Asawin Suebsaeng

Interactive Writing Fellow

Asawin Suebsaeng is the interactive writing fellow at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. He has also written for The American Prospect, the Bangkok Post, and Shoecomics.com.

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A graduate of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., Asawin came back to DC with hopes of putting his flimsy Creative Writing major, student newspaper tenure, and interest in human rights and political chicanery to some use. He started cutting his teeth at F&M's student-run weekly, The College Reporter, serving as editor in chief. He has interned at The American Prospect, been a reporter for the Bangkok Post, and scribbled for ShoeComics.com. His favorite movie is either Apocalypse Now or Pirahna 3D, depending on the day or mood.

Jon Huntsman Glosses Over Genocide In Bangladesh

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Mon Dec. 12, 2011 4:50 PM PST

2012 GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

During Monday's Lincoln-Douglas style debate between front-runner Newt Gingrich and back-runner Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor was asked about the United States' volatile relationship with Pakistan. Huntsman asked the audience to think back to the early 1970s, when America's alliance with Pakistan was more reliable and sturdy. "It was Pakistan that helped open the way to China," Huntsman said, before going on to praise the partnership between then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Pakistani President Yahya Khan. Returning to this baseline of friendship with the Pakistani government would be part of Huntsman's grand strategy of "remind[ing] the world once again what it means to be a friend and ally of the United States."

Sounds swell, right? With the way things have been going lately, who wouldn't want to get back to an era when Pakistan actually assisted the United States in major foreign policy wins?

What Huntsman neglected to mention in his description of that period in US-Pakistan relations is that Gen. Yahya Khan was a genocidal leader who orchestrated an indiscriminate campaign against Bengali civilians during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence. Casualty estimates range in the hundreds of thousands (with higher estimates clocking in at three million deaths) and the operation was labelled by one top-ranking American official at the time as "the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland." Kissinger—predictably—looked the other way because Khan was a key interlocutor in arranging President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. "[General Khan] hasn't had so much fun since the last Hindu massacre," Kissinger said during a closed meeting in 1971.

Obviously, Huntsman was not citing mass murder and ethnic cleansing as indications of a solid bond between the two nations. It is, however, rather peculiar for the Republican candidate to hold up such a dark chapter in Pakistani history as an example of sunnier days. It's likely that Huntsman was simply taking a page from the realpolitik handbook, while banking on the safe assumption that few, if any, listeners were aware of this complex, brutal episode of the Bangladesh Liberation War and Nixon's "opening" to China.

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CIA Black Site in Romania: Hidden in Plain Sight

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Fri Dec. 9, 2011 7:08 AM PST

On Thursday, the Associated Press published their exhaustive investigation into "Bright Light," a one-time CIA black site that was used in key anti-terrorism operations. From 2003 until its closing in 2006, Bright Light was one of the agency's most vital detention and interrogation facilities in the Bush administration's war on terror. Some of the most notorious terror suspects of the past decade—including alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—passed through the secret prison located near the heart of Bucharest, Romania's capital. The AP, in conjunction with the German public television program ARD Panorama, uncovered details of the site's interrogation program, building layout, and other critical information. Here's the photo of the facility's exterior that has been making the rounds online:

After gazing at that, you're probably thinking that this top-secret CIA prison looks an awful lot like a rundown DMV. The report describes the black site as "hiding in plain sight, on a leafy residential street along a busy set of train tracks in Romania's capital":

Unlike the CIA's facility in Lithuania's countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA's prison in Romania was not in a remote location. The building is used as [the Romanian government's] National Registry Office for Classified Information, which is also known as ORNISS. Classified information from NATO and the European Union is stored there. Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and identified pictures of the building.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Right-Wingers Outraged by Muppet Plot!

Fox Business and friends see a conspiracy in the new Muppet movie, leading to an inquisition (of sorts) online.

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Wed Dec. 7, 2011 4:00 AM PST

Right-wing paranoia has Muppets in the hot seat.

Last month The Muppets opened in theaters nationwide, hotly anticipated as the Muppets' first big-screen adventure in over a decade. Its kid-friendly, PG-rated storyline is all about love, laughter, camaraderie, looking out for the little guy, and finding your place in the world. In a season chock-full of dark and controversial Oscar bait, here's an upbeat respite packed with delightful song-and-dance numbers, like this one:

How could anybody not enjoy this? I mean, no one could possibly get bent out of shape over The Muppets, right?

Right?

[Read the full article]

Attack of the Mammoth Clones?

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Tue Dec. 6, 2011 5:02 AM PST

When they bring this fella back from the dead, he's going to have some major scores to settle.

Try figuring out if this is an excerpt from an AFP story that ran on Saturday, or the synopsis for a certain 1993-Steven-Spielberg-popcorn-movie-turned-amusement-park-ride:

Scientists from Japan and Russia believe it may be possible to clone a mammoth after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia, a report said...

Teams from the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan's Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia...[T]he discovery in August of the well-preserved thigh bone in Siberia has increased the chances of a successful cloning. Global warming has thawed ground in eastern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of frozen mammoths...

Now, I think I've seen this movie before...and I distinctly recall Jeff Goldblum getting brutalized by a large dinosaur.

But in all seriousness (since the Jurassic Park angle has already been done to death on this story) the report is just the latest in the teams' efforts to bring the animal back from extinction—a phase that the species of tusked mammal have dabbled in for about 100 centuries.

The clone-a-furry-prehistoric-creature formula, according to researchers, is as follows:

Swap out the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant for ones taken from the frozen mammoth's marrow cells, thus creating embryos with mammoth DNA.
Plant those special embryos into the wombs of a bunch of elephants.
Each elephant—a close relative of the mammoth—delivers the resurrected-mammoth baby in roughly 22 months.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

Gaze Into the Exploding Universe of Dark Money

We've charted the red giants and blue dwarfs spending millions to influence the 2012 election.

—By Dave Gilson and Asawin Suebsaeng

| January/February 2012 Issue

If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here's the parallel universe it formed: rapidly expanding super-PACs and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting their gravitational pull on federal elections. A group's size in the chart below is based upon all known fundraising or spending since 2010…so keep an eye out for dark matter. Come back for regular updates.

PAC, Liberal Groups, Conservative Groups: Stars, Clusters, Belts, and Clouds