in close cooperation with another organization, HRF took a much more aggressive approach: planning Abdulemam's escape from Bahrain.

On a number of previous occasions, Human Rights Foundation personnel had gone to extensive lengths to obtain testimony for OFF from people who try to challenge arbitrary power and dictatorship through non-violence advocacy and empirical data. In 2010, HRF representatives traveled to Cuba with hidden camera equipment and were able to obtain the testimony of celebrated blogger Yoani Sanchez and the Ladies in White dissident movement. OFF personnel also traveled to Vietnam to visit persecuted Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do. They snuck into the Saigon monastery where he remains under house arrest and captured Thich's thoughts on democracy, human rights, and the intolerance of the Vietnamese regime. The Vietnamese authorities interceptedone HRF staff member, who was arrested and severely beaten by their intelligence police, but the digital recording of the monk's testimony made it safely to Oslo. Why not now help Abdulemam escape Bahrain, where the authorities had instituted a permanent manhunt for him?

Here's how we hatched a scheme to get Ali Abdulemam out of Bahrain -- and learned again how even the best laid-plans can be overtaken by random luck:

We consulted with Nasser Wedaddy, a Muslim human-rights advocate working at the Boston-based American Islamic Congress (AIC). Wedaddy was the man who had first alerted Abdulemam when the crackdown started in Bahrain, literally waking Abdulemam up in the middle of the night and asking him to go into hiding immediately. Abdulemam knew to pay attention because Wedaddy had