32

November, 2010

Rarely in government work did the results of one’s efforts stare back at you. But there it was, on the wall opposite Stuart in the DC metro:

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING!

Accompanying the admonition was a photograph of a man and a woman, concern written across their faces, talking to and being reassured by an authority, a uniformed police woman taking notes.

After 9/11, when he’d been appointed, along with many others, to work on programs to prevent terrorist acts, Stuart and his team had traveled to London on a fact-finding mission. They’d hoped to mirror Britain’s public awareness efforts, one of which centered on the slogan, If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear. When they’d initially designed the American poster, it gave Stuart comfort. But not anymore.

The team decided the American people needed to be proactive, not reactive. Take action. The informal informant, Stuart thought. The slogan had a ring to it, like The Quiet American, suitable for a sophisticated Broadway play. He was proud to have gotten the cooperation of state and local politicians, law enforcement, first responders, and others in power to buy into the signage program—even though it had more symbolic value than security value. But that was the point. He felt it was the government’s duty to reassure people something was being done. The signage program gave every citizen a role to play in the security of the country.

Identifying and tracking a few hundred bad guys among a population of three hundred and thirty million was the seminal challenge of the Office of National Intelligence, officially abridged to ONI, and spoken as One-Eye. His campaign of citizen involvement was a modest part of the overall mission. It was something he understood. The task of building a detention center for Guantanamo prisoners was also something he understood. The project had a clear mission, a beginning date and a completion date. His prior work pre-screening sites for future government detention facilities had definition and purpose. But the mushrooming ONI had made Stuart skeptical. He couldn’t wrap his head around developing legal surveillance programs for the entire country. It all began to feel eerily totalitarian. One-Eye was taking things too far. The unintended consequences could be legion.

Conducting surveillance on every individual, so that every individual believed they were under surveillance went against everything he believed. Whether intended or not, that had become the goal of One-Eye. Whether intended or not, the most important objective had become to incite every person to mistrust every other person, so that everyone had no choice but to bow to the will of the state as protector. That was textbook tyranny, and he wanted no part of that slippery slope. He stopped himself from shaking his head in frustration. This was America, dammit. One-Eye could easily turn the land of the free and home of the brave into just another totalitarian country, a country too much like those places around the world America was trying to turn into democracies.

The doors whooshed closed behind him and the Metro car began to move. Stuart wrapped his hand around a pole to steady himself and studied his fellow commuters. He wondered what all of them thought of the poster. If they saw something, would they say something? Would they willingly go along? Some passengers read newspapers. Some gazed absently out the windows. Some had noses in books, others had their eyes glued to smart phones, earphones dangling. He wanted to shout: Are you paying attention? Do you understand the threat? Did you even bother to vote?

The train slowed to a stop, and as he exited along with the throng, he glanced at the security camera in the corner and wondered who was watching. At street level, he bee-lined to the Starbucks and ordered a regular coffee.

Among the crowds, he walked the several blocks to his office. How many of the people he passed thought about 9/11, about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, the plane that, destined for the Capitol, was taken down tragically—and heroically—in Pennsylvania? Did they think about the billowing smoke that enveloped the whole of southern Manhattan as the towers fell? Did it occur to them daily, weekly, or at all? Or had the cataclysmic event simply disappeared from the collective consciousness? Hell, he thought, half the country didn’t even know the names of their elected representatives in Congress.

Throwing his empty coffee cup into the trash, he waded through the security line at the DHS building’s entrance and made his way to his office. He punched the answering machine. The first voice mail was from David Sugarman. While listening, he scrolled through his email to the one from Sugarman explaining his voice mail. He dialed Sugarman’s extension.

Now that Sugarman had a handle on where the new detention facility would be built, DHS, cooperating with Defense, FBI, One-Eye, and about two dozen other government entities, had to figure out who was going to be repatriated and who was going to be incarcerated.

“Morning, Shug.”

Sugarman cut to the chase. “Stuart, this menagerie we’ve got at Gitmo . . . I keep going back over the files and it looks like most of the detainees were clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time, swept up during operations not well-documented or not documented at all. But we have to get past that.”

“To paraphrase Rumsfeld, we have to build a prison with the prisoners we’ve got, not the ones we wish we had.”

“It’s a nightmare.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“Have you gone through my report?”

Stuart looked at the folder on his desk. “I’ve got it right here. I’ll try to get to it this week.”

“Bottom line is, early on, we seemed to have picked up transients and random criminals, to say nothing of the isolated persons of interest from other far-flung countries. Some are probably stateless, maybe petty criminals, and a few appear to be victims of human trafficking.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Stuart remembered learning that early on in the War on Terror, the CIA paid bucket loads of cash for leads to possible terrorist suspects in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now those buckets were actual human beings locked in geopolitical hell.

“I wish someone would admit,” Sugarman said, “that we were duped by some pretty unsavory players into taking prisoners their governments didn’t want. Or, they were part of clandestine operations that we’ll never have the intel to sort out.”

“Well, how we got them isn’t our responsibility, “Stuart said. “What happens to them next is our business. We know the few really bad guys are, of course, going nowhere. We have to deal with them. And, as I understand it, all extradition options have been exhausted for the rest of them. So they’re our problem, too.”

The ethical and moral morass was an unintended consequence, Stuart thought. Focusing on it this early in the morning was already giving him heartburn. The only consolation he could find in the entire fiasco was that the majority of the detainees would be treated more humanely in America than anywhere else, as long as they could be reclassified and no longer considered enemy combatants.

Sugarman went on. “And, there’s the whole question of holding trials for the ones we know are bad actors. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that so many people went apeshit when it was even hinted that Gitmo terrorists would be given the privilege of a fair trial.”

“I know, Shug, but that question is outside our scope,” Stuart said. “Our job is conveyance, not closure.”

“But what do you think is going to happen to them? Once they’re on American soil, then what?”

“Hell, I don’t know, we give them forty acres and a mule?” Stuart’s voice betrayed his exasperation. “It’s all above our pay grade. Our next task is simply to figure out who should come here first.”

“Seriously, Stuart, some of these individuals predate 9/11 by decades, you know; some predate the modern American definition of terrorist. We’ve got rogue trades with other countries from clandestine programs the FBI and CIA officially iced decades ago.”

This was new to Stuart. “What do you mean ‘officially’?”

“Shit, man, remember the Red Army?”

“The Red Army? Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. And we’ve got one poor slob down there with an FBI file dating back to the early 1960s.”

“Good God. What’s he being held for?”

“I don’t have a clue. There are more gaps in his file than a ten-year-old’s teeth. Best I can discern, there’s some vague connection with the South Lebanese Army and the Mossad in the ’70s, an even more vague link to the CIA when they were stirring up trouble in Syria before the ’73 War with Israel. He ended up in our hands during that brief thaw in relations with Assad’s son, you know, right after 9/11? Even Bashir expressed a modicum of sympathy about the attack on our homeland.”

“Right, we needed their help at the Syrian-Iraq border.” Stuart paused. “Did you say his file goes back to the sixties?”

“With sizeable gaps. Read it for yourself. A summary of each detainee’s profile is in my report. Hey. Listen, I’ve gotta go. Let’s circle back on this in a few days.”

Stuart hung up and leaned back in his chair. An FBI file that dated to the early 1960s? Was Sugarman kidding? Stuart had read as much as he could about the Gitmo prisoners. Most of the information was classified, but enough had leaked out, reports from civil rights lawyers, investigative journalist accounts, and official government records that he thought he had a decent profile of the average detainee. Nothing suggested anyone with that much history. He stared at Sugarman’s report on his desk. He’d get to it this afternoon. Or tomorrow. First he had to survive a weekly departmental meeting.

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Just when Stuart didn’t think he could stand one more PowerPoint slide, his phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at caller ID. John Veranda. He declined the call and started to slip the phone back in his pocket when it buzzed again. Then a text message appeared: Pick up!

Stuart excused himself and went into the hallway. He dialed the number and John picked up before the ring was done. He was not his usual good-ole-boy self.

“John, I’ve asked you not to call me on my work phone.”

“You got your personal cell?”

“It’s in my office. I’m in a meeting.”

“You’ll find about a dozen calls from me on your personal number. If your meeting isn’t life or death, make up some excuse, go outside, and call me back.”

“I can’t talk about the project—“

“This has nothing to do with that. Just do it. This is no joke. You got five minutes and I’m counting. Now.”

Before he could respond, John hung up. Stuart slipped back into the meeting and signaled to his assistant that he was stepping out for awhile. Then he stopped by his office, picked up his personal phone, and headed out the door.

When Stuart passed the security checkpoint and opened the door into the fresh autumn air, he realized it had been too long since he’d been outside his office building at this hour, or even on his lunch hour. He made a mental note to change that, to give himself a break during the day. The atmosphere inside that building was more stifling than the bureaucracy it contained.

He wasn’t even twenty feet from the building when his cell rang.

“What’s the emergency?”

“Stuart, I need a favor. A big one. But first, you owe me after making me the laughingstock of my own town with your confidentiality bullshit.”

“John, you’re exaggerating. We didn’t breach confidentiality. And, I can vouch for Sugarman.”

“Someone in your shop gave up the goods. I don’t know who and I don’t care. And Sugarman’s an A-1 asshole, Stuart, but all that’s off topic.”

“He can be a little brusque, but I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I damn well do feel that way. Look, I’m giving up my land, my dream, for your detention facility. And from what Sugarman implied, you’ll probably be seeking federal eminent domain over the land my family and I live on.”

“That is nowhere near a certainty.”

“Not only is not a near certainty, I’ll take you to hell and back before you kick my mother out of her house. Unless—”

There was a pause. “Ok. I’m listening.”

“Well, you damn well better be. Here’s the deal, I want you to use every ounce of your bureaucratic authority to find information on a man who disappeared in 1973.”

“1973? You want me to dig through an information trail that went cold thirty-five years ago? This isn’t the movies. I can’t hack into police files to ferret out some missing person.”

“Don’t fucking patronize me, Stuart. This isn’t a regular missing persons case. I need information on an individual by the name of Elias Haddad. He emigrated to this country from Syria in 1962 or thereabouts, settled in Joliet, IL, and disappeared in 1973 during a trip back to Syria to visit his dying father. He hasn’t been heard from since.”

Stuart froze. Haddad. Had dad. The woman in Cairo. Could it be? No. It was impossible. For a moment, he couldn’t find his voice.

“Look, you sonofabitch,” John went on, “my home town medical center might just become your detention facility for the world’s most hardened terrorists. Do this for me. This request is about trying to save one person. It’s about you being a human being, not a fucking bureaucrat. Make a difference in one person’s life. Not the whole world. Not the entire country. Hell, not even the town of Saluki. Just. One. Person. Dig down into that bureaucratic heart of yours and make a difference in one life, not three hundred million.”

Stuart hesitated for a moment. “One person, John?”

“One, Stuart.”

Holly Chicago. That was her name. Stuart took in a deep breath. Joliet. Cairo. Her hair. Her gun. Had dad. “I’ll see what I can do.”