What a Poor Bastard

We shall die in darkness and be buried in the rain.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Justice Denied in Massachusetts

What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

—Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1989

The drive home from Dulles was a revelation. Our car was quiet. The roads were smooth. Cars drove slowly and sometimes ceded way at intersections and rotaries. All the streetlights worked. There were trees everywhere and the streets were clean, the shops well lit. My neighborhood had neat homes, tended lawns, calm people strolling the sidewalks, softly blinking streetlights, cars signaling before turns. Women walked alone, or with friends, smiling and at ease. It was stunning to see how orderly, prosperous, and safe America was.

Sally still became exhausted at the end of each day, and had to be careful about what she ate, but she seemed to have managed all right. She was doing as well as she could. The kids had been a lot to handle at the same time that she tried to regain her health and spirit. Our kids seemed, from what I could tell, unaffected by all the turmoil of the past several months. They stormed around, said cute things, and at times acted petulant. The big event in Sally’s and the kids’ lives was managing to drag the Christmas tree they had bought through a large snowstorm into the house.

A week after my return from Point Zero, Sally, the kids, and I drove up to Boston to visit my eighty-two-year-old parents. My father had played competitive hockey through age seventy-five, had been acting chairman of the town school committee for many years—pushing for one of the earliest sex education programs in the country—and enjoyed swearing at machines, which he insisted on not learning how to use. He did not so much swear, though, as cuss, his worst epithet being “Jumping Jesus!” My mother was wheelchair-ridden, but held her chin with a jaunty, appraising air, and e-nun-ci-ate-ed all her words im-pec-cab-ly in her Brahmin accent. As a child she had studied dance under Isadora Duncan, and she had been Miss Brookline and acted before the troops during World War II. My parents still lived in the family home, a fourteen-room Victorian house walking distance from Fenway Park, with a wraparound porch, stained-glass windows in the front hall and master stairway, and a Masonic rising sun carved on the lintel over the front porch. I was the fourth generation of my family to have lived there—all the generations lived there together when I was growing up—and, sadly, surely the last.

After the initial bustle of greetings, and of Spencer and Margaux running up to the attic to bring down old toy rifles, Lincoln Logs, my grandfather’s World War II air warden helmet, and the billy club he had been issued as a deputized law officer during the Boston police strike of 1919, and of the kids hiding in the “telephone room”—a walk-in closet under the main stairway where we had the phone when I was growing up—I settled down in the living room to chat with my father and mother. A fire crackled in the fireplace, a bas-relief of the Devil blowing on the flames visible at the back of the hearth.

“I always like watching the Devil through the flames,” I said as I sat beside the fire.

“No, dear,” my mother said to me in a recurring exchange. “That is not the Devil. That is Aeolus, the Greek god of wind.” She had always been slightly offended at the idea that there could be a devil in her house. Who in his right mind would put the Devil in someone’s hearth, of all places? We both smiled, intransigent.

Heavy drapes separated us from the music room, where we had had two pianos and other instruments when I was growing up, and my aunt Joyce—more like my big sister than an aunt—had practiced voice an hour or two a day. My mother’s other sister, Alexandrine (“Aunt Sandra,” pronounced AHnt SAHndra, as in “open your mouth and say AHHHH”), now seventy-three and living once again in the family home, came in and sat down to listen to the Wandering Nephew. Sally went off to the butler’s pantry to make her ritual cup of tea.

“I haven’t heard from you in months, Glenn,” my mother said, looking me in the eye. Four generations of family portraits on the walls looked me in the eye, too. I glanced at a photograph of my grandfather, with whom I had grown up, taken in 1917, standing in his lieutenant’s uniform. His own grandfather had been a lifelong friend of, and shot buffalo with, Buffalo Bill, and my grandfather had sat on his knee one day when Buffalo Bill visited the house. My grandfather had received a shooting lesson from Annie Oakley during that visit, too.

“No. No. I was away for a long time.”

My mother raised her chin ever so slightly.

“I assumed as much. Traveling a lot, I suspect. Anything you can tell me? I love your stories.”

Her eyes sparkled. For many years, I had been writing or telling my parents about my adventures with the silverback mountain gorillas in eastern Zaire, or with gypsies at the base of Mount Olympus in Greece, or with sullen locals in a small-town bar on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. My mother frequently consulted the Rand McNally atlas beside her chair when she received my letters. It had been printed in 1940 and contained a good map of “Hitler Occupied Europe.” The window beside the bookshelf—all the windows in the house—still used the blackout curtains from World War II.

“Well, I had a lot of work in Europe. It was good to get back there. I was able to go up to the top of the Zugspitze, in Germany.” I then described my trip to the cable cars, the wind at the picnic tables at the observation café at the top, and how well I did using my German. “I was still able to get by after all these years; was kostet das? Haben zie ein zimmer? Ich muchte Bröt, bitte. Wo ist die Bahnhof?” My mother enjoyed my tales and was proud that my German was still so serviceable.

I had not been to the Zugspitze, or southern Germany, for five years.

As I always found when I returned from overseas, most people I interacted with had little real interest in where I had been or what I had been doing. I simply left their frames of reference, or interest, when I went away. Someone I had not seen for a while might ask, “Where have you been this time?” I would answer, and after two or three sentences the person usually would respond, more or less, “Neat. Did you see the Notre Dame game last month, while you were away?” and that was the end of my months, or perhaps years, somewhere beyond the horizon. Or, if they were interested in public affairs, they might mention a speech the president had given on terrorism, or domestic security. Then the conversation would revert to old patterns, and my months or years spent wherever I had gone simply did not exist.

Sally and I left our kids with my parents one evening and went to a dinner party at the home of one of my old college roommates, Sam Carr. That we could enjoy an evening out together was a sign of how much Sally had recovered physically and emotionally. I was quietly happy, and relieved, to see this. I often fretted that she did not realize how much her efforts and struggle moved me, how much I was coming to understand the strength of character and body it took, how much I hoped to help, and struggled myself to know how.

Sam was a true representative of the Brahmin class, with ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, and others who served as officers on General Washington’s staff. I had teased Sam that I, too, had direct ancestors who had fought in the Revolution, five of them, in fact; only, four of the five had been Loyalists who fought for the British. I told Sam that I would set aside justice and still be his friend, even if he continued to refuse to compensate me for the properties that his ancestors had expropriated from mine. When we arrived at his property, we drove through the gate, past the gardener’s house, rolled past the greenhouse, and two hundred yards farther on parked and walked into their large home, passing into a book-lined salon with French windows that looked out to a field and a wood separated by a stream running through their land.

About a dozen former classmates and their spouses attended the dinner: lawyers, doctors, people in finance. Waitresses dressed in black skirts and white blouses made the rounds of the drawing room, discreetly serving hors d’oeuvres. Baroque chamber music played in the background.

Sam’s wife, Margaret, greeted us warmly.

“Sally! It’s so good to see you. What can I get you to drink?”

My stomach tightened. Sally’s smile froze. I am not sure if she looked apprehensive, or if I projected my apprehension onto her features.

“Oh, I’ll just have sparkling water, thanks.”

“Really? No. A glass of champagne, perhaps?”

I felt even more on edge.

“No, thanks,” Sally said, polite as ever. “Sparkling water, please.”

I was relieved, and disturbed. This was going to happen over and over, forever. There was no escape, but then, there never is.

Margaret was an exception to my typical experience with my friends and acquaintances, and always enjoyed questioning me about my work overseas. She knew that I had worked on Iraq and Afghanistan over the years, and mentioned this to the small group of guests sitting and standing with us. Naturally enough, the conversation turned to 9/11, our recent invasion of Afghanistan, and the hunt for Usama Bin Ladin.

One of the other guests, an ophthalmologist, was an attractive thirty-five-year-old woman in a cocktail dress cut slightly too low. She wore a demure beret in her blond hair, like a halo above her clear face. She looked down at me, as she stood with a drink in one hand, lightly touching the arm of a sofa with the other. I was sitting in front of her, on a small chair, separated from the sofa, one hand inside the other on my lap.

“Why can’t you find Bin Ladin? I mean, come on. You work for the State Department. What are all of you doing? We have to get him.”

She shifted her weight to one leg and lightly placed her hand on her hip. I looked at her for a moment in silence.

“Well, I understand,” I answered. “But the area along the Afghan-Pakistani border is huge, and really, really rugged. I mean, it’s hard enough to find my own kids in my townhouse when we play hide-and-seek. We’re talking about an area as big as Texas. It’s really hard to do.”

The woman was having none of it.

“I know what I’d do. I’d solve the problem.”

“Oh?”

“I’d grab some guys out there, the ones where we think he is, and I’d make them tell me where Bin Ladin was. You can make people talk. You know the CIA can do that sort of thing. They should, anyway.”

I had just come from a black, windowless, freezing cell, where for months I had been the Interrogator, the Hand of Judgment. Now I sat in a paneled room overlooking a bucolic estate, surrounded by refined men and women in designer clothes, being stared at with appraising eyes and genteelly berated for not torturing our enemies enough, whoever they might be. I am in the same place I was a week ago, I thought. I never have gone anywhere.

“But we can’t just grab anyone and expect him to know where Bin Ladin is,” I replied, in what I hoped was a measured voice. “Most people there don’t know anything. The few who do, do not want to give him up. It’s a cultural thing. And we can’t just make someone talk.”

“They killed 3,000 Americans. They aren’t civilized. It’s not like we should be reading these people their rights. They deserve no respect. They deserve nothing. And then, if we can’t find him, I have a simple solution to the problem of finding Bin Ladin, anyway.”

“You do? It’s not so easy.” I wished that Sally, or Sam, or Margaret would change the subject. I did not want to give puerile answers to insipid observations that irritated me. But everyone seemed content with the conversation and, with me as the lone Washington official, wanted to listen to my supposed insights.

“Yes,” she said. Her forceful confidence reminded me a little of Wilmington, back at Headquarters. “I’d just nuke the whole place. Kill ’em all. That’d get Bin Ladin.”

“But there are millions of people there.” My voice was flat, but I hoped not disdainful. I wanted neither to fuel the discussion nor antagonize the woman on a subject about which she knew nothing, but had made up her mind. “You can’t just kill millions of people, none of whom but maybe two hundred or something have anything to do with Bin Ladin.”

The ophthalmologist was indifferent. “They attacked us. They are hiding the guy. So they’re guilty. He is evil. Nuke ’em.” She seemed to mean it, too.

I almost remarked that barely thirty miles from where we sat, our forebears—at least Sam’s and mine—had hanged or stoned people to death for witchery, after having wrung confessions from them by “dunking” them—drowning them under controlled conditions—and that we all now shook our heads in condescension about such collective insanity and fanaticism. My attractive and educated dinner partner was coldly suggesting that we kill an entire population, so as to exorcise one demon. But I bit my tongue.

“I suppose that might kill Bin Ladin,” I replied, raising my eyebrows.

The CAPTUS case had enhanced my sense of solitude, of detachment from everyone around me. Were CAPTUS and I—two “inmates” from the asylum, captive and jailor—the only two sane men alive?

Barely a moment had passed. Margaret at last came to my rescue.

“It’s all just so interesting,” she interjected. “I mean, I don’t think we’d want to bomb—use a nuclear bomb on so many people. I’m sure the government knows all about what to do. Or don’t they? But, Bin Ladin is just so awful. I think it’s very hard.” She looked at me and rose, smiling. “I’m glad to know that people like you are working on it.” She raised her voice. “Let’s all find our seats in the dining room. Our dinner is ready.”

On the drive back to my parents’ house, Sally told me not to get so worked up.

“Why do you let some noo-na bother you? They are ignorant. You know the truth.”

I did not answer for a moment. There were no streetlights on this road. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the homes we passed, small points of light amidst the swirling snow in the sharp wind and formless dark. I nodded, half convinced, half cynic. I wanted to avoid talking or thinking about or reacting to any of the conversation, or about the shades it had conjured, of which the attractive ophthalmologist in the low-cut dress had never dreamed, but of which she was certain nonetheless.

I enjoyed driving at night, feeling the steering wheel cold through my gloves; it was solid and gave me a sense of control, the tires crinkling in the snow, all sounds muffled. The solitude made me feel safe.

“I guess.”

I glanced at Sally out of the corner of my eye. Sally had done all her drinking in the dark, out of sight, a secret crisis that was slowly destroying us. At last, in a series of painful revelations, I had learned what had been happening, and sometimes I knew what to do. Sally’s—our—recovery became possible once I recognized, and she acknowledged, the truth. We could handle the truth, or at least try.

I looked back through the windshield, the headlights casting a narrow beam of light into the dark. Countless snowflakes shone an evanescent moment before us, captured just an instant in their anonymous flight, before disappearing back into the enveloping black.

“I guess. Yeah. I know the truth.”

Ryan had responsibility for CAPTUS now, in Point Zero, while the CTC desk carried on as before. I had hoped to see Keith, the branch chief, to talk about the two cables I had written as I was departing the station, and to try to change the direction of the case. I was dismayed to learn that Keith had changed positions, and moved to another branch. I did not even see him, as he was away TDY. His position was unfilled. I had no memorable discussion with Wilmington, either, who was always very busy, or out somewhere. I was unable to engage with him, but did not want to anyway. We knew each other’s views. He obviously had no interest in seeing me. Our conversations were superficial. He had moved on to other operational issues. CAPTUS? Being handled by the branch. No problem. Thanks for your help. For the higher offices, for all that CAPTUS was a high-profile case, the higher offices referred operational issues back to the branch, which knew the case.

I looked for my two cables. No one knew anything about them. Point Zero had never sent them. They did not exist. The COS or DCOS had obviously decided that they were too incendiary. My views were not collegial and, had they been transmitted, would have raised awkward issues about CAPTUS, Hotel California, and CTC’s handling of the case, over a long period of time. A single C/O who challenged years of DI assessments and DO operational practice was usually viewed as someone almost by definition bizarre and to be silenced, probably unfit because he was unable to meld with the team and how professionals did their jobs. Who was one officer to challenge the collective views of dozens of officers and offices, from both branches of the CIA, over years of careful review? Who was I to challenge the foundations of an entire program, ordered by the president? I regretted not having sent them to myself, back channel, even though one was not supposed to do that.

All in all, CAPTUS, who had so consumed my life, viewed from the urgent, overworked atmosphere of CTC and the CIA, in the context of the aggressive GWOT, was just one case—albeit an important one—but one that no one would want to have complicate the larger operational issues of how to conduct counterterrorism operations, while following the White House’s guidance on rendition, detention, and interrogation. There was a saying in the DO: On major issues, one should let “kings fight with kings.” The issues raised by the case I had handled were issues for kings, such as the DDO—the senior operations officer in the CIA, or the DCI, or members of Congress, or the Office of the Vice President, or the White House. I had had my differences with Wilmington; CAPTUS was rotting in a dungeon; but most everyone in the DO would consider that any officer out in the field, or down in the bowels of the organization, who challenged Agency and U.S. government practices, to be a fool embarked on a fool’s suicidal errand. The men running the country suppressed anyone who challenged them on these issues, even the most powerful officers in the government. A smart officer, a good officer, did his job and left philosophy in the classroom, law to the Office of General Counsel, and politics to our most senior masters. And that way, he would keep his head.

That summer, President Bush issued a statement in observance of United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The statement said, in part:

The United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. We are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right. . . . Yet torture continues to be practiced around the world by rogue regimes whose cruel methods match their determination to crush the human spirit. . . . Notorious human rights abusers . . . have sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors. . . . The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example.

I found this speech infuriating. I knew what we were doing; our actions soiled what it meant to be American, perverted our oath, and betrayed our flag.

Lawyers could argue that our actions were legal. But I had lived what we were doing. I knew otherwise. Our actions contravened the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the U.S. Constitution, whatever ratiocinations administration lawyers had tried to spin. At work, one did not raise these issues, or question one’s orders. Not in any conversations I had, or heard about. These issues had been resolved. Do the job, or find another.

A month later Ambassador Joe Wilson’s article “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” was published. Joe had been, essentially, my first boss twenty years before in Burundi. He argued, of course, that the rationale for our invasion of Iraq had had little to do with the facts about Saddam’s ostensible weapons of mass destruction programs. I paid special attention to Joe’s article, as I knew Joe, had worked with his wife, Valerie Plame, many years earlier, knew that his article was fundamentally sound, and of course recognized that the article would catalyze a heated polemic all around.

I had lunch with a senior DO colleague around this time. For years, he had been heavily involved in our Iraq operations. We had known each other for a decade and spoke openly with each other. Of course we spoke of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the War on Terror. Joe’s article was just beginning to make waves. I told my colleague that Joe’s article was simply one example of an almost infinite number of crude distortions of intelligence and perception concerning terrorism and Iraq. I said I had come to be appalled at how the administration, and the CIA, so grotesquely mischaracterized the threat from al-Qa’ida, rolling all terrorists together as though they posed one enemy, rather than a broad range of challenges—even going so far as to assert the fundamental identity of and associations among al-Qa’ida, Hizballah, the narco-traffickers in Latin America, Mexican “coyotes” along the U.S. border, Saddam (who was secular!), Palestinian suicide bombers, and on and on, in a frankly lunatic mishmash. I alluded to the CAPTUS case as representative of how distorted perception had led to mortifying error.

My colleague nodded. I was not telling him anything he did not know. Hundreds of people in the cafeteria around us created a loud background babble. No one could hear us even at the next table. It was hard to understand anything amidst all this noise, even when listening. The thought occurred to me—surely I was not the first to have it—that I was sitting in the middle of a ziggurat.

“I know, I know,” he began, holding his fork and knife above his plate as he spoke. “I was involved early on in the planning for the Iraq invasion. This was Seventh Floor stuff. We went around the table, discussing specific tasks we would need to accomplish to support the invasion. This was long before the invasion. Way before it. We hadn’t even started to deploy troops to the theater yet. When it was my turn to speak, I said that I had worked the Iraqi target for years, and everyone needed to understand that Saddam and al-Qa’ida had nothing to do with one another. Totally different problem sets. I said that we could not justify invading Iraq by citing the al-Qa’ida threat, because al-Qa’ida was not there, and had nothing to do with Saddam. No one said much of anything. We continued the planning. It was clear that we were going to war.”

My colleague was dispassionate as he spoke. I slightly shook my head, although what he was telling me was no surprise. We all knew Saddam and al-Qa’ida had nothing to do with each other.

“So, then, a month or so later, we have our next big meeting. Same issues: planning the invasion of Iraq. It came my turn to speak again. This time I said that I had also worked proliferation issues for many years—this was the whole ‘Saddam has WMD’ thing; if we were concerned about the biggest threat from weapons of mass destruction, then we had to focus whatever we were doing on North Korea. Saddam posed little threat. Then I said that we also needed to consider the likely consequences of invading Iraq. We would probably cause the country to break apart, and for what? Al-Qa’ida wasn’t there, Iraq posed no significant problem from a weapons of mass destruction perspective. We would create new problems for ourselves by invading. The assessment we were basing our actions on was divorced from the facts; we couldn’t accomplish what we claimed as our objectives; and we would create problems we probably could not solve. So we needed to make this clear to the White House. I finished, and the meeting carried on as before, planning the invasion of Iraq.”

Here, my colleague paused, took a bite from his plate, and smiled slightly.

“After the meeting, as I was coming out of the conference room, one of DDO’s senior assistants walked with me down the hall. ‘Some advice from a friend,’ he told me. ‘Say what you want in the meetings. It’s your decision. But you are doing yourself no favors. The decision has been made. Either one is onboard, or, well . . . No one can change this. The only effect of what you say will be to harm yourself. Be careful.’ Then he walked away. So I thought, ‘Fuck it. I’m done. I won’t have anything to do with it.’ I arranged my new assignment not too long afterward.”

Two years later my friend and colleague Ryan, who had replaced me in Point Zero, sought me out. He was leaving CTC and the Agency, moving on to a different part of the government. I had not seen Ryan for over a year. This was to be a parting. We went for coffee in the Headquarters’ cafeteria.

“Glenn, I know you had major differences with CTC about the CAPTUS case. I know your views. I’m out of here. I wanted to tell you something before I left. When I went out to Point Zero to take your place, Wilmington and the office gave me one order: ‘Keep the case going. Do whatever you need to do, but keep the CAPTUS case going.’”

“I know.”

“But there is something else I wanted you to know. You were right. You were right, Glenn. You got the case right. I came to see that. I wanted you to know. That is something to take with you. That is not something one can say in here, really; it undoes the whole fucking thing. But I wanted you to know I respected you for what you were doing. It took courage.”

I have not seen Ryan since.

A little more than three years after CAPTUS’s rendition, I came out of one of DCI Tenet’s daily five o’clock meetings, the most senior operational and substantive meeting in the Intelligence Community on the conduct of the Global War on Terror. Mark Lowenthal, the ADCI—the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production—had also attended and we walked together down the carpeted hall of the Seventh Floor, where the CIA’s most senior officers had their offices. Mark was a friend whose candor, judgment, and wit I particularly enjoyed. One of the subjects of discussion at the meeting had been what the White House wanted to do about the detainees we were holding in various locations around the world. This was most definitely a White House issue, not a CIA one. As always, there had been no resolution. I knew, however, that in particular Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith was one of the main obstacles to resolving the problem. In a series of meetings held to resolve the detainee problem, Feith regularly became incensed at the positions of various elements of the government, notably the State Department, which urged that Guantanamo and our various detainee sites be closed, and most of the detainees liberated or tried. Almost incoherent with anger, he accused the representatives of the other agencies of asserting that the administration had broken the law with its policies toward detainees. “Are you accusing us of breaking the law? We did not break the law! We did not break the law!” he would shout over and over, furious. He invariably paralyzed the meetings. Feith was widely viewed among my colleagues as a dangerous zealot, who inhabited a world of his imagining. But in these meetings he was a guilty queen: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

I told Mark that I had handled one of the HVT cases. I told him—I could speak frankly to Mark—that I thought we had, in effect, gotten everything wrong, despite all our efforts, that we had been acting on delusions, and that I was deeply concerned about it all. More important than that, though, was what happened after that, and to all of the detainees, at least the HVTs.

“These guys are kept in abominable conditions. XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX. They don’t exist anymore. What is this? We can’t do that. The White House can’t just keep these guys forever.”

“I know,” Mark agreed, frustrated, resigned. “But they don’t know what to do with them. The White House doesn’t know what to do with them.”

From what I could tell, the administration both did not care about holding our detainees without habeas corpus forever, and did not want to acknowledge what, based on their vehement and ruthless infighting in the government, even they knew was criminal policy. If the “torture memos”1 were found to be illegal and were rejected, then the policy’s architects were as guilty of subverting the law and our process of government as a detainee was naked at rendition.

As an HVT, the CAPTUS case had been particularly tightly held. To my surprise, also in 2006, the case leaked to the media. I know the FBI investigated how this had happened, but I believe they never found out. For the record, I did not leak the CAPTUS case, or any other bit of information, to anyone, at any time, ever. I do not know how CAPTUS leaked.

In 2007, I retired from the Agency after nearly twenty-three years as a case officer. The CAPTUS case was my last significant operational assignment. I served my last years after the CAPTUS case as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, a senior, but non-operational assignment.

In 2008, I chatted with a former colleague. As old-timers do, we shared war stories. He had worked CAPTUS, too. He mentioned to me, to my real dismay, XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXX .2

“Collateral damage,” Wilmington and others might say.

“What a poor bastard,” my security officer would say.

In 2009, while lining up “Beltway Bandit” contract work with the Agency, I needed to renew my security clearance. The Agency’s Office of Security declined to renew it, the legacy of the disastrous phase that was capped by my having forgotten my bag.

Finally, not long ago, I learned that CAPTUS had been, at last, released.

1 The “torture memos” were written by John Yoo, a political appointee in the Justice Department, to provide legal cover for the administration to authorize the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques. It was the central one of these memos that Wilmington cited to me as authorization for my interrogation of CAPTUS.

2 The redacted clause describes the evolution of the CAPTUS case.