in the central african republic and later returned there doing work for the missouri botanical garden some of his most notable projects have included walking the entire two thousand mile corridor of remaining intact forest blocks between congo and gabon completing the mega fly over an eight month aerial survey of development in africa which captured more than one hundred sixteen thousand vertical images many of which are visible on google earth and walking the entire range of the redwood forest in the western united states more than seven hundred miles and he is here to talk about his recent investigations into mining impacts in british columbia michel thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having me so start tell us how did you get involved with your investigation into mining in british columbia well i'm a conservation is a profession but i went back to alaska about seven years ago to kind of live in i'm starting to get old and i'm a wilderness guy and what i did a few years ago and when i got there i found this perfect spot you know two million acres of designated wilderness area in southeast alaska beautiful rain forest virgin mountains no logging no roads tons of wildlife fish in the rivers the kind of place were somebody like me can feel like i'm ok you know i can i can i can be happy for the rest of my life living in this wilderness you know and it's eighty miles from a road perfect you know how can it be that that i can find this place and then i started hearing about mining upstream in british columbia because the river i live on crosses the border into british columbia and i started asking people and not very many people knew about these mine s in southeast alaska started asking politicians and other people about these mines and i wasn't getting much information but i started and it's sleuthing it on the web you know and started stuff you know and starting to figure this out and i started looking at the british columbia government websites on mining claims and and the and the deeper when it the more i realized my god i'm  looking at the largest gold mining complex on earth here that that's just about to happen but it hasn't happened yet you know and the reason it has happened is because of this kind of speculative bubble for gold that has occurred in the last five years and and in british columbia because of the system that's in place you can you can be sitting in malaysia and get on line and and register and and claim a piece of british columbia and that claim gives you unbelievable rights on that land you can dig holes you can build roads you can bring in helicopters you can make camps you can you can tell people that they can't trespass you can you can you know figure out that there's some mineral there and then you can create a company and you can float it on the stock market and you can make tons of money before you ever extract a single ounce of gold and that is what i discovered in it and it's huge it literally is the largest proposed gold mining complex on the planet and so what has been your response as are people rallying around the us well you know i went to the department of natural resources in alaska i went to the e p a i went to the congress senatorial offices i started talking to the local administrators i talk to the forest service talk to anybody that would listen fish and game and my sense was from from the kind of bureaucrats the people in government but they just don't want to touch this thing you know that it's across the border you know we have good relations with canada we don't you know we don't we just don't want to do it you know or we're too busy or too lazy or too politically adverse to stirring up trouble but the fact is you know we have a boundary waters treaty with with canada nineteen zero nine we we signed a treaty with canada to do exactly this which is to look at projects that will impact water and to talk about them bilaterally with canada that's the whole reason for this treaty and it is used especially in the great lakes quite a bit that's why it was created because of the pollution in the great lakes back in the early part of the twentieth century when people first got you know what's going to happen if if the united states decides to completely pollute these these great lakes and canada has no say you know so that's what we say in this treaty it's exactly what's happening now all these mines are on the british columbia side in canada but all of that water flows into southeast alaska so why wouldn't we have a discussion with the british columbia and why wouldn't we have a discussion with canada why wouldn't our politicians or our people responsible for managing our natural resources why wouldn't they in gauge the canadians and have the public engaged in this process i don't know but it's not happening there's no way it's happening and i've tried vehemently with many different people and many different kind of organizations to try to get things moving along so far we don't have much momentum so to talk about what are the potential environmental impacts well if you look at this mining complex and you put it together and that's one of the things i've been doing is putting together this enormous google earth project and if you put the parcels of the claims over the entire coastal range of northwestern british columbia it disappears under parcels it looks like the l a basin it looks like the great plains when when they parcel as that for agriculture you know that's it's wall to wall claims there are thousands and thousands and there isn't one stitch of land that hasn't been claimed in the last ten years you know so so you kind of look at that and then you look at ok how many of these projects are claims have potential to really  become and you start adding that up and that's what i've done i've catalogued every single pretty much gone from claim to claim figure to ok which projects are real which ones have essays that are looking good which ones are probably if things go well in the price of gold holds which ones are going to become mines there's over fifty of them that have potential to really become mines at least you know that's that's like ones that are truly active right now and then if you start looking at ones that are really kind of in the process and in order to do that i got a float plane and went back there and and really have been looking at it for the last two summers there's probably ten projects that will account for about six billion tons of acid rock or that will be extracted from these mountains and stored behind dams in many cases taller than hoover dam you know because the ground there is so steep that you need a tall dam to create volume and this this is one of the areas on earth that has you know one of the greatest rain falls it has more snow than just about anywhere avalanches tectonic activity in this unbelievable run off you know and so you think that's the time bomb that we're looking at six point something billion tons of war that they will take out of the ground acid generating once it's exposed to oxygen and to water it generates acid and and it will poison river senate will poison all of the fisheries resources of southeast alaska if if you get a breach then of course everyone says well that can't happen it's like that's what they thought in japan last year when things went south nuclear was you know things do happen you know they've had similar breaches down like in the appalachians yeah and you know again this is a place that gets if you take the appalachians for instance you know i don't know what the exact rainfall is but it's probably thirty five inches of rain something like that in the appalachians we get in some places up in southeast alaska almost ten times that you know the amount of rain is a rain forest we're talking about it's it's it's got more rainfall than any place in north america and we're talking about one of the top five rainfall areas on earth with some of the steepest slopes on earth so the probability that you're going to be able to keep all that water from touching this acid waste is in my opinion extremely low especially when you put it out for the rest of time so how much gold are we talking about that they're looking at extracting and maybe talk about the how they gold is so heavy compared to rock general rock volume that you're talking about from acid waste perspective compared to the gold you you have is you know a dump truck basically equals a gold ring it's kind of the equivalent you know so so we're talking about enormous amounts of waste and when you think about managing that waste the companies you know while they may say that they are responsible when you look at the time horizon that's legally binding for them its numbers in the low decades it does not does  not look at any even a century you know let alone thousands of years you know and that waste will be there forever it will be there for the rest time it's a time bomb you know and if that thing breaches or leaks it will be leaking into this creek probably forever so so for me you know i try to to the premier of british columbia and i said you know you're delivering thousands of tons of waste to each of the citizens today you're you're committing every citizen in this in this province to thousands of tons of waste that they need to manage for the rest of time you know is that is that you know what you really want to do you know and i wouldn't be surprised if somebody like that hasn't even thought about it hasn't even quantified in their brains what it what it really means what they're doing you know but it's thous of waste a that they're committing to to manage for the rest of time so me as a voter you know if you said to me you know ok we're going to have jobs some jobs most of the people that work here are going to be from other provinces but that's beside the point where are you willing to accept to manage for the rest of time four thousand five thousand tons of waste you know as an individual and you looked at the costs of that any voter would say heck no there's no way forget it that's a crazy idea you know that's a crazy idea and you think about somebody buying a gold ring you know and and saying ok you know anybody here you have to sign this contract because you're going to respond be responsible for the cost of maintaining twenty six tons of acid waste for the rest of time and this bond that you've signed will be passed down to your children and to your children's children unless they can sell it to someone and if they can't sell it then you're legally bound to manage this waste for the rest of the time you know that's that's what needs to be calculated into these mining projects and it isn't they will say it is but it isn't and and you know if that were done it would completely change the way this whole grand scheme is unfolding because there external one of the primary costs to society for doing what they're doing you know and it's not even you know it's like it's put it in those terms twenty six tons per gold ring when you get married are you willing you because you're making this commitment for the rest of your life you know are you willing to as your first act just because you bought this one little bubble to commit to you know you and your wife managing this this waste for the rest of time i wouldn't buy the ring no one would buy the ring no one in less there's crazy so how does the government of canada compare with the u s government in terms of being in bed with corporations well that's that's a good question i would say that we have a long history in this country of trying to minimize the monopolistic tendencies of companies and it's a natural thing you know it's it's like if you can monopolize resources as an individual in your own hunter and gather and there's no downside to that you're going to do it you know and so it's a natural phenomenon that a corporation would like to monopolize a resource they would love to be the only company producing a certain thing that everyone buys because then they become fabulously rich so in this country you know if you go back  in time and look at teddy roosevelt who in my opinion was one of the great leaders that we've had in this country one of his great obsessions was about managing the natural resource base he he said it many many times and he enacted a lot of policies to follow up with the talk which was you know as a nation what you really are as a nation is is your resource base and if you don't manage your resource base and you are beholden to others for your resources it will never be secure it will never be able to really be comfortable in and progressing as a nation so one of our  primary objectives and he put it many times this is our number one problem that we need to face is managing our natural resource base because at the time he became president the corporations were  up swallowing up monopolizing a lot of resources and he could see the train wreck coming you know and so he said one of my primary goals is to undo these combinations to to force and opening of these markets so that so that we have a diverse number of people who are involved and so we have that history here but we also voted in a while voted we we  d the supreme court of the united states which everyone knows is highly political and that's an obvious fact that it's a known it's not a contention that that decide only a few years ago that corporations are individuals and so they can put unlimited you know amounts of money into political campaigns through pacs you know to me that's that's the most fundamental decision that has happened in our country in decades probably in a century because it's basically you know undoing what teddy roosevelt did you know he he tried to isolate it's kind of like church and state you know it's corporation and state and you can't you can't have any association between politicians and corporations if you expect good leadership we just can't have that you know it doesn't make any sense it's it's like church and state like having religious zealots running a country you know he most people don't want that and it's the same if corporations can and put people in office through money that's a very slippery slope you know in and in canada you know the least the current leadership there is is totally with these guys you know totally with the oil goes totally with the mining guys totally with the people who are developing canada in a way that is creating this unbelievable legacy for people for the rest of time and you look at the the water for instance that's being consumed by the tar sands projects right now it is in the billions of barrels billions of barrels in unbelievably short amounts of time you know and you think all that water has to be treated you know and it's got chemicals in it and it's now being dumped into these rivers you know you think you know are the real costs of that being counted for you if you look at sands and the oil and gas development in alberta and british columbia it covers an area one to two times as big as colorado i mean it's just can't it's the biggest industrial project on earth you know and you think if people are voicing their concerns about global warming and about developing tar sands that are incredibly inefficient you know that for energetically as far as producing oil and gas will you know why shouldn't people be able to stand up and say you know what this pipeline shouldn't go in because if it does it's going to sands from two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand barrels a day up to millions of barrels an impacts of that haven't really been accounted for properly so we citizens say no well corporations say yes so corporations are definitely winning in canada and i would say they're well on their way in this country and if we happen upon a leader that completely follows a line a president that follows impacts on the well you know for me it's kind of a continuum we've got the rain forest along the coast and then we kind of the farther you go from the coast and the farther north you go you get this enormous wilderness basically that and that's why i'm so concerned about these mines is you know these are some of the gree wilderness areas left on earth you know these are some of the places where you can you can fly in an airplane which i did last summer for hours for hours and not see a single sign of human life you know we're talking about all one of the great sources of fresh water on earth one of the great refuges  wildlife for more billions of songbirds and water fell and other birds a source of fresh water for all of north america for the rest of time you know water that creates unbelievable opportunity here to to do it right you know to get the human footprint is on a continuous march forward we have seven point one seven point two trillion billion seri trillion maybe  someday billion people on earth and so you know the human footprint will increase you know everybody wants an i phone everybody wants what they want you know and i know that i'm not an idealist but but you know there's a way to do it right and  their way to do it right is to internalize the costs to the environment for what you're doing in you know well companies would laugh at that they just say in this case crazies a lunatic he's a greenie he's a he's a left wing or he's a communist maybe but but no i'm being perfectly rational when i say you know if if you're going to buy a gold ring you should buy the twenty six tons of waste that goes along with it it's perfectly normal why wouldn't you you know why should you put that on someone else you bought the ring so you take care of the waste and if the company has to internalize those costs to add it to the cost of your ring they should have to do that you know and if you're going to produce a carbon balance that is impacting other people and it is i mean look at we're facing unprecedented global warming and you know those costs should be internalized very simply you know and if they were in tire process that we see would change why because companies would be faced with regulation that they would have to follow and if and if you don't regulate these guys and teddy roosevelt one of our great presidents as i said before he saw this and and he said this insanity we can't allow this to happen otherwise these guys will just take all the resources and make trying to liquidate them and turn them into money and it will control us you know is that what you want in an enema and that's teddy roosevelt that's not me talking so if you want to say teddy roosevelt was a a lunatic you know then say it but you know he saw it very clearly and he talked about it extremely coherently many many times so kind of that's a huge deal so just a few minutes left so do you have a website or how can people plug into helping this effort i set up a web search myself called the eunuch river post you and u riposte which basically describes this mining scheme greatest biggest most impactful gold complex on earth so you can go and look at the google maps and really click on all the little picks and shovels and and see who these guys are and and what they're doing you know and you can look at who the investors are in these companies and gold is on a slippery slope right now so so if people start making noise about these mines in the process that's going on the probability that these mining stocks will will remain stable is lower because people can start thinking about the externalization of billions of tons of acid rock going into our country you know it's not like you know we're canadians we're not canadians but we are going to be impacted by these projects in canada so you can call your congress people you can call these companies you can you know try to create the noise that's necessary to be able to to start shifting the balance here because that's what we need in leadership has to come in the e p a has to react the apartment of natural resources in alaska has to react to the forest service has to all these all these entities need to react and they're not but if there were thousands of people telling them that they need to react they would just briefly have you been inspired at all by the protests people against the pipeline x l pipeline i would say that they've won a few rounds and it for me it's fantastic that people will take their time you know people everyone has to eat every day everyone has their responsibility so if if something becomes important enough that you're going to leave would have or you're going to do and you're going to take the time and effort to go protest something you know as a normal citizen i know because i've been doing it for these mines and i've never done it before in my life you know it's a it's a commitment it's it's it's  it's there's a cost associated with it and so you know the fact that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people protesting this pipeline means that there's something there you know there's a reason that all these people are starting to protest you know even though protest is being discouraged you know and so yeah i think it's fantastic i really do but it needs to be amplified by but orders of magnitude if we're going to change things well are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning pamela olsen pamela olsen lived in ramallah for two years during which she served as head writer and editor for the palestine monitor and foreign press corps nadir for dr  thousand and five presidential campaign she's published stories and articles in counterpunch electronic intifada mando weiss israel's occupation magazine and the standard magazine and she is here to talk about her new book fast times in palestine and a love affair with a homeless homeland param thank you very much for coming in and spending time with a smart and thanks for having me so start out to tell us what was your motivation in writing your book fast times in palestine well the motivation was you know when i visited unexpectedly in two thousand and three i never expected to visit there at all i was backpacking from cairo to as timbale and i plan to skip the holy land you know probably because it seemed really complex and partly because it was actually more expensive than the other you know countries i was visiting but once they kind of stepped foot in that place and you know witnessed first of all the you know the kind welcome of the palestinians and you know how warm and funny and i don't know savvy an interesting and educated unlike even well traveled people or even in the small village called j ews i was really intrigued and then you know very quickly i began to witness what's being done to these  to the palestinians with you know the wall cutting them off from their land and you know the checkpoints and the routine harassment and everybody stories from you know what had been happening to their families for years and you know then i visited a friend in israel and i told him about what i had seen and he was almost as shocked as i was to hear about the stories i was telling him even though he lives literally about five miles from the green line from the west bank he knew very little about what ordinary everyday life was like for the people just across the you know just on the other side of the fence and so i actually brought him to jail used to show him you know first of all the people that you know were he executed expected halfway expected to just sort of cross the fence and there's men with masks on and kalashnikovs just waiting for him to cross the border you know to cause him problems but of course they're like they hid his car for him because he had israeli license plates and he wasn't technically allowed to visit this palestinian village called j e and they were like practicing hebrew with him and practicing russian with him because he was russian israeli and you know he was both as charmed and as shocked at the things that he was seeing with the wall and everything and  so that was kind of like my first couple weeks in the holy land you know and then from there it just there were so many things i witnessed so many amazing times that i had and so many political realities that i witnessed as a journalist and later as the foreign press corps nadir for a palestinian presidential candidate that made up the story that's so intriguing and so important as well but that nobody was telling that i could see so i wanted to try to tell that story did you have were you political purdah clinton involved not particularly i was a physics major at stanford and i was interested actually originally in alternative energy and the more i sort of studied and learned about it the more i realized that it was actually a political issue like you can make the best invention for clean energy once but if all the political will is toward subsidizing other you know dirtier technologies then you're kind of dead in the water and then so then i ended up getting a minor in political science and also studying abroad in moscow where you know it was interesting because nobody in moscow is i guess silly enough to believe without any kind of critical thinking whatsoever when you know what their press and government tell them so it's kind of like briskly refreshing compared to the u s where everybody watches c n n and they assume everything is exactly as they say and all this kind of thing you know i wouldn't read or hear about what's lot of you know the leaders of russia were saying and then i would talk to chechen refugees or mothers of russian soldiers or you know later when i took the train to siberia i met the soldiers themselves who were telling their stories of being in this meat grinder and i guess you can say that sort of started to politicize me and it was part of the reason also that i visited the middle east because you know nine eleven happened right before i graduated and then the iraq war starting up and you know i just had a feeling that i'm being lied to and being bamboozled like my intelligence is being insulted but unfortunately i didn't know anything you know i couldn't come back with anything because i didn't know anything about islam or about the middle east or about any of these things so part of why i wanted to visit the middle east was to fill in some of those holes and like i say i just wanted to do touristy things that was playing plenty for me plenty venturous enough for me but by the time i was kind of comfortable in middle east and then i started meeting journalists and foreign aid workers and i'm on jordan they were telling all these stories of history happening like happening right next door in iraq and right next door in palestine and completely different than what i had been told by my own press and government and you know winston churchill said some men stumble into the truth now and then but most of them pick up and keep going as if nothing had happened and i didn't want to be one of those people so i sort of stopped to investigate and  sure enough and years later i'm still working on the issue how did you learn as being a writer dern editor at the palestine monitor that's a great question and i certainly wasn't qualified to do so and when when the you know i was volunteering with a palestinian progressive political party called the palestinian national initiative and you know it was you know i guess a progressive they were believe in equal rights for women and minorities  and nonviolence like their platform was based on international law all of these things that checks all the boxes you think you know we in the united states would want in arab leader so i wanted to explore you know pressure cooker situation so yes so i was volunteering with that and after about three months of volunteer i get a call and they say hey you know the head writer and editor of the palestine monitor stepping down do you want the job and i was like are you sure you have the right number you know i'm a physics major x bartender volunteer i just got here three months ago not sure i'm qualified to run a news organization and they're like oh don't worry you'll figure it out so so you know from like from the beginning it was like drinking from a fire hose just learning not only to be a journalist but also all of the you know terminology and all the villages and what the villages are known for and there's you know more political parties than than most people heard triangulate what people are talking about when they're talking about the different parties or an israeli parties too for that matter so you know as the book is called fast times in palestine partly because you know every time i would get a little bit comfortable in whatever i was doing i get thrown a complete curveball and this was one of them which to describe the palestine monitor more what's the audience for that it's an english language news source  the main audience is people in the us in europe who are not otherwise getting a clear picture from the palestinian perspective of what life is like day to day and what the trends are of you know water use practices and settlement expansion and the way that the wall separates people from their land and home demolitions and it makes no bones about the fact that it's primarily from the palestinian perspective unlike the u s media which doesn't really at mit in general that is primarily from the israeli perspective but it was an attempt to kind of balance that a little bit in do you feel like you were your journalism when you were working there was  objective or advocacy journalism or mix of both sure so every day the first thing i would i would do every day is get a list of who had been killed the night before every for the time that i was there  average two people were killed every single day and on average a child was killed almost every other day so there was that backlog of death almost every morning that you have to figure out who was killed who killed them why were they killed how are the injured all these kind of statistics about what you know this is just routine killing that just went on day after day after day and we try to be as thorough i mean is as objective as possible just here's the facts here's what happened you know we would call the cost battle we call the family we would check the israeli papers for what they said about it we would check the u n if they had a report about it and we would check other newspapers and try to triangulate as best we could what we believed was the most objective truth in any case and that was just the killing and there are many other things too that we tried to be as you know a trite tried to you know show the truth from the palestinian perspective as honestly as possible and then occasionally we would have let you know human interest stories which would be straight up this is what life is like for this family or this is what life is like for this village or for this woman who was elected mayor of this village and how did  become elected mayor and what's it like watching men bring your tea and coffee pretty nice actually so yeah there was a lot of a lot of that and how long did your dad more than a year i think i started in the fall of two thousand and four and i left palestine at the very end of two thousand and five did you have any benefits from being part of the press then when you're working on the no it's the opposite if you're working for a news organization in general you tend to get extra harassment at the israeli borders if i had told them of course i didn't tell them that if i told them i worked for the palestine monitor chances are i would have been deported pretty quickly i mean because i had to go i had to leave the territories controlled by israel which includes the west bank and back in and get a new israeli tourist visa every three months and i had to be untruthful about about what i was doing because it's really i mean they really it's that it's at their discretion whether they want to let you in or nots and many many of my friends and coworkers have been you know deported because of what the because of the work they do so is definitely not a benefit and in this far as getting a work permit or a work visa if you're living and working in the palestinian territories it's almost impossible to get that so most of the foreigners live three months at a time knowing that at any moment they can get turned back at the border or banned for ten years or whatever it's for that reason it's difficult to build a life and that's what ultimately led me to leave i couldn't handle the pressure of you know every single time that the way that you're grilled in the way sometimes it's held for eight hours at a time and just the psychological difficulty that on top of all this these brutality that you're witnessing and all these things that are happening then you know that at any moment if you say the wrong thing at the border you can lose your job you lose your house he was your things you know your friends and your plans and it got to be too much for me after a while so kind of a form of p t s d or not as bad as on yeah i wouldn't go quite that far but was it more when so many impressions and so many emotions and so many things like when you're living there you have to learn to sublimate your emotions enough to you know get by and do your work i mean every single day waking up and the first thing you do is you have coffee and and record death and destruction you know it gets pretty  pretty psychologically difficult after a while and in the book i talk about several stories of my own friends who are you know plucked off their bus and disappeared and friends who were beaten by soldiers and friends who are you know their husbands are taken away for a year you know in prison and kind of these bogus charges in the way that they're traumatized and they lose a year of income and they lose you know if my friend was unable to witness the birth of his daughter because he was in an israeli prison or something he never you know that pretty self evidently he didn't do so you know all of these things together it's takes a toll after a while and obviously on a magnitude of thousand times worse people that are there of course i mean i wrote right in the book that i can't i'm like if i can barely deal with it for two years you know imagine living with a decade after decade and it's not like you know as an american i have much more many more privileges than a palestinian as far as i can travel  i can go anywhere in the west bank that i want without worrying about you know getting an israeli permit i can leave the country whenever i want and it's not my mother it's not my sister in law it's not my you know nieces and nephews who are being treated this way so i really it's i mean almost everyone who visits the west bank they say the same thing they say i can't believe palestinians are more violence giving everything that i'm learning about what they go through  author of the book fast times in palestine a love affair with a homeless homeland talk about how you got involved with dr mustafa barghouti use two thousand and five presidential campaign sure that was another interesting curveball  so about three months after i was just getting used to this journalism job i was kind of finally settling into it yes arafat died and i went to his funeral i read about that in the book and then  i go to jail used for the post ramadan holidays which are right after he died and if you know when i'm harvesting olives a friend walks up to me and says you know i have some bad news a friend a friend of mine has been shot in the back by israeli soldiers he was taken away into a hospital in israel they want tell us what his condition is his parents are you know going crazy they want to visit him but the hospitals there that the army says you can't visit him unless you go to the hospital to get a paper that proves what his condition is so it's like this perfect catch twenty two so i say well look you know i can i can go do it i can i can get the paper so should be a relatively simple thing right i mean the hospital is about ten miles away as the crow flies but of course they have to go all the way down to the mall and then  jerusalem then go to the jerusalem central bus station and take a bus all the way back up to this town that's ten miles away takes about six hours of the checkpoints and everything and but i found the is the hospital and i'm like ok finally i'm here should be that hard from here on out and then it's just they they take it they send me in these bureaucratic circles they say oh we don't get paper like that for people like this and then they're like well we get papers but you know we can't do it today and oh yeah we can do it today but the doctor is busy well she's not really busy but you know we have to broke and you're not going anywhere so anyway i was just this nightmare of sort of hostile bureaucracy and i finally get it done i get back to you so i get back to back to my job i just want to kind of relax into my job  whatever and then dr mustafa barghouti calls an emergency meeting after work and i'm like oh great because i was sort of i had this plan of going to some chinese takeout and go home you know there's and angelina jolie action movie on that i want to watch says ok i need somebody to volunteer to be my foreign press corps nater and i look around and all the other foreigners have plans to be out of the country for the christmas holidays i'm the only one who doesn't the only native english speaker who doesn't like agree ok fine i can do  it and at the sight of the time it was kind of this just the sense of duty like ok i guess i should do it but then i was like wait a minute you know my boss is running for president and i'm you know offered a front row seats and i mean this is actually pretty exciting so for the next two months not only am i doing my full time job i'm doing another full time job which is representing the campaign to the entire world's international media and it was a pretty fascinating experience talk about them or what stands out from stands out is that it's i guess you know i mentioned i went to work with them to see what kind of forces are arrayed against a candidate like this and it was very interesting to see that of course that they you know the main mahmoud abbas's party they don't want anybody upset in their apple cart like they have this kind of domination over not just sort of administrative under administration under occupation but also preferential business deals and you  know checkpoint passes and they can do all these things that ordinary palestinians are allowed to do and they you know they're kind of comfortable in their position and it was increasingly clear that people are kind of fed up with this sort of corruption slash you know the fact that they're they're comfortable under occupation and nobody else's you know i mean it's kind of this divide that people get increasingly tired of so it seems like it was kind of the right moment to elect somebody new and to try something else  you know campaign workers in various places around the west bank in gaza and then there was the israeli government an army that they were kind of they would say in public that of course we're going to allow all the presidential candidates to travel freely and of course we're going to let everyone get to the polls when it's you know election day and it speaks a lot of speaks volumes that they're talking about allowing presidential candidates to move freely i mean it's clear who isn't actually in charge in this area  but even that wasn't true i mean he he had to sneak into east jerusalem several times to campaign there one of his campaign workers was interrogated when he was putting out fires his the israeli army wouldn't let him inside the hebron old city he was allowed into the gaza strip once another time he was rejected he was not allowed and you know east jerusalem has two hundred fifty thousand voters the gaza strip has one point five million voters  to be kind of cut off from these constituencies you know in the middle of a campaign it's very difficult to you know i mean it's difficult enough to try to make a difference in this you know cynical society where everyone's been through like their spiel are so sick of politics and so cynical about politics and to try to you know go to all these villages and just be sort of cut off at the pass and so many different ways and one in one case he was actually stopped at a checkpoint and everybody in his vehicle was was taken out in like sort of roughed up by israeli soldiers like one of the men was choked one of them i mean he was hit on the back of his back with the butt of a gun another one was hit i think behind the ear with the butt of a gun  and then after this they were forced to lay on the ground for like an hour and fifteen minutes and if they try to talk to each other they were hit again so anyway they finally at them go and they went to the hospital to check make sure everyone's you know no concussions or whatever and of course our campaign wrote a check a press release and sent it to all of our press contacts and some people actually wrote about it and i was you know especially excited excited to read the new york times i'm like you know finally they going to have to mean this kind of such an outrageous thing they're have to expose this kind of abuse for once and then i opened the the new york times and it's kind of buried in an unrelated article about a small girl being killed in the gaza strip by israeli gunfire he just says elsewhere dr mustafa barghouti claims to have been involved in a scuffle with israeli soldiers that's kind of the extent of the coverage and i called the journalist they said hey you know we sent you a press release why don't you cover this in a more detailed slash truthful way and he said oh yeah we just didn't have time to go into that kind of detail and i didn't say this but i was thinking it like if it is really presidential candidate had been dragged out of his car and beaten by palestinian security services i'm sure you would have found some time so that's just one tiny example of the kind of you know things that you're dealing with when you're trying to you know report what's actually happening on the ground in palestine in was the new york times treatment of coverage of that incident was that typical for us corporate media coverage of his campaign very typical and not only i mean they seem to always preemptively to dismiss him it was always a long shot candidate dr mustafa barghouti or dark horse candidate dr mustafa barghouti and he kept saying like you know you're predetermining this election without even you know it's it's not very respectful of palestinians to tell them you know who their candidates are and what their chances are but and of course the arab world as well like the arab media was also you know a lot of them at that i mean now there's kind of arab spring in the air at the time it was pretty much mostly sort of dictators beholden to the west and they didn't also didn't want any kind of you know too many people to get too many ideas about representative democracies they kind of kept it quiet too so it was really an uphill battle the whole way the whole way but just about five minutes left so eventually you came back here to the u s and you spent a while working in d c can you touch on the sure i worked at a think tank that advised both congress and the defense department s an independent federally funded research and development center and you know i went there partly to kind of you know i explored the culture in the middle east and found it to be very edifying very enlightening and from the middle east the culture of washington seems sort of equally alien to you know that the middle eastern culture used to and you think like how do so many supposedly college educated you know people come up with these ideas that are so that seem so self evidently bad for everybody and i wanted to understand that culture and also see if i get influences if i could you know bring a very level headed view from from what i had you know what i'd seen in the area and what what made sense to me after living there for over two years and it was definitely an education the way that people are very locked into there's a kind of there's always this sort of in the air there's kind of a conventional wisdom that everybody knows not to go against it's kind of it's unspoken but if you sort of you know pop up and say oh i'm going to talk sense right now instead of go along with be you know dominant narrative you're not invited to conferences you're not promoted you're not you know taken seriously you're called naive all these there's all these different ways to marginalize people who don't go along with whatever's in the air at the moment and i certainly experienced that myself so i write a lot i sort of narrative eyes the way that this sort of incestuous beltway bubble like keeps itself going with these terrible ideas and you know also from d c i was watching history unfold  palestine you know the election the hamas election victory how it actually happened versus what washington was saying about it you know the kidnapping of you actually eat and how it was just such a big deal of course it is a big deal when it when a young man is taken away from his family and held without charge or trial for many years but what nobody was talking about was there are several thousand palestinians in the same situation taking away from their family often for either bogus charges or no charge or trial at all and  you know people don't realize how that tears away at the fabric of palestinian life and everybody knows that anybody can disappear at any moment for any reason or for no reason and there's no recourse there's no legal recourse it's not up to them  you know watching what happened in lebanon in the summer of two thousand and six versus you know when everyone was talking about it around me and just comparing and contrasting you know reality with washington i guess so you were actually for a while they were trying to change things from inside so to speak yeah exactly is worth a shot you know but it was it was more like you know i mean you they say when you dance with the devil you know you don't change the devil the devil changes you you know by the time i had been there for sort of a year and a half i realize i've caught myself kind of censoring myself and kind of going along with this whole culture and then i was like i'm out here i'm not this isn't this isn't good so then that's when i decided to you know stop doing that and first of all i'm back to palestine for a while just to kind of recalibrate and sort of get back to reality world a little bit and sort of feel like a human being again and you know then i was ready finally to write this book and so your your work is from the outside now so to speak yeah i think it's going to be really difficult to change washington from the inside something barack obama said in israel when he visited it really struck me which was he said look we're not going to take any risks you know we're not going to do you have to push us to do it you have to tell us to do it and i'm like well last i checked leaders are supposed to lead but they're not going to do it i mean is there's no culture of leadership in washington and any kind of good direction so yeah i figured that we're going to have to pressure people from the outside and i thought you know a good starting point is looking at reality from a more realistic you know viewpoint so that's why i wrote this book and i wrote it not just to get information across but also to be you know like there's romance and adventure and suspense and humor and all these things that make reading actually fun so and you know people tell me that you know once they start reading it they'll stay up too late to try to finish it because there's all these you know things in the air they want to find out how it's resolved and because you know i could write another dry academic book about how miserable things are about this guy and but you know he's going to read it i mean i don't read books like that but i want you know when i have free to read something with a little bit of readability i guess you could say so so yeah i thought and i was really shocked actually that so few people have done this like you've written something about this region it's actually fun to read