[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 63 (Monday, May 7, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E717-E718]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     THE SATELLITE SENTINEL PROJECT: MONITORING WAR CRIMES IN SUDAN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, May 7, 2012

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, in late 2010 a remarkable and innovative 
project was established to use real-time satellite imagery to monitor 
and document the humanitarian and human rights situation on-the-ground 
in Sudan. The idea was the brainchild of activist and actor George 
Clooney and came into being through a remarkable collaboration between 
Clooney's humanitarian foundation Not on Our Watch, the Harvard 
Humanitarian Initiative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the incredible 
generosity of DigitalGlobal, the commercial satellite company that has 
donated thousands of images of activities taking place on-the-ground in 
Sudan. Through these images, the world has seen images in southern 
Sudan that may be mass graves, and others documenting military attacks 
on civilian targets. The project is an invaluable tool not only for 
understanding what is happening in real-time in Sudan, but in providing 
evidence that may one day be used in international trials for war 
crimes committed against Sudan's defenseless civilian population. A 
story about how this project was set up and the team of Harvard 
faculty, students and interns who monitor and analyze the satellite 
imagery was published in the April 29th edition of the Boston Globe 
Sunday Magazine. I salute the Satellite Sentinel Project and all its 
collaborators for their singular contribution in documenting the human 
rights and humanitarian reality in Sudan.
  Attachment:

         [From the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Apr. 29, 2012]

SpyLab: How a Team of Harvard Geeks Is Using A Satellite--Plus A Little 
   Help From George Clooney--To Rewrite the Rules of Humanitarianism

                         (By Michael Blanding)

       Late-afternoon light slants outside the windows of a 
     Harvard Square conference room where half a dozen twenty- and 
     thirty-somethings huddle around a table covered with laptops, 
     several cups of coffee, and one falafel sandwich. It could be 
     a grad student study session, at least until a young woman 
     named Brittany Card stands up in front of a white board 
     covered in drawings of soldiers and tanks in Sudan.
       ``I'm just going to go through the sitrep from memory, so 
     everyone's on the same page,'' Card begins, sounding more 
     like a general in uniform than a 23-year-old in pearls and a 
     plum-colored dress. Her situation report on the afternoon of 
     March 27 goes on to cite massive troop movements, aerial 
     bombardments, and a flurry of acronyms. As she talks, the 
     group looks at satellite images of scrub desert and buildings 
     projected on a pull-down screen at the far end of the room.
       Last year, South Sudan split from Sudan, and the North 
     African countries have teetered on the verge of war ever 
     since. A day earlier, Card continues, the fragile cease-fire 
     seemed to snap. It appeared that Sudan Armed Forces (SAP) had 
     bombed an oil field in South Sudan; meanwhile, southern 
     militias from the Sudan People's liberation Army (SPLA) had 
     apparently attacked an oil field in the north. The question 
     was, who started the fighting--and what would happen next?
       Card is the data analysis coordinator for The Satellite 
     Sentinel Project, which has been asking questions like this 
     since late 2010, when a foundation cofounded by actor George 
     Clooney put up the money for an audacious project to use 
     satellites to spy on combatants in an active conflict zone. 
     Operating out of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the 
     project's goal is to protect civilians, but to do that the 
     team has had to learn to think like military commanders.
       ``Is this a SAF play or a southern play?'' asks Satellite 
     Sentinel Project's director of operations, Nathaniel Raymond, 
     a 34-year-old with mussed-up hair and tortoiseshell glasses.
       ``Whoever's play it is,'' replies Benjamin Davies, the 34-
     year-old fast-talking deputy director, ``we had rapid events 
     take place'' on the border.
       And while they weren't watching. like everyone else, they 
     had been focused on Sudan's Kauda Valley, where the Sudanese 
     government has hemmed in rebels and civilians alike, blocking 
     food shipments and conducting bombing raids that drive them 
     into the surrounding Nuba Mountains.
       The team begins throwing out ideas for what could be 
     happening.
       Davies theorizes the Sudan military could finally be 
     preparing for an assault on the Kauda Valley. No, Raymond 
     says; they would have seen more activity from all the troops 
     in that area. ``It's like The Two Towers. You look out, and 
     there are a lot of orcs and torches,'' he says. If you're 
     stuck in the Nuba Mountains, he adds, ``you are saying, 
     `Where is Gandalf right about now? Can you text him again?' 
     ''
       The group is fond of movie analogies. Before the night is 
     through, they'll reference Harry Potter, The Matrix, 
     WarGames, and The Hunt for Red October as part of their 
     unusual mix of war-room bravado, nonprofit earnestness, and 
     dorm-room antics.
       Suddenly a thought occurs to Raymond: What if the SAF troop 
     buildup in Kauda is a trick to draw in southern rebels? He 
     slams the table. ``Oh man, it's obvious. You draw them in and 
     then you hit their flanks.'' He points to an area in Sudan by 
     the cities of Muglad and Babanusa, where tanks dropped off by 
     train would have an uncontested route to the border. In 
     minutes, Card finds that the nomads usually seen in the 
     region are much farther south--that could mean they've been 
     driven out. The team's manager of imagery analysis, Isaac 
     Baker, 32, calls up satellite shots that show roads being 
     built from Muglad and tanks stationed in Babanusa. The 
     evidence is mounting.
       This theory would be a change from the one the Satellite 
     Sentinel Project has been building. Just a week earlier, on 
     March 16, Clooney and other activists led a protest in front 
     of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to draw 
     attention to the plight of the refugees in the Nuba 
     Mountains. ``It's about to start raining, and once it starts 
     raining there, thousands of people are going to die,'' the 
     actor said. He then crossed a police line and was arrested, 
     and his message was broadcast everywhere from CNN to TMZ.
       Now, however, the Harvard group suspects everyone was 
     looking at the wrong spot. If their theory proves true, they 
     will have predicted an invasion before it happened. If it's 
     not, they will have wasted thousands of dollars in free 
     imagery from a satellite company that has already given them 
     millions' worth, and taken their eyes off the real conflict 
     ``How confident do we feel about this?'' Raymond asks.
       They decide to go for it. Since the images won't come in 
     until tomorrow, all they can do now is wait. It's close to 9 
     p.m. when the group breaks up. ``It's addictive, isn't it?'' 
     says Jody Heck, a Harvard sophomore. ``I have to study for a 
     10 o'clock exam tomorrow''
       Using satellites to search for war crimes in the Sudan was 
     George Clooney's idea. He had started making trips to the 
     country six years ago. In October 2010, just months before 
     South Sudan voted to declare independence, he returned with 
     the Enough Project, a Washington-based nongovernmental 
     organization working to end genocide and other crimes against 
     humanity. ``If entertainment is going to trump news,'' 
     Clooney says by phone from Los Angeles, ``then entertainment 
     should go where the news is.''
       Whenever violence had occurred in Sudan in the past, the 
     government had always been able to deny it Sitting in the 
     desert one night with Enough's cofounder, John Prendergast, 
     Clooney asked, ``Why is it that you can Google Earth my 
     house, but you can't do the same thing to war criminals?'' 
     There had to be away, he continued, they could turn 
     satellites into the humanitarian equivalent of paparazzi.
       They could certainly try, figured Jonathan Hutson, Enough's 
     communications director. He had previously worked with 
     Nathaniel Raymond at Physicians for Human Rights in 
     Cambridge, where they had used them to investigate mass 
     graves in Afghanistan. A few nights after Clooney's trip, 
     Hutson found himself in the actor's suite at D.C.'s Willard 
     InterContinental, eating pizza and setting up a conference 
     call with Google and the United Nations. Their goal, Hutson 
     says, was to figure out a way to ``stop a war before it 
     starts:''
       It took less than three months for the Enough team to 
     launch the Satellite Sentinel Project, with $750,000 in seed 
     money from Not on Our Watch, the humanitarian foundation 
     Clooney started with actors Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt, Matt 
     Damon and others. Hutson got Raymond to direct the operations 
     of the project, and Raymond got Harvard to host it. Finally 
     commercial satellite company DigitalGlobe agreed to donate 
     images--which can cost thousands of dollars apiece--and 
     helped train Isaac Baker and student interns to analyze the 
     footage.
       With four staff members and a half-dozen interns, the new 
     team quickly learned to search for clues of impending 
     attacks. Nine after launching the project, they detected SAF 
     troops gathering within 40 miles of the Sudanese village of 
     Kurmuk. After the Satellite Sentinel Project issued a report 
     about it over the Internet, more than 1,500 villagers fled 
     across the border to Ethiopia. By the time the invasion took 
     place, there were few people left to kill. ``We saw that 
     coming and went all Paul Revere up in that,'' Raymond says.
       The project's ability to warn civilians of impending 
     violence ``is unique in my experience,'' says Stephen Wood, 
     an ex-CIA analyst who is vice president of DigitalGlobe's 
     Analysis Center. Just as important, though, is how they 
     document past abuses. ``We've watched villages being 
     absolutely destroyed, and being able to help explain how dire 
     that is has been very significant.''
       Last summer, for instance, the Satellite Sentinel Project 
     alleged Sudan was killing

[[Page E718]]

     civilians and burying them in mass graves in the town of 
     Kadugli. Yet in a Washington Post article, the United States' 
     special envoy to Sudan said US intelligence reports showed no 
     evidence such graves actually existed.
       The team kept looking. ``We had multiple people speaking to 
     us saying bodies were being buried near a [particular] water 
     tower,'' recalls Benjamin Davies. One day, Ben Wang, an 18-
     year-old intern from Tufts, was looking at satellite images 
     when he noticed the tower had moved. He pointed to a hole in 
     the ground where it had been. ``The grave is there,'' he 
     said.
       Over the next month, the team watched the tower move back 
     to its original place, covering up the grave. In August, they 
     released a report and, by year's end, Time magazine reported 
     that the International Criminal Court was investigating war 
     crimes based largely on information gathered by the group.
       As Satellite Sentinel Project reports were increasingly 
     being cited by Congress members and UN officials, the team 
     began to realize something new was happening. Rather than 
     remaining passive observers, they were affecting the actions 
     of the combatants. The Sudan Armed Forces started hiding 
     their tanks inside tarps and bunkers, camouflaging them not 
     from the enemy on the ground but from a satellite 300 miles 
     above it. Major offensives began starting on American 
     holidays--Thanksgiving, Presidents' Day weekend--as if the 
     fighters hoped the people watching in Cambridge would be away 
     from their computers. Then this past January, days after the 
     project issued a report mentioning road construction, 29 
     Chinese workers helping build the road for the SAF--innocents 
     in the conflict--were kidnapped by Sudanese rebels. They 
     weren't released for 11 days. ``It was the sum of all 
     fears,'' Raymond says. ``It's what we work every day to 
     avoid.''
       Raymond and the others at Harvard may toil on laptops half 
     a world away from any violence, but their work isn't virtual. 
     Every member of the team has had ``Sudan dreams,'' as they 
     call their nightmares of shooting and being shot. ``There is 
     an immense intimacy to the violence; Raymond says. ``We are 
     not sifting through reports to create a static archive of 
     events. We are actually affecting the ways in which 
     perpetrators make decisions.''
       It's a heady responsibility for a team whose eldest member 
     is 34. But while members hasten to add that Harvard 
     professors and DigitalGlobe analysts are advising their 
     moves, there is something about the digital generation of 
     activists that uniquely suits them to the task. ``We could 
     not reproduce this with people who have been trained in other 
     [nongovernmental organizations],'' says Davies. The qualities 
     said to characterize Generation Y--the ability to multi-task 
     on multiple technologies, a facility for social networking 
     and teamwork, and even the individual sense of entitlement 
     over deference to hierarchy--all help this group analyze data 
     and make decisions quickly. ``People overvalue expertise,'' 
     says Raymond, perhaps the first time those words have been 
     spoken at Harvard. ``Critical thinking and the ability to 
     learn complex systems is more important than some one walking 
     in with six PhDs.''
       The amateur satellite sleuths were put to the test in March 
     when Clooney was set to meet with President Obama and testify 
     before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On a recent 
     trip to the Nuba Mountains, he'd witnessed a rocket attack 
     and interviewed children who had lost limbs from bombings--
     but his testimony would not be proof. And while the Satellite 
     Sentinel Project had satellite images from the time showing 
     smoke from alleged bombings, they couldn't find the 
     ``shooter''--artillery or aircraft--that caused it ``We are 
     presenting a report with the biggest movie star in the world 
     meeting with the president of the United States,'' recalls 
     Raymond. ``You want to find the shooter.''
       Baker kept at it. After days of triangulating from nearby 
     airstrips and squinting at his computer screen, he finally 
     noticed a speck he hadn't seen before--it was an Antonov AN 
     26, a Soviet-era cargo plane Sudan uses as a makeshift 
     bomber. ``This was literally the smoking gun,'' says Davies.
       Two days later, Clooney showed the satellite image to the 
     Senate committee, with the Antonov outlined in blue. He 
     credited the Harvard team with the evidence.
       ``Their level of expertise is incredible, but more than 
     that is their level of commitment,'' Clooney says now. 
     ``Sometimes they are up all night trying to figure this stuff 
     out, for no other reason than they are trying to save lives. 
     And they don't get enough acknowledgment for that.''
       It looks as if the project staff has been up all night. 
     It's March 29, two days after they'd decided to search for 
     the flanking attack, and they're again gathered around their 
     conference table. Eyes are bleary, and the group is quiet. 
     They've got the satellite images they asked for, but not the 
     proof of an imminent invasion. ``We wanted a softball,'' 
     Davies says. ``Sometimes you don't get that.''
       Baker, as he tends to do, is still searching his laptop 
     screen for overlooked clues. Davies starts projecting Beyonce 
     videos from YouTube on the screen. ``We see a lot of dead 
     bodies in here,'' he says. ``Beyonce is dead-body 
     kryptonite.''
       After more than an hour, Bakes finds some new checkpoints 
     and signs of tank movements, but still no smoking gun. 
     Raymond prepares to call it a night.
       In the days to come, Baker will find two tanks that could 
     signal an invasion. By late April, news reports would 
     indicate the region edging ever closer to wax. After South 
     Sudan seized the oil-rich Sudanese town of Heglig, Sudan 
     bombed a bridge in South Sudan, killing several civilians. 
     Despite pleas from the United Nations and African Union, the 
     violence would continue. The team may have been incorrect 
     about the location of attacks, but they had accurately 
     predicted SAF was mobilizing for a fight.
       That realization is still weeks away, though, and tonight 
     the mood is somber. ``Should we move [the satellite's focus] 
     south or stay tight on the border?'' Raymond muses aloud.
       The question is a fraught one. After providing some $16 
     million in pro bono imagery and analysis, DigitalGlobe has 
     been negotiating new pay rates going forward. While Clooney 
     has helped raise an additional million dollars for the 
     project over the past year, much of that money has already 
     been spent. That means even as violence escalates in Africa; 
     the future of the Satellite Sentinel Project is in doubt. ``I 
     am doing the best I can to raise money through speaking 
     engagements,'' Clooney says. ``I believe we are going to be 
     able to keep this up. The question is can we find ways to 
     sustain it.''
       For now, though, it's time for the team to regroup. ``This 
     is not a bad day; this is a good day,'' says Raymond, 
     rallying the troops with a kind of battlefield speech. 
     Redirecting the satellite ``was the right thing to do,' he 
     says. ``We needed to make sure we were seeing the whole 
     picture.''

                          ____________________