This is long and needs an edit and finesse, but I wanted to get it out for now so bear with me. . .this is not my email- to reply to me, mail to laurel@o2collective.org.

Greetings from Kathmandu, Nepal-

Hey Everybody--In the whirlwind of adrenaline, exhaustion and inspiration since my detainment by the Chinese military last week I've only had the opportunity to speak directly to a few people and only now have even a moment to put out a group email to give a glimpse into what just happened. It would truly take a novel-length tale to tell all the bizarre details and movie-plot intrigue of what we experienced this last week- but for now I wanted to send out a synopsis of what happened while its still fresh in my memory.

With the global media storm surrounding our action and detention, most folks must know by now that I was just released from the custody of the Chinese military for participating in an action calling for the liberation of Tibet from the side of Mt. Everest. There was a great deal of necessary secrecy and cloak and dagger shenannigans involved in our preparation, departure and travel through China to pull this action off, and it is a relief to be able to finallly speak freely about what we've been up to.

For some context: China has enforced a brutal military occupation on the peaceful people of Tibet since invading the almost defenseless nation in 1951. Somewhere in the order of a million Tibetans were killed to secure China's iron-fisted rule and the Tibetan people today live in a continual state of fear. They face imprisonment and torture for simply possessing a picture of the Dalai Lama or displaying a Tibetan flag in their own home. Dissent against China is suppressed so thoroughly and violently that it has become almost non-existant within Tibet. The Dalai Lama and the legitimate government of Tibet operate in exile from neighboring countries. Meanwhile, China is engaged in a slick multi-million dollar PR campaign to convince the world that the Tibetan people are happy and prosperous under the benevolent wing of Beijing.



The Chinese government lobbied hard to gain the 2008 Olympic Games and are shamelessly using them to create the impression that the struggle for Tibetan liberation is lost and the world has accepted that Tibet belongs to China. The organization behind our undercover operation, Students for a Free Tibet, brilliantly recognized a moment of historic opportunity to create an action that could catch the world's attention and breathe new life into the Tibetan liberation movement.



An integral part of China's bid to host the '08 Olympics was their guarantee that they could run the Olympic Torch from the top of the world's highest mountain down to the opening ceremonies of the Games in Beijing. This spectacle is expected to be the most widely watched event in the history of humanity. It is hard to overstate the significance of this symbolic act to the Chinese government, the Tibetan people, or the world at large.

Allowing the torch to pass through Tibet unopposed, with the whole world watching, would grant a tacit international approval to China's Tibet policy. To be clear- this is a policy of systematic cultural genocide where an entire people with a rich and ancient spiritual civilization are being wiped out, assimilated and marginalized out of existence.



OK, sorry to be so long winded just setting the context, but it's crucial to understanding why we did what we did and why it is causing such a reaction. China is fiercely protective of its claim to Tibet and tolerates no discussion whatsoever that they are actually violating international law and generally accepted standards of human decency to do it. It's clear the massive attention brought by the upcoming Olympics presents a make or break moment for the Tibetan people, but their hands are tied to do anything from the inside.



So, this is where we come in- our team was organized into a few different units traveling separately with elaborate precautions and cover stories to ensure we could slip past the notorious network of spies, surveillence and informants employed by the Chinese governemnt to keep just these such actions from taking place. My crew carried the gear and equipment for the action- including a mobile satellite television broadcasting studio in our backpacks, as well as the materials to construct the banner out of unidentifiable materials after passing through the worst of the security checkpoints.



The whole trip was guided by forces seen and unseen in ways I can only begin to convey. We were held in the prayers of a global network of allies, elders and wise-ones to a degree that at times verged on spooky. We carried talismans of protection and luck from Masters of all sorts and in the end they proved as valuable as the layers of high technology we carried along side.



We flew into Chengdu in Central China, and spread out, miming our way through days of comical errands in a big city with few other foreigners before flying to Lhasa, the historic home of the Dalai Lama and the capital of Tibet. Lhasa is a compelling, complicated place rich with the lived mysticism of monks and pilgrims and thriving Tibetan culture- but also full of new chinese shopping malls, brothels and night clubs where Chinese dress up as Tibetans and parade on stage for 'cultural shows'. From there we hired a land cruiser to cross the insanely rough, winding roads of the Tibetan Plateau through some of the most starkly dramatic, barren and awe-inspiring landscapes Earth has to offer. The first sight of the Himalayas is enough to make you cry, the first sight of Chomolangma, aka Mt. Everest, brought us to our knees.



Reaching the Everest Expedition Base Camp at 17,500 feet is an adventure in and of itself-and reaching it after hiking an hour uphill in the darkness before dawn with packs full of gear to catch the sunrise over Earth's tallest peak is a whole other matter completely. The atmospheric pressure at Base Camp is half that of sea level and though we planned to allow ourselves time to acclimatize- the altitude does some pretty crazy things to one's head.

The day of the action the stars aligned auspiciously in our favor. The previous morning we did a dry-run to see how the equipment would function in those conditions- and they didn't. The software froze, the computer crashed and our videographer and tech-support person froze their fingers to the bones removing their gloves to use the touch screens. The next day we brought along a tent and set it up below the crest of a hill, between two sleeping yaks, just out of sight of the Chinese camp. We heated water the night before over a yak dung-fuel stove in a tent and stored it in vacuum flasks to heat the gear in the morning. We placed chemical hand warmers on all the batteries and processors and wrapped everything in sleeping bags and sweaters to keep all the gear as warm as possible.



The walk up from our camp to the site, the mountain was obscured by massive cloudcover. We marched forward, chanting mantras and invoking various deities to do their part to uncover her slopes in time for sunrise. Indeed, as if on cue, the clouds parted, the sun crested the ridge and the seemingly endless technical glitches resolved themselves just in time for us to step forward and broadcast the action to the world.



After unfurling the 18-foot banner reading One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008 (with Chinese and Tibetan language translations alongside the symbol of the Olympic Rings) Tenzin Dorjee, a Tibetan American member of our team, stepped forward and lit the Torch of Tibetan Liberation. We removed our hats as he sang the Tibetan National Anthem and lit a bowl of flame with the torch- commencing opening ceremonies for Team Tibet in the Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee was meeting in Beijing later that day to announce the route of the Torch to the world, so we made bright shirts that said "IOC: No Torch Thru Tibet" on the front and "TEAM TIBET" on the back.



The day we chose for the action was also historically significant for being the 18th birthday of the Panchen Lama, the second most holy figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama traditionally is the one to recognie the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama, and with His Holiness getting on in years this issue is very politically charged. When the Dalai Lama recognized the Panchen Lama 12 years ago, then a 6 year-old boy, the Chinese kidnapped him and hid him from the world. Now, twelve years later, the Chinese still hold him from his people, and the day of our action, somewhere out there, he became an adult. His safe return is primary, basic demand of the Tibetan people.



After expressing some of our purpose for being there to the camera, the three of us holding the banner marched down the hill and into the center of the Chinese Olympic Team's camp. We paraded the banner for a number of minutes- hooting and hollaring to the Tibetn Yak herders waking up around us before any Chinese fully took notice and understood what was happening.



Then began a 55 hour ordeal of epic and Orwellian proportions. Our action was shut down as we were detained by Base Camp security forces and marched up the nearby hill to a long cement building that became our detention cell and interrogation chamber for the next 12 hours. The officers appeared dismayed and bewildered- seeming to have no idea how to handle us or what to do with us. What was clear was that what we had done was so bad as to be almost unthinkable and that higher-ups needed to be called in immediately. They brought us to a room that looked just about exactly what you'd expect a creepy Chinese detention cell to look like- a cold, stark, cement square with one desk in the middle, bars on the windows and hunks of Yak meat hanging from the ceiling.



An officer had spotted Shannon filming from the hilltop in the distance and dispatched others to bring her in. Seeing them approaching, she cursed Jeff out of the tent in a hurry and distracted the advancing soldier with a direct gaze while Jeff tucked the still-rolling camera under his arm like a football and took off running from the authorities down the side of Mt. Everest as fast as he could. The action had been successfully transmitted by satellite to NYC, but to get still-quality pictures for magazines or TV-quality video, those tapes had to make it out of the country.



Jeff successfully hid camoflaged in piles of boulders for many hours, first stshing the tapes at an abandoned monastery before retrieving them and trying unsuccessfully twice to get through the police road blocks. He managed to find "auntie" --a hidden operative-ally of ours who had already been handed our receipts, camera memory cards and like on a midnight mission the night before--and give her his shoes, with the tapes hidden beneath the soles. She carefully wore the shoes and rode a bicycle past the checkpoint where they both made it to a town many hours below the mountain. There, in hte middle of the night, police swarmed Jeff's room and after much searching brought someone from Everest to identify him.



Back at the Basecamp: We still had a working cellphone on us at that point, so we set it on silent and began to send text messages to our support network to tell them we were available for surrupticious interviews from within our holding cell. The first call was from Voice of America and Kirsten gave her first media interview ever- an eloquent and efficient tale of our action and status that launched what would become a planetary press frenzy. Just before our minutes on the phone ran out, she slipped to the pit toilets and gave another live interview to the Associated Press.



They called me in first for the initial round of interrogation- another small, cold cement room with a makeshift desk, this time filled with young soldiers holding machine guns. They took our passports and asked basic questions, clearly trying to impress upon us the seriousness of our situation. We began by playing up the naive American tourist role- that we didn't know it was illegal, we do this all the time at home, etc. For the first three rounds of interrogation they didn't separate us in between, so we were able to share our questions under our breath and build an adaptive story tailored to buy time for Jeff to get out of the country with the tapes. It became clear there was confusion on their part about the technology we used and if anyone was actually taking pictures, so Shannon asked to go to the toilet and dropped the wide angle lens from her pocket down the hole while we stuffed the whole camera bag in the cabinet of the desk in our cell to hide any evidence of the now missing video camera.



After our first round of questioning ended, the local police from Shegar arrived with lights flashing and tires squealing and began the questioning from the beginning. Then came our third round of interrogation. Enter: Mad Dog- a deceptively friendly woman from the Shigatse District of China's Foreign Affairs Divison who was perhaps the most disturbing single figure of our whole detention. She immediately attempted to beguile Shannon, who was having none of it and called her out directly, to which she snapped and began shooting razors out of her eyes and cold fire from her mouth. She continued this bi-polar approach of chilling, syrupy sweetness and harsh, near-violent attacks for the next two days- alternating between strategies of manipulation and mood. She was the one who could throw me off balance just by walking in the room, and I just tried to avoid her as much as possible.



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OK Y'all, I'm 30 now and in Thailand and have already tried to return to this twice, once to write for over an hour before losing it all when the connection went down- plus I can see it is turning into the novel- length tale I said I was going to save for later- so, at this point I am going to wrap up with a quick and dirty synopsis for those who have been asking for it so that I can go ahead and get something out today.



After a full day in and out of small rooms being questioned on the side of Mt Everest, night-and cold- began to fall and things became increasingly more confusing and frightening. First we were told we would have to sleep in the small room at basecamp, then we were loaded into the back of a police vehicle and driven to our original tent from the night before. (They had already set up police road blocks and shut down all access to and from both camps, plus questioned and searched all the cars and tents in the area in a full-scale manhunt for Jeff, the camera and anyone who might know anything about us. They found where we had stayed and brought in the father of the family for hours of yelling and questioning- he was in tears and looked terrified when we saw him so we were very resistant to be dragged back to their place and cause them anymore trouble).



Then, after midnight, we were suddenly separated from each other and put into packed police cars and driven through the night down the heinous rockslide of a road from Everest to the town of Tingri three hours below. The ride was jarring to the core, with an armed Chinese soldier falling asleep in my lap and my head pressed against a 'Hello Kitty' pillow as I pretended to be asleep while holding on tight so as not to bounce my head off the ceiling of the jeep.



In the wee hours we pulled into a spooky military compound of some sort in the middle of nowhere and were told we were to have dinner. I had just had a powerful personal experience that I can only categorize as a vision while crammed in the luggage compartment of the police truck- and was feeling strangely calm and grounded when we arrived. Kirsten had been trapped alone in the back of a truck with Mad Dog whispering demonic love nothings in her ear and when she got out of the car she was nearly hysterical and a total wreck. I comforted her as best I could and tried to assure her our message was echoing far and wide and that we would not disappear into the dark recesses of a Chinese prison in the middle of the night.



There was much shuffling, yelling, phone calling and general chaos as it was clear seven overapping jurisdictions of China's
criminal/military/foreign affairs and propaganda divisions of hierarchy were scrambling to figure out what to do with us. We were told no dinner and now we go to Shigatse, Tibet's second largest city, another five or more hours away.



Just before we left, Mad Dog opened Shannon's jeep door and ordered her out. She marched her into a dark building and back into a small, sinister cement room, with three or more male officers at her back. There she cornered Shannon up onto a desk and shouted at her that she would begin to cooperate and tell the truth now or she would sleep the night in that room (in subzero termperatures)and that "harm would come to her". Shannon held her ground and asked "are you threatening me?" to which mad dog shook her head yes and then had to be restrained and pulled back by the officers behind her before doing who knows what next. One of these officers later approached Shannon's jeep and with his fingers in the shape of a gun, held it up to her head through the glass and pulled the trigger.



What I experienced was Shannon running out of the building with a great deal of commotion and yelling by everyone in tow. They put her back into her vehicle but she jumped out the door on the far side and ran to my jeep, opening the day and shouting "answer no questions until you talk to the consulate- I've just been threatened with harm!" She made it to the other jeep in a hurry to say the same thing before being caught and thrown back in her own car.

From then on, the tone changed. Being kept awake for more than 30 hours, given no food or water, in constantly shifting, stressful and uncertain circumstances with armed angry men shouting incessantly at me and eachother in Chinese was enough, but seeing Shannon in clear fear for her safety and then being totally isolated from her and the others while driving to an unknown destination across the pitch darkness of the Tibetan Plateau was to put it mildly, disconcerting.



We made another middle of the night stop at another creepy, isolated police compound and this time they left the women in the cars and ordered me and Tendor into separate rooms. The whole experience was so movie-dream like as to seem unreal- I was never directly told I would be hurt- but the constant confusion and stern, broken english phrases like "you made big problem, big problem" as we were marched from one dark, scary place to another was ominous and unsettling.



Just before dawn we arrived in Shigatse where our jeeps were driven into a government courtyard compound of some type. We were held in our individual vehicles for at least three more hours, still with no sleep, food, water or indication of our fate, when we were abruptly summoned to enter a nearby building. We had seen the size and style of the Shigatse prison on our way through days before and fully expected the next step was a cement bed with a nasty poop hole in the floor. Instead, we were marched into a palacial banquet hall and seated around an enormous round table set for an elaborate meal.



The setting was truly grand, and though we were sat apart with many officers between us, we were initially so delirious and relieved to see eachother and get water that we just sat there taking it all in a bit dopey eyed. Then we were commanded to "Eat! Eat!" and as we did the room filled with flashing cameras and video crews. It was a staged meal to show how well we were being treated! We felt duped, but at least we knew the US consulate was involved now.



We were then taken to individual hotel rooms that had been turned into interrogation chambers and another full day of questioning began. The whole scene was so surreal as to be sometimes almost amusing, sometimes terrifying and always just odd enough to keep us off our feet. I was not allowed to sleep and told I had broken Chinese Law (Article 5 of the constitution to be precise- I was made to memorize and recite it) and that I had no choice but to answer their questions. For the most part they were very concerned with anyone and everyone we had come into contact with- where we had stayed, who were our drivers, who made the banner and torch, why did we do it, etc etc etc.



There must have been over 50 different people assigned to us, and they cycled through our rooms endlessly- always making us sign and stamp our finger prints 37 times after each round of interrogation, then posing us with flower bunches and fruit baskets for pictures, then asking the same questions over and over again. The language barrier worked in our favor, and the little translator machines they used made for some ridiculously entertaining folly- with utterly nonsensical questions being asked in stern and severe tones to great comic effect.



Shannon and I each took responsibility for everything- we had the idea, we made the banner, we talked everybody else into it at the last minute. Throughout the whole ordeal- not one of us broke story. Shannon and I were fiancee's who came to Tibet to get married and were heartbroken by what we saw when we got to Lhasa. So we bought a tent fly and a blanket, found a guy on the street to translate the chinese and tibetan (they are still scouring the streets of Lhasa for the tall, fat Chinese man I admitted had helped us, I'm sure) and then roped the other random travellers in just before we did it.



There is a strange psychology that happens in stresful detention and questioning like this- I'm sure its been studied in FBI papers somewhere- its like you start to believe your own cover story even as you grow strangely emotionally dependent on your captors. . .anyway lots of twisted psychoanalysis I could do about all that but I just dont want to get into it right now- but the point is, we never gave info on our drivers, or anyone else we even interacted with.



There are so many weird nuances and trippy cultural observations from this chapter of our detention that I don't have time for many of them. I and they shifted tactics repeatedly. For hours I acted even more exhausted and delirious than I was and just sat hardly responsive going in and out of consciousness in a chair while grunting half answers to their non-stop inquiries. At another point I told them they could put me in jail if they wanted but I wouldn't talk any further until they let me see my girlfirend and talk to the US Consulate- that was a little scary to do but it bought me a few hours of obfuscation.

Anyhow, finally late in the next night I was allowed to fall asleep for all of about two hours before being shaken awake by very serious guards. They swarmed around me and communicated that we were in a very great hurry and I had made a very big mistake and needed to make it right. This was actually the lowest point emotional-strength wise for me. My heart was crazy fluttering and my mind racing and my main thought was "they have Jeff, (which they did), they know I've been lying and they're going to really get serious now". What they did was sit me at a desk, hand me a pen and order me to apologize for threatening the national security of the People's Republic of China. On accident, I laughed. "you want me to say I'm sorry?!" to which they most severely and adamantly insisted yes, you must say you are sorry.



In retrospect I wish i had taken the time to be a little bit more of a smart ass with my apology but I was just so relieved to get out of there I wrote what they wanted and signed and stamped and was given back my passport with an official "expelled from China" visa added inside.



Now things got really strange. We were rushed past a barrage of media back to our indivudual police land cruisers, but this time we had a flashing light military escort in front of and behind us, with each of our cars filled with various high ranking police chiefs, foreign affairs agents and the like. We were then driven for nine hours at high speed across the Tibetan Plateau in what they themselves called a 'presidential motorcade' to the Nepal border. The lengths they went to staging photo-ops for our departure was remarkable.

We crossed ice-covered, 16,000 foot passes where busses had to be pulled off the road for us to pass. Huge machines moved two-ton boulders to let us through. Dropping over 10,000 feet off the Tibetan Plateau into the Kathmandu Valley has got to be one of the most dramatic canyons and shift of environment on Earth. And the road is beyond horrendous. By the end, our motorcade had over 15 vehicles pushing everything and everyone out of our way at every turn.



Whole towns were shut down to let us fly through-with soldiers saluting and standing at attention the entire way. The military radioed ahead and pulled over all the trucks at the border town on the Chinese side so we would reach the border in time. Normally it would take nearly 3 hours to drive through and get to the Nepal side. It took us about 5 minutes- it was insane- I felt like we were deviant rockstars on public parade- the amount of attention we stirred is hard to over-emphasize-it was startling.



Finally we were lined up in front of the Friendship Bridge at the border for one last scolding and photo-op- to which I pleaded to blank stares: "Puh-lease Brer rabbit, whatever you do, just don't throw us in that briar patch in Nepal!!" And there we went, walking freely across the bridge to Nepal- cameras flashing and video crews rushing ahead until the very last step. On the other side we hugged and jumped in joy, shouting "Reng tzen @87#$%-^&*ER'S" (FREE TIBET).



We ditched our Chinese minder pretty quickly- refusing the vehicle he chose for us and got a truck to Kdu. Along the way we were told the local Tibet Alliance had put us up at the Hyatt Resort- by far the fanciest place in all of Nepal- and that media was waiting as soon as we were ready. The reception we received in Kathmandu was overwhelming. It was a Heroes Welcome of tearful proportions- totally humbling and emotionally very intense- way beyond what I had any idea to prepare for.



We knew this was going to be big, but hearing that our parents had been in and out of Congress members offices and in daily contact with the State Department while our faces and even friends were all over national and global television was still a surprise. The press conference at the Hyatt in Nepal was like out of a movie- the five of us arranged in a panel in front of a wall of microphones and cameras- AP, Reuters, Agence France Press, etc etc.



For three days we were visited at the hotel by waves of prominent Tibetan leaders. We were invited to dinners in our honor and asked to speak at events in front of thousands of people. We were draped in Katas by monks and members of the Tibetan Parliament in exile, by the head of the Tibetan Woman's Association and the Tibetan Youth Congress. We were visited by some of the remaining freedom fighters who snuck the Dalai Lama out in 1959, and by representatives of many regional Tibetan community organizations. Everyone was just effusive and excited, like we had blown fresh life into a fire they were holding close to their hearts to keep from the wind. The gratitude was just about too much to take, and the real feeling I was left with was one of responsibility to do more for these people who are allowed by the world to do so little for themselves.



The Tibetan people are a proud and powerful ancient culture and here they were just electrified by our little act of solidarity. I felt almost hollow being showered with such praise by such people- but the force of inspiration in their eyes demanded they be met without shrinking away. The clear symbolic power of our little action reverberated through all of us in spoken and unspoken ways.



These people simply want to go home and peacefully practice their culture and religion in their own land. They want to teach their children their own language and worship at the holy sites of their ancestors. It is such a basic struggle for human dignity that one can't help wonder naively "If the world just knew. . .?!"


I am going to wrap this up for now- but anyone who wants to see video can go to youtube or the students for a free tibet webpage. I also want to let anyone who does not know yet know that San Francisco is the only US city to accept the Olympic Torch next April- adn Mayor Newson says human rights concerns are "irrelevent" to the Olympic Games. We'll see about that- but realize there will be ways to get involved in the near future. We will give the mayor a fair chance to see the error of his ways and avoid a fight he does not want, but then we will beat him badly if he fights. "No Torture Torch in SF" is what I'm thinking.



When we get SF to publicly drop the torch it will be another major international incident heaping pressure on the Chinese to change their genocidal policies toward Tibet. We could not have been handed a better way to connect our local efforts to the international agenda- so stay tuned and get involved if you can.



I am in awe and love with my network of community and friends and family right now- thank you in a big, big way for all the spoken and deeply felt support through all of this----can't wait to see you all soon.



Big love and loving Rage,,,,,Laurel