George Clooney Cuffed at Sudanese Embassy Protest

Can’t say the guy doesn’t have range. On Friday, George Clooney put his actor/director/good-time-guy persona aside to get serious about what he warned could become a catastrophe of global proportions, the crisis in Sudan, and he went so far as to get arrested in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to make his point.  —KA

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Clooney’s father, journalist Nick Clooney, 78, was with him and was also arrested, as were Martin Luther King III, NAACP President Ben Jealous, comedian and activist Dick Gregory, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), Rep. John Olver (D-Mass.), Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) and former Rep. Tom Andrews (D-Mass.). The group was restrained with plastic handcuffs and taken away by police.

Speaking before the large crowd that gathered to watch the protest, Clooney said, “We need immediate humanitarian aid into Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”

He went on to say that the group wanted “the (Sudanese) government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them, and stop starving them.”

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AP / Cliff Owen

Actor George Clooney, center, and Rep. Jim Moran, left, are led to a police vehicle after being arrested during a protest at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., on Friday.