Mar 18 2012.
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Clooney was protesting Sudan's efforts to block humanitarian aid from reaching a volatile border region where its army is fighting rebels aligned with South Sudan.
Clooney, his father Nick, and other anti-Sudan activists ignored three police warnings to leave the embassy grounds and were led away to a Secret Service van in handcuffs.
"What we're trying to achieve today is we're trying to bring attention to an ongoing emergency, one that's got about a six-week timetable before the rainy season starts and a lot of people are going to die from it," said Clooney, after his release from jail. "So our job right now is trying to bring attention to it - one of those ways was apparently getting arrested."
"I guess we're not allowed to hang out at the Sudanese embassy," Clooney quipped.
Clooney, who recently visited the area, told a Senate hearing this week that Sudan's forces were launching repeated attacks on unarmed civilians and preventing aid from reaching a region where U.S. officials say as many as 250,000 people face severe food shortages.
Clooney, who has long been a prominent celebrity activist critical of the Khartoum government, had been widely expected to provoke police into arresting him in order to bring attention to the issue.
Clooney's father, Nick Clooney, who was also arrested, told reporters that the bleak conditions in the region has "scarred" them since their first visit in 2006.
"It continues to be an ongoing tragedy," said the elder Clooney. "We want to do anything we can to make sure that tragedy ends in our lifetime."
Activists have drawn parallels between the current crisis in Sudan's Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces and the violence almost a decade ago in the western region of Darfur, where Khartoum sparked international condemnation by violently suppressing a rebellion in a conflict that the United Nations estimates killed some 300,000 people.
With little sign of the conflict ending soon and food running out across the border in the Blue Nile, the refugee camps are bracing for another large influx of refugees.
Others arrested on Friday included several U.S. congressmen, the son of slain U.S. civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Prendergast, the co-founder of the Enough Project and a veteran human rights campaigner.
George Clooney told the press it was the first time he had been arrested.
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mary allen says:
Mar 18, 2012 at 03:26 pmBump___Clooney__An ongoing Tragedy