| Summary: | This year, one of the last fugitives of the Earth Liberation Front pleaded guilty to arson - at a moment when climate activists are again flirting with radical ideas. The Two Elk Lodge in Vail, Colo., ablaze, in October 1998.Credit...Mark Mobley/Vail Fire and Emergency Services To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Late one summer evening in 2018, an American citizen named Joseph Mahmoud Dibee was sitting in José Martí International Airport in Havana, Cuba - trying, unsuccessfully, to sleep - when he was approached by three men. Dibee, a civil engineer, was in Havana on a layover. After a long business trip in Ecuador, he was heading home to Russia, where he lived with his wife and stepson. The men demanded his passport, then led him out of the terminal and into a waiting sedan. Dibee asked where they were going, but got no response. Sandwiched between his captors, he was driven miles through the night before finally arriving at what appeared to be a jail. For the next three days, Dibee would claim in a subsequent court filing, he was imprisoned without explanation and, in effect, tortured. His small concrete cell was open to the elements; during the day, the cage baked. As Dibee, who was then 50, sweat through his clothes, the jail’s guards gave him little to drink. He soon became nauseated and began to repeatedly pass out. With no way of contacting his family, Dibee worried that, if he died, they would never learn what happened to him. On his fourth day of confinement, weak from dehydration, Dibee was dragged to an air-conditioned trailer in another part of the facility. He was met by a middle-aged man in fatigues who identified himself as an officer in Cuba’s state intelligence service. Smiling, the officer held up a bottle of water. “But first,” he said, “tell us about the fires.” Several days later, on Aug. 9, 2018, Cuban authorities handed... |