’re watching
light dawn in
their eyes, as they
see no one has
ever been here.”
motorcycles mapped remote parts
of the country and trained locals
to use their smartphones and bikes
to record geographic information
about their environs. All that spatial
data will be connected to local place
names and then shared online. Since
Sierra Leone was part of the Ebola
outbreak in 2014, says Gayton, “ulti-
mately our proof of concept is that
we make a map that will [be able to]
stop Ebola. I like maps, but what I
care about is access to health care.
The outcome I’m looking for is tangi-
ble evidence that it helps saves lives.”
A review published last year in the
International Journal of Epidemiology
found that the lack of spatial data was,
in fact, a key factor in West Africa’s
Ebola outbreak. “Infectious diseases
have a spatial structure,” the author,
Tom Koch, writes, so mapping these
areas has become a low-tech race
against time—and the next epidemic.
Gayton’s already putting his ini-
tial data to use in collaboration with
Dr. Ed Monk, a visiting resident at a
small hospital in Segbwema, a town
in eastern Sierra Leone that serves
30,000 people. “As soon as you walk
on the wards, you can tell there’s been
a better time for the hospital,” Monk
says. When Segbwema had a bustling
diamond mine, it was the home of a
renowned Lassa fever virus center,
but during the civil war on and off
from 1991 through 2002, the railroad
was gutted and the hospital were
Monk now works was temporarily
closed. Today, the old water tower
outside the hospital has a shrapnel
sprawling rows of cots with impro-
vised mosquito netting. But what
the hospital does have is surprisingly
good patient records, thanks in part
to Gayton’s efforts.
This summer, Gayton mapped all
the dwellings in the catchment area,
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

finding 3,000 hamlets by going door
to door and “asking them, ‘What do
you call this village?’” He produced
a gazetteer, a map with both statis-
tical and geographical information,
for the hospital registrar. Now, when
patients come in, their homes can be
identified on a map.
Ka-Ping Yee, a former Google soft-
CLO CKWISE FROM LEFT: MISSING MAPS (2) ; DAVID LUSWATA (2)
ware engineer who visited Port-au-
Prince in 2010, came to the hospital
to help train the staff on how to use
the gazetteer. Ping also built a pro-
gram to collect medical data, making
it possible to track where patients are
coming from. “Let’s say one village has
so many malaria cases,” says Solomon
Musa Vandi, a community health
nurse at the hospital. “We go there,
we find out why. That’s what we lacked
in the time of Ebola in this country.
If people had this sort of facility, that
disease would not have spread.”
WHERE AND TEAR While mapping
the uncharted territories of West
Africa, a member, below, of Allen’s
team came down with a fever, which
was worrisome because there was no
doctor nearby and no one to call.
Gayton’s team in Sierra Leone has,
of course, run into challenges, large
and small. In June, a team on motor-
cycles was very deep in the diamond
hills, after hand-poling a ferry across
a river and navigating flooded roads
where the bikes were up to their gas
tanks in water. A team member came
down with a fever. “In the back of
my mind, I was thinking, If he gets
worse, what do I do? There’s no one
to call,” says Allen. They mapped the
village, and the stricken man, shak-
ing with malaria, had to be held
upright on the back of a motorcycle
for the return trip.
The team also had to struggle with
the enormous physical challenges of a
technologically sophisticated project
in a country where neither electric-
ity nor network signals are reliable.
“We’re building a playbook so anyone
else in the world who wants to can
replicate it,” says Gayton, who’s kept
careful logs of the process. “This is
how much it costs, this is how much
we pay mappers, this the technology,
the training manuals—you can just
adapt it to the local context. I have
one goal from this, and it’s to get the
rest of Africa mapped.”
The communities Missing Maps
are working in are often isolated and
undereducated, far from government
oversight or opportunities for educa-
tion—places where, when something
goes wrong, people have small chance
to recover. “Local names are import-
ant,” Allen says. “Geotags are critical.
Terror spreads as fast as the epidemic
itself in these communities.”
He pauses. “ The enemy is the
unknown.”
NEWSWEEK.COM 39
Horizons
Look what the tide brought in: a new, invasive species!
march 11, 2011, started like
any other day for the many
mussels along Japan’s eastern coast-
line—clinging to docks and straining
their snacks out of the water—until
2:46 p.m., that is, when two colliding
chunks of the Earth’s crust set off six
minutes of ground-shattering quakes,
then a series of gigantic waves power-
ful enough to crush three-story build-
ings and rip docks off their moorings.
That earthquake and tsunami killed
about 18,000 people and caused more
than $200 billion in damage. Simply
clearing away the debris took about
40 NEWSWEEK.COM
SCIENCE
Eco-Roulette
four years. But not all of the debris
stayed in Japan, and the untold story
of what was sent adrift offers a reveal-
ing glimpse of how natural disasters
reshape the world, often in the most
unexpected ways.
The tsunami marked the moment
when thousands of those mussels
set off on an incredible adventure
across the Pacific Ocean.
In the past six years,
debris from Japan has
landed on the beaches
of Hawaii and all along MEGHAN BARTELS
the western coast of @meghanbartels
North America. And according to
a study of the tsunami’s aftermath
published September 29 in Science, a
small sample of that debris—much
of it plastic—brought with it living
specimens of almost 300 species.
The report offers a “minimum pic-
ture” of the tsunami wreckage trans-
ported to North America, says James
Carlton, lead author on the project
and a marine ecologist at Williams
BY
College. And the debris is still arriv-
ing, he reports. “We had no idea it
would last until 2017 and beyond.”
The long trail of debris means hun-
dreds of species got a foothold in new
ecosystems. Scientists have known for
a long time that species hitch rides
on logs, but it’s incredibly difficult to
track a piece of debris from takeoff to
landing. “This is really the first large-
scale [migration] event that we are
basically witnessing as it unfolds,” says
Martin Thiel, an ecologist who stud-
ies species movement at the Catholic
University of the North in Chile and
wasn’t involved with the study. ”
Ecologists could track most of the
tsunami debris because it was rela-
tively easy to identify. In many cases,
an entire dock or boat washed ashore,
complete with registration numbers
or other identifying information.
For the study, the team examined
634 pieces of debris believed to stem
CRUISE, NO CONTROL Some of
the debris created by an earthquake
and tsunami in Japan drifted across
the Pacific (including a barge that made
land in Long Beach, California), bringing
with it many accidental tourists.
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

from the tsunami, then tallied the
animals each piece was carrying,
aided by 80 scientists from around
the globe. The final tally: living crit-
ters from 289 species, including Jap-
anese skeleton shrimp, Pacific seastar
and barred knifejaw fish.
Some of those creatures may not
have made the whole journey—they
FROM LEFT: MIYAKO CIT Y O FFIC E/HAND OUT/R EUTERS; RUSS LE WI S
may be descendants born on the voy-
age—but they all have the chance to
live in a new habitat. And the research-
ers estimate that many more living
organisms have the same opportunity,
given the large amount of unstudied
debris in the oceans. Most of these
“debris hitchhikers” won’t survive
because they didn’t happen to be
deposited in a habitat that suits them,
but any that do get lucky could become
an invasive species, able to thrive so
well that native species suffer.
There’s no telling which species
might do that kind of harm—Carlton
Most “debris
hitchhikers” won’t
survive, but lucky
ones could become
an invasive species.
compares the process to “ecological
roulette,” because predicting which
new arrivals will not meet natural
predators in a new location is impos-
sible. The past can be informative,
however—Mediterranean mussels,
one of the 289 species found in the
debris, have invaded other places—so
scientists are monitoring coastal hab-
itats in Hawaii and North America for
early signs of an invasion.
The amount and variety of debris
still washing ashore six years after
the Japanese tsunami is staggering.
Natural debris like wood petered out
after the first few years, since it often
breaks down en route. But the plas-
tic keeps coming. “We have basically
a huge armada of plastics, and those
are the ones that have been making it
along this very long trip,” Thiel says.
Tsunami debris is just a fraction
of all the plastic in Earth’s oceans,
so the same odysseys being docu-
mented here could be more com-
mon than we realize. “We know
that plastic in the ocean is not a
good thing for many different rea-
sons, and this is one of the reasons,”
Thiel adds. He’s referring to ugly
surprises, like the Japanese orange-
spotted sea anemones that came
ashore from southern Oregon to
central California during the spring
of 2016, the first time the anemone
was spotted on any tsunami debris.
“The tsunami event was this obvi-
ously human tragedy,” says Cathryn
Clarke Murray, a marine ecologist
at the North Pacific Marine Science
Organization in British Columbia,
which has been supporting Carlton’s
research and other projects study-
ing the impact of tsunami debris.
But, she says, the study has provided
new insights into how species move
around the world. “It really changed
our perception of coastal ecology.”
Carlton and Thiel both note that
the study is timely, given the paths of
Hurricanes Irma and Maria across
Florida and the Caribbean, knock-
ing plastic and other debris into the
ocean. Many species could easily have
hitched a ride to travel along the Gulf
Stream and eventually land in Europe.
And if current trends continue, more
and more of that debris will be long-
floating plastic. That’s welcome news
for accidental adventurers, since no
one wants to be stranded in the mid-
dle of an ocean. There’s no telling,
however, how these wanderers will be
greeted once they make landfall.
NEWSWEEK.COM 41
Culture HIGH, LOW + EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

MUSIC

A Fully Loaded Automatic

Michael Stipe talks about adolescence, aging, Trump hatred, Andy Kaufman
love and the 25th anniversary of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People

PEOPLE PLEASERS
Stipe, with binoculars,
and the rest of R.E.M.
in 1992, from left,
Buck, Berry and Mills.

42 NEWSWEEK.COM N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

 PRESIDENTIAL WOODY
Harrelson talks about playing LBJ » P. 53
michael stipe is offering me anchovies.
“This is not what I expected,” the retired
rock star says, poking at the plate of fish he’s just
ordered at a seafood bar in New York City’s East
Village. “Do you eat anchovies?”
This is not what I expected either: being served
seafood by the ex-frontman of R.E.M. I politely
decline, citing vegetarianism.
“I’m vegan-default,” Stipe says, laughing. “I like
these little fishies.” So…a pescetarian? “No, I eat
anything. But most of the time, I’m vegan.” He
swore off meat as a teenager but “started eating
everything again when I was 40.”
Aging, which plays strange tricks, is on both of
our minds as we eat: Stipe is a 57-year-old man look-
ing back at the reluctant 32-year-old superstar who
made Automatic for the People, the 1992 release that’s
commonly cited as R.E.M.’s melancholy masterpiece.
He’s looking back, in part, because that album is
being reissued this month to mark its 25th anni-
versary. “I’m kind of in awe of what we
did as relatively young men,” he says. “I
mean, we started very young.”
It’s fitting, then, that Automatic is
preoccupied with mortality. Among its ZACH SCHONFELD
@zzzzaaaacccchhh
most enduring tracks are the end-of-life
meditation “Try Not to Breathe,” the
grief narrative “Sweetness Follows” and, of course,
the popular anti-suicide plea “Everybody Hurts.”
For Stipe, it’s “super weird” to revisit this mile-
stone now that R.E.M. is no more. “It makes me feel
like Father Time,” he jokes. Not that he looks the
part (anymore): Stipe’s long beard—the mountain-
ANTON C OR BIJ N; TOP RIGHT: FRANC O OR IGL IA/GET T Y
ous ZZ Top–worthy facial hair that became a fixture
in 2016—is finally gone. Wearing white slacks and
a white button-down shirt, the singer is in a chatty,
jovial mood. Nothing is off-limits, and every R.E.M.
song I mention prompts a story or insight (on
“Ignoreland,” his rant blasting the GOP: “The pro-
duction could have been a lot angrier”). It’s a Tuesday ‘I’M NOT NORMAL’
afternoon in October, and Stipe has just finished a
taped interview with Dan Rather, whom he identifies
in an Instagram caption as “Hero.”
The early ’90s were remarkably eventful for R.E.M.
In 1991, Out of Time, the band’s hugely popular
sixth album, ushered in a brighter, more orchestral
sound and shot to No. 1 on the strength of “Losing
My Religion.” The nerdy college-rock band from
Georgia was now as famous as Madonna. “Suddenly,
I was a celebrity,” Stipe says, someone who got rec-
ognized on the street. “It went to a different level
because of MTV.” He lip-synced for the first time in
the “Religion” video, ending a long-standing R.E.M.
policy. The singer decided to give it a try after see-
ing Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”
video. “Prior to that, I had thought, This is incred-
ibly stupid, and everybody’s in on the joke, and you
just look like a moron.”
At that year’s Grammys, R.E.M. guitarist Peter
Buck wore casino-themed pajamas as a gag because
he didn’t expect to win. The joke was on him: R.E.M.
got three awards. “What [1991’s success] brought to
us as a band was this incredible confidence to jump
off a cliff together,” Stipe says.
Instead of touring behind Time, R.E.M. went
into the studio with a string section and quickly
made Automatic, a largely somber
counterpoint to Time’s pastoral pop. A
BY quarter of a century later, it remains
perhaps the most elegiac album to have
sold 18 million copies.
Considering all that glitzy success,
what explains the album’s downbeat
tone? “We had just come through the 1980s,” he
says. “Reagan and Bush and AIDS. It was fucking
dark times. And this record is a dark record.”
There were personal losses too. “My grandpar-
ents were at the end of their lives. I had a sick dog.
Conflating a sick dog with the AIDS crisis is obvi-
ously dangerous territory, but this was what I was
dealing with on a day-to-day basis. And the ’80s
were just fucked up. So many people dropped off
and disappeared and died. I don’t know. I hit 30. I
guess you think about things differently.”
John Michael Stipe was born into a military family at
the dawn of the 1960s. Despite being yanked from
state to state by his father’s military career—Texas,
Illinois, an army base in Germany—the singer has
said he had an “unbelievably happy” childhood.
Stipe rarely discusses his early life in interviews, so
NEWSWEEK.COM 43
Culture
I’m surprised when he starts talking
about his father. “He was an astonish-
ing man. But he was weird. He had this
darkness, and he had this oddness.”
When Stipe was 15, he saw Andy
Kaufman on television and felt a flash
of recognition. It was 1975. The comic
was deep in character as “Foreign
Man” during the first season of Satur-
day Night Live. Stipe was struck by the
irreverence of the bit. “I was like, This
is insanely fucked up,” he remembers
thinking. “[Kaufman] was addressing
for me, as a teenager, what CBGB and
punk rock and Patti Smith and Tom
Verlaine [would represent]. This was
my island of broken toys.”
Stipe was living in East St. Louis at
the time, and now he felt seen. “Andy
Kaufman and punk rock: Suddenly, I
found my tribe. These people are like
me. This is what I’m going to do.” Stipe
was also discovering his sexuality (he
came out as queer in 1994) and “real-
izing that I was really different from
anybody else. But I’m not normal any-
way. I’m a little bit odd.”
After high school, Stipe lived with
a punk band in Illinois, subsisting on
spaghetti and butter. He soon moved
to Athens, Georgia, to attend the
University of Georgia, where he met
future bandmate Buck at the record
store where the guitarist worked.
They decided to form a band with fel-
low UGA students Mike Mills (drums)
and Bill Berry (bass). The rest is col-
lege-rock history. Murmur, the band’s
inscrutable debut, arrived in 1983,
Reckoning in 1984 and so on.
Years later, Stipe’s obsession with
Kaufman resulted in the beloved
R.E.M. song “Man on the Moon.” An
affectionate send-off to the come-
dian, who had died in 1984, “Moon”
LOOK BACK IN ANGER Stipe feels
“personally insulted” by America’s
sharp political swing to the right.
44 NEWSWEEK.COM
MUSIC
is Stipe’s favorite Automatic song. It’s
also one of two written about tragic
celebrity figures of ambiguous sexual
orientation: “Monty Got a Raw Deal”
addresses the life of actor Montgom-
ery Clift. When I mention the track,
Stipe launches into a story about the
meeting Clift’s onetime co-star Eliza-
beth Taylor. When he told the elderly
actress about the song, she grabbed his
hand and said, “The love that we had
was more powerful than any love I’ve
ever known. There was no name for it
then, and there’s no name for it now.”
In 1992, Stipe, like Clift long before
him, was coping with the perils of
newfound fame and the prospect of
publicly acknowledging his queerness.
Rumors (false) swirled that he had
AIDS. “That was dismaying, because I
didn’t feel like it came from a place of
true concern,” he says. “I felt like it was
more petty rumormongering.”
When Stipe finally addressed his
sexuality in 1994, he was promoting
“My generation
has done the
exact opposite
of what I thought
it would do.”
the louder and flashier R.E.M. album
Monster, but he was still writing
about death. “Let Me In,” that
album’s centerpiece, finds Stipe wail-
ing about the then-recent suicide of
close friend Kurt Cobain. It’s like the
harrowing “Everybody Hurts” com-
plement nobody wanted and every-
one needed.“I’ve had more than my
fair share of suicides,” Stipe tells me.
“I’d like to have no more.”
THAT ORANGE CLOWN
In 2015, Donald Trump, then a long-
shot presidential candidate, used
R.E.M.’s 1987 hit “It’s the End of the
World as We Know It (and I Feel
Fine)” as entrance music at a GOP
rally. Bad idea. Stipe’s denunciation
came hard and swift: “Go fuck your-
selves,” the singer told Trump’s cam-
paign in a statement. “Do not use our
music or my voice for your moronic
charade of a campaign.” (Mills joined
in the disgust, calling Trump an
“orange clown” on Twitter.)
It was classic Stipe: strident, lib-
eral, anti-establishment. It was also
a show of artistic and political unity
by the members of R.E.M., four years
after the band amicably broke up.
Stipe was never shy about sharing
his political views, especially during
the Automatic era: This is the rock
star who wore a “White House—
FROM LEFT: MICHAEL LO CC ISANO/GET T Y; SONIA REC C HIA/GE T T Y
Stop AIDS” hat to the 1992 Grammys.
Post-R.E.M., his political advocacy
has intensified. He has spoken out
against the “unjustifiable” treatment
of U.S. military secrets leaker Chelsea
Manning and joined with Elton John
to support transgender inmates in
Georgia. In 2016, he became a vocal
supporter of Bernie Sanders, often
introducing the senator at rallies.
Stipe and Sanders were once pictured
eating hot dogs at Coney Island.
Are they friends? “No, not friends!
We don’t exchange text messages or
N OV E M BE R 10, 2017
anything.” But Sanders was the out-
sider candidate, “so of course I ended
up with him. You’re talking to the guy
who wrote ‘Everybody Hurts,’ but I
consider myself an outsider.”
Stipe despises Trump and feels
“personally insulted” by the country’s
sharp political swing to the right. “I’m
a hippie,” he says. “My generation was
going to solve the problems of energy
efficiency and the environment. And
look where we find ourselves—at the
brink of absolute collapse. My gener-
ation has done the exact opposite of
what I thought it would do.”
The singer takes solace in artistic
ventures: sculpture, photography,
video portraits, music. He has an auto-
THE WOOD MAN
biographical book of photographs
LBJ star Harrelson, left,
coming out in 2018. “I don’t even like with director Reiner.
talking about it, because when I read
about it, it seems like, You pretentious MO VI ES
twat! Just go fucking write a song
again. I imagine other people reading
that and going, Shut up!” The Hound
Dog’s Revenge
He’s happier talking about the
R.E.M. reissue project; he enjoys
reintroducing the band’s music to the
world. Out of Time got the 25th birth-
day deluxe treatment in 2016, Mon-
Woody Harrelson and Rob Reiner hated Lyndon
ster is due for a reissue in 2019, and B. Johnson...until they made a movie about him
Stipe’s favorite album, the sprawling
New Adventures in Hi-Fi, should fol-
low two years later. Just don’t expect woody harrelson’s primary such a beguiling character on Cheers
a reunion tour. (I had to ask, though it residence is a beachfront home more than a quarter-century ago. He
might have sounded more plea than on Maui, but in the past year, he has appears to be a decade younger than
question.) “That’ll never happen,” spent as much time in Hawaii as your his 56 years but swears he is exhausted.
Stipe says plainly. “I can’t think of a typical honeymooner. On this sun- “I much prefer to be a slacker,” says
single thing that could make us come blessed October morning, the actor is Harrelson, sighing. “I want to go home
together to do anything publicly.” in New York City promoting his per- and live the frickin’ hippie life, wear
Why so certain? “Because we did formance as America’s 36th president. nothing but a bathing suit. I don’t
what we did. To try to put the band LBJ is one of six films in 2017 that star really want to work so much.”
back together for any reason would Harrelson, and yet he insists, “I’m a So why does he? He lists a few of
just be sad and wrong.” lazy motherfucker.” this year’s projects. “A
Would he ever make a s olo Ha r r e l s o n i s a t h - movie like The Glass
record? “I don’t know what a solo letic and boyish and BY
Castle [in which he plays
record is these days. So the answer is still equipped with the the patriarch of a dys-
no. But I want to use my voice again. goofy, gap-toothed grin JOHN WALTERS functional family in the
I really like it.” that made Woody Boyd @jdubs88 adaptation of Jeannette

NEWSWEEK.COM 45
Culture MOVIES

Walls’s best-selling memoir of the

same name]—I can’t see not doing
that. A movie like LBJ...or War for the
Planet of the Apes...even the Star Wars
movie, which took eight months.... I
was supposed to take the second half
of this year off, but I won’t be getting
back home until November.”
He’s just a boy who can’t say no.
Or perhaps, like Billy Hoyle in the
opening scene of White Men Can’t
Jump (1992), Harrelson is a serious
baller pulling a con. Beneath that
gee-whiz façade is an actor of uncom-
mon industriousness and versatility,
at home providing comic relief in
The Hunger Games or playing a tor-
mented cop in HBO’s best season
of True Detective. He is equal parts
Robert Mitchum and Robert Duvall,
and now he’s that Texas hound dog
Lyndon Baines Johnson.
If you see LBJ, it may stun you to
This is a portrayal osition 8 in 2008, which prohibited
marriage by same-sex couples; it was
realize that Harrelson is older than of a monumental passed on the same night Barack
the man he’s depicting. The movie
covers Johnson’s career from the
statesman. Hamilton Obama was elected president. “I had
such mixed feelings that night,” he
1960 presidential primary, when he without the hip-hop. says. “I was elated that our country
was 52, to his 1964 State of the Union could be so progressive but disheart-

FROM TO P: KYLE KAPLAN; CO URTESY O F ELE CTRIC ENTERTAINMENT; NATIONAL ARCHIVE/GET T Y

address, using November 22, 1963,
the day John F. Kennedy was killed,
as a fulcrum. As recently as two
years ago, Harrelson stiff-armed the
notion of playing the fellow Texan,
the so-called master of the Senate.
“My first roommate in New York City,
Rob Moran, he’s a producer now, and
he told me, ‘You need to play LBJ.’
“‘Dude, I would never play the
guy,’” Harrelson replied. Why not?
“Because of Vietnam.”
Ah, the quagmire. The film avoids
Vietnam almost as assiduously as the
current commander in chief once did.
LBJ is not a biopic; it is an excerpt—a
few chapters from a political career
that endeavor to put some polish on
a notoriously crass man, while also
bolstering his humanity.
Rob Reiner directed the film, and
he lobbied Harrelson hard. The
actor now believes Johnson deserves
reconsideration. “LBJ got a lot of shit,
but he accomplished more than
anyone other than FDR,” he says.
“Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights leg-
islation. Sure, he got bogged down in
the war, but other than that, he was
an amazing president.”
Reiner did a similar about-face. “I
was of draft age during Vietnam, and
here was this man who could send me
to my death,” says the director, who,
like President Donald Trump, received
a medical deferment. “I hated him. I
just hated him. That’s the only view of
Lyndon Johnson I had.”
Reiner’s opinion shifted as he was
working to defeat California’s Prop-
ened by the vote on Prop. 8.”
As Reiner fought against it, he
became a student of how policy,
politics and government intersect.
Research led him to a profound
admiration for LBJ. “ We show a
scene in the bedroom where Lady
Bird [played by Jennifer Jason Leigh]
tells him, ‘Kennedy was a man of
great ideas. Now we need a man who
can deliver.’ That struck to Johnson’s
heart, because he knew he could do
that,” says Reiner. “He had the deepest
knowledge of how government oper-
ates. He understood it in his bones.”
The film portrays a pragmatic
political grinder (“I’m the only one
who knows how to speak Southern
and how to speak Kennedy,” LBJ quips
to a pair of staffers) without reveal-
ing where Johnson stood on racial

46 NEWSWEEK.COM N OV E M BE R 10, 2017

equality. MLK had a dream, but LBJ
had a duty. Late in the film—as the
beleaguered Johnson, now president,
is battling Southern Republicans to
pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of
1964—he is driven past the Lincoln
Memorial. He looks out the window
of his limousine and growls, “This is
your goddamn mess I’m cleaning up.”
During the shoot, Harrelson spent
three hours each day in makeup—
two to apply the prosthetics and one
to remove them. Still, this physical
transformation may be a more diffi-
cult sell than the Civil Rights Act. It
is a bit of a distraction to watch Har-
relson’s scenes with Richard Jenkins
(playing the racist Senator Richard
Russell), who, in some ways, more
closely resembles LBJ.
“But that’s why I wanted to make the
Rigorous students of U.S. history
may not recognize this soft-pedaled
LBJ either (a noted philanderer, he
is only the devoted husband here).
There is the obligatory scene of Lyn-
don discussing his johnson—he was
reputedly the Milton Berle of Oval
Office occupants—and another
in which he sits on the toilet while
talking strategy with two staffers (an
open-door policy that should have
been repealed). Still, this is a por-
trayal of a monumental statesman;
Hamilton minus the hip-hop.
In the age of Trump, it might seem
cruel to release a movie about a presi-
dent who, above all, was a pragmatist.
It might also seem perverse to focus
on such a profoundly ambivalent fig-
ure. Heroes and monsters, after all,
usually make better lead characters
(see every comic book blockbuster).
film,” says Reiner. “Johnson should
have gone down as one of the great
presidents. But having had Vietnam,
it’s all mixed together and bad. That
got me to thinking, Who is this guy?”
“I don’t know what LBJ truly
believed in his heart,” says Harrelson,
who is, as he says this, sitting in the
shadow of Trump Tower. “We explore
the fact that Robert F. Kennedy didn’t
trust LBJ in the movie. And I don’t
know if I trust LBJ. I just know he
was a guy who did shit because it was
politically expedient.”
So how compelling will this glass-
half-full characterization be for audi-
ences? Lyndon Johnson may be the
better president, but Donald Trump
will be a better movie.

HISTORY IN THE REMAKING

Clockwise from top left: Reiner on
the set; Harrelson and Leigh (as Lady
Bird) in a scene re-creating Johnson’s
swearing in on November 22, 1963,
following the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

NEWSWEEK.COM 47
Culture Illustrat ion by A L E X F I N E

P A R T ING SHOT

Bruce Dickinson
he’s an airline pilot, a world-class fencer, an actor, a novelist Your shows are famous for their
and a craft brewer. Most people know Dickinson, though, as lead singer of Spinal Tap–esque sets. The 1984
90-million-record-selling Iron Maiden—the heavy metal band behind such hits Powerslave tour may have been
as “The Number of the Beast” and “Die With Your Boots On.” the pinnacle in that regard.
And now, Dickinson is a memoirist. Among many other things, What Does It’s a fine line between incredibly
This Button Do? recounts Dickinson’s experience piloting Maiden’s Ed Force kitsch and magnificent, and
One, the 757 named after the band’s sinewy mascot, Eddie the Head, during Powerslave [the album’s tour] just
the 2008-09 and 2011 tours, and the development of the popular line of fine clicked every box. There’s not too
craft beers by Iron Maiden and Robinsons Brewery called Trooper (after a many bands that tell you, “We’re
Maiden tune). Newsweek caught up with the headbanging renaissance man as gonna re-create ancient Egypt
he was leaving for Bogotá, Colombia. “I’m doing a conference with Bob Geldof onstage.” We had a giant 10-foot
and Kofi Annan about green technology,” said Dickinson, who was invited to Eddie walking around and a huge
discuss a couple of projects, including a hybrid airship he has invested in and one with rockets shooting out of his
something called a Pouncer. “It’s a 9-foot-wingspan edible drone. You can eat it.” eyes. It was epic, kind of like Cecil
B. DeMille. And because it was back
in the day, it was all theatrical-sized
“There’s not too many props. It wasn’t screens. It wasn’t

bands that tell you, ‘We’re hologram. It was real.

gonna re-create ancient You write about performing in

Egypt onstage.’”
Wroclaw, Poland, for that tour and
visiting Auschwitz.
It’s a very spooky place. The Polish
guy who showed us around, he goes
there all the time, and I was like, How
can anybody do that? I couldn’t be
there for more than a couple of hours.
It really did my head in. You can smell
the evil of the place.
We think we’re all modern 21st-
century human beings, but we’re only
a heartbeat away from Auschwitz,
and not just with Jewish people.
There’s an equivalent going on
somewhere in the world, every single
day. You think, At what point do we
start to evolve? And then something
J OHN MCM URTR IE

crazy happens, like Las Vegas, and

it makes you wonder: What is it with
human beings? Are we all capable of
doing that? —Jeff Perlah

48 NEWSWEEK.COM N O V E M B E R 10, 2 017