But the Lord came down to see the city
and the tower the people were building.
The Lord said,
“If as one people speaking the same language
they have begun to do this,
then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language
so they will not understand each other.”
—Genesis 11:5–7
When I was little, a singsong Sunday school teacher taught me the Old Testament wrath of God. I followed along in my illustrated children’s Bible, poring over brightly colored pages of flood and fire and destruction. The men of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon once hatched a plan to build a tower tall enough to climb into heaven and verify the existence of the Lord, who was so threatened by the project that He brought their tower down, first by fire and then by earthquake. Anyone who laid eyes on the ruins went mute. God was exasperated: He had destroyed His creation only a few generations earlier with a great flood, but here they were, still rebellious and ambitious, collaborating with one another on a tower of doubt. So He smashed apart their ability to speak in one language, turning them against one another for eternity.
And that’s why people speak different languages, cooed the Sunday school teacher.
Only a few chapters later, the Lord was planning new ruin, this time upon the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Abraham pleaded with God for their salvation: If He found fifty righteous people there, would He spare the cities? When God accepted, Abraham asked if the cities might be saved for forty-five righteous souls. Down and down he haggled with the Lord, until they settled: if ten righteous souls could be found, the cities would be saved.
The illustration in my Bible of the destruction that ensued terrified my young eyes: a rain of burning sulfur, immolating bodies and burning vegetation, ruin rising from the land like smoke from a furnace. Had the Lord found only nine righteous souls, I wondered?
After the Blackwater mercenaries were burned in Fallujah, I remember reading outraged bloggers calling upon American leaders to lay waste to the city as though it were Sodom or Gomorrah. As I rode through its ruins, there was little I could say to the kids other than to stay away from our Humvee; seven years of Arabic studies, and all I could do was to stare silently at them with the nervous hope that they weren’t hiding grenades.
I still wonder whether Abraham might have talked God into sparing the cities to save just one or two righteous souls. The number that they agreed on, ten, reflects a legal maxim that is better known as Blackstone’s formulation: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. Maimonides called it the 290th Negative Commandment, saying, “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way.” During the Salem witch trials, Increase Mather declared, “It were better that ten suspected Witches should escape, than one innocent Person be Condemned.”
Benjamin Franklin so fervently believed in the principle that he set the ratio at a hundred to one. The Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked Blackstone to support its interpretation that the due process clause of the Constitution requires prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
That we should not reduce our principles to rubble as we size up evil in the world is a notion as old as the Bible. Shortly after 9/11, though, legal theorist Alan Dershowitz suggested that America found itself in a new, unprecedented era. To him and many others, the advent of terrorism meant “the calculus may have changed.”
As I cleared the fateful correspondence between Omar and the State Department from my kitchen table, it occurred to me that the calculus of Blackstone has not simply changed, it has been inverted: the US government would rather leave behind one hundred innocent people like Omar to face assassination than to admit one potentially guilty man. An Iraqi interpreter must prove himself innocent beyond all bureaucratic doubt, however reasonable or unreasonable it may be.
I imagine that theorists like Dershowitz would argue that Blackstone’s formulation wouldn’t apply, since Omar wasn’t an American citizen. But Omar was beheaded for aiding the United States. Skeptics might also suggest that his death was an anomaly, but it is painfully evident that many more have been killed. While no comprehensive list exists of slain and injured US-affiliated Iraqis, a partial account was leaked to me in 2008 by a sympathetic employee of Titan, the contractor that employed Hayder and Zina and thousands of interpreters under a $4.6 billion contract with the Defense Department. Over 679 rows, the database—meant to track potential insurance obligations—tracks the fate of hundreds of Iraqi interpreters:
• Death caused by multiple injuries sustained during torture
• Death due to booby-trapped house
• Gunshot wound jaw
• Gun shot wounds to the face and hip
• Shrapnel in the eye and lost a couple of teeth
• Kidnapped and death
• 1 round in Rt Thigh, 1 Round in the upper Rt thigh, 1 Round in the Scrotum
• Shockwave caused collapsed lung
• Extreme damage to the RLQ of abdomen and right thigh with apparent exsanguination (total loss of blood in the body)
• Loss of right leg above the knee and 3 fingers missing on the left hand. Possible loss of remaining leg.
The Titan database records 280 deaths over just the first few years of the war, but tens of thousands of Iraqis worked for other American contractors, so the true number is likely an order of magnitude greater. I have yet to meet an Iraqi interpreter who can’t rattle off the names of several slain colleagues. If George Bush or Barack Obama had been willing to exercise leadership, many of them would have been saved, but instead the bureaucracies under each president’s control continue to regard these friends as potential enemies. They do this, they say, to protect us against terrorists, who hate us for our values.
In 2007, soon after the founding of the List Project, I flew to Geneva to attend the first UN summit on the Iraqi refugee crisis. After checking into a small hotel in the village of Chambesy, on the outskirts of the city, I logged into my email to find an urgent message from a state.gov address. Its sender was a foreign service officer who said that he needed to meet with me that night. I brushed him off, giving him my phone number but declining a meeting.
My phone rang immediately. He was insistent that we meet, saying that he couldn’t communicate what he needed to over the phone. “I served in Iraq,” he said, as if to give me a clue. He asked where I was staying.
“Okay, listen, if you walk toward the train station which heads into Geneva, there’s a footbridge. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”
“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled.
“Okay, I’m gonna head out now. Go over to that bridge and wait beneath it. I’ll be driving a dark sedan.”
“How will I know you?” I asked flatly.
“Oh, look for the sedan with a license plate ending in a nine.”
I waited by the bridge in the quiet still of early evening, studying license plates, wonder what could possibly require such cloak-and-dagger measures. I wondered why I had agreed to meet. The sedan finally approached. As I walked toward it, the passenger-side window slid down and club music pumped out into the sleepy lanes of Chambesy. “Kirk! Hop in!”
He drove us away from Geneva, making small talk but not yet explaining why he needed to meet me so urgently. After about a half hour, the sedan eased into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. I got out of the car warily and followed him inside.
We were ushered to a table, but as soon as I sat down, he wandered off. I watched as he worked his way around the restaurant, looking at the faces of the other diners. When he returned, I snapped at him.
“C’mon, what’s the point of all this?”
He sat across the table from me, leaned in, and said, “I was just checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone I recognized.”
“Why?”
“You kidding? My bosses aren’t very happy with you right now.” He removed a folded slip of paper from his pocket and, adding to my exasperation over the faux-spy antics, placed it on the Lazy Susan in the middle of our table and rotated it toward me. I unfolded the paper and read the names of two Iraqis working for the embassy, both of whom had already been referred to me by another worried foreign service officer.
“They’re already on the list,” I said impatiently. “Can we go back now?” I didn’t have much of an appetite.
“Oh, thank God,” he sighed. “Are they going to be okay?”
A good man, going to absurd lengths to conceal an impulse to do the right thing.
This was not an isolated experience. It came in many shapes but was instantly recognizable, in the dingy Irish pubs in Washington with bureaucrats who were nervous to be spotted with me, in the worried emails from dummy accounts, in the knowing glances from the backbench during meetings with front-bench officials: insiders aware that the United States of America wasn’t doing enough but patrolling the volume of their outrage nonetheless. Had I still been working for USAID, had I not fallen from the window, I imagine I might have done the same. Instead, in the government’s new formulation of what constitutes a danger, I was one.
Seven years ago, a militant in Baghdad severed the head of a dog and lobbed it into Yaghdan’s yard, the first link in an endless chain of events. In the years that have passed since I wrote that op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, the end of the List Project has become unknowable. Throughout each of those years, I tried to break the chain, writing pieces, testifying, recruiting lawyers, lugging binders to the State Department. But the Iraqis kept writing, and the bureaucracy kept stalling.
The eight firms and hundreds of attorneys representing those on my list constitute, to my knowledge, the single largest pro bono effort on behalf of refugees in US history. In 2012, Chris Nugent, the attorney at Holland and Knight whose relentless advocacy saved hundreds of Iraqis, including Yaghdan, was stricken with multiple sclerosis. He can no longer practice law, but the results of his work continue to be felt. My Iraqi team—Tona, Amina, and Basma—still burn the phone lines each day to guide others through the process. Marcia Maack, the pro bono coordinator at Mayer Brown, continues to train new lawyers and wrestle against the government, managing scores of cases for the List Project. Since Yaghdan and Haifa’s arrival in August 2007, more than 1,500 Iraqis on the list have made it through the gauntlet of the resettlement bureaucracy and now live in America.
While the List Project achieved far more than I ever imagined, I seem capable of focusing only on the Iraqis we left behind. The List Project continues to receive a steady stream of applications from those who remain in great danger in the new Iraq. A few weeks after the end of the war, a young man on my list received a jar of sulfuric acid from a militia, which ordered him to leave before he was bathed in acid. An Iraqi in Ramadi received a knock on his door and found a policeman who told him he had forty-eight hours to flee or else he would be assassinated. Others have been abducted and killed.
But my prediction of a Basrah-style public execution of our Iraqi allies was incorrect. Instead, the number of assassinations climbs in tiny increments—a decapitated man here and there—with never enough of a “signature” to summon outrage in Washington or the attention of the few remaining journalists in Iraq.
The Special Immigrant Visa program established by Senator Kennedy’s Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act is scheduled to expire in 2013. Nearly eighteen thousand slots remain unused. In February 2013, toward the end of a lengthy discussion with a recently retired senior Obama administration official who was involved in refugee affairs, I laid out the statistics and asked how he felt history would judge the United States on this dimension of the war. He sighed before saying, “Look, what do you want me to say? In terms of protecting Iraqis who stepped forward to help us, I think we did a crappy job. You’d have to put your head in the sand to say otherwise.”
Afghan interpreters, many of whom have written to me for help, appear even worse off than the Iraqis. Although 1,500 Special Immigrant Visas were designated for Afghans each year, the State Department took nearly two years to “ramp up” its program. No sooner had it become operational than Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador in Kabul at the time, sent a February 2010 cable asking the State Department to kill the program: “This act could drain this country of our very best civilian and military partners: our Afghan employees . . . if we are not careful, the SIV program will have a significant deleterious impact on staffing and morale . . . local staff are not easily replenished in a society at 28 percent literacy.” He proposed tightening the language of the legislation so that visas were issued only “in those rare instances where there is clear and convincing evidence of a serious threat.” The impact of the cable was immediate and lasting: with our withdrawal from Afghanistan looming, the average number of Afghan interpreters receiving visas each month is four. The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 is also set to expire with thousands of unused slots.
As the List Project struggled with successive administrations, it was impossible for me to evaluate our progress without considering the success of another organization that was launched around the same time. Operation Baghdad Pups, an initiative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded to resettle Iraqi dogs that had befriended our troops. Their website had a flashy banner proclaiming “No Buddy Gets Left Behind! . . . Abandoning Charlie in the war-ravaged country would have meant certain death for him.” In exchange for a $1,000 donation, the group would cut through the US government’s red tape in order to bring these pets to “freedom” in less than six months. Airlines donated free travel for the dogs. Crowds gathered at the airport, crying with joy when the animals arrived.
Mouayyad, Hayder’s best friend, who drove only American cars and dreamed of one day coming to America, was still struggling to make it through the visa application process as 2013 arrived. After years of waiting, he read an article in the Army Times about “Smoke,” a cigarette-eating Iraqi donkey from Anbar Province that had befriended the marines during their deployment. Marine colonel John Folsom told the reporter, “It didn’t seem right that Smoke was left behind,” so he and Operation Baghdad Pups raised $40,000 over thirty-seven days to evacuate the donkey to Omaha, Nebraska. In July 2012 CNN reported that nearly all of the $27 million donated by Americans to help Iraqi dogs (nearly fourteen times the amount the List Project was able to raise over the years) was used on direct-mail campaigns to raise more funds.
On January 2, 2013, President Obama signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which included an amendment to grant dogs working for the US military the status of “Canine Members of the Armed Forces.” Animal rights groups and major media outlets ran a series of articles describing a troubling situation: these dogs were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and were struggling to get treatment.
When I heard a woman call into a radio program on PTSD to declare that she had developed it after watching too many episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television, I realized that the stigma surrounding the disorder had evaporated. If dogs were now susceptible, why not the TV-viewing public? In 2011, senior Pentagon officials even launched a campaign to drop the D for disorder from the diagnosis, rendering it simply post-traumatic stress. “This is a normal reaction to a very serious set of events in their life,” said Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, the army’s surgeon general.
The nightmares that patrolled my sleep in the year after the fall have departed, but my flesh and bones offer up daily reminders of the accident. My left wrist makes a snapping sound when I twist it, and I sometimes nick my chin when shaving because the nerve endings around the scars are dead. Whenever I bite into an apple, I wonder if my front teeth—cracked little tombstones that grow duskier each year—will finally break.
But although the accident and the ensuing trauma have become memories, I have given up on the tidy idea of “closure” and the expectation that the Iraq chapter of my life will one day close. A full quarter of my life has been tossed into the abyss of that war, and even though it’s over, I don’t know how to keep that quarter from becoming a third. When I go to dinner parties, I try my best not to say the words Iraq or refugees but usually fail, and feel embarrassed later for what seems like my impoliteness. When I get home, I find more emails from refugees throughout the world, pleading for visas. Those who have made it to America write and call every few days with new requests: a cousin just received a death threat, a brother is looking for work, a daughter is applying to college, a family needs money for rent. Could I help?
The time may come when all the tiny cracks in what remains of my idealism will combine to shatter it to bits. I’ll stop telling myself that next year will be the year the administration finally wakes up. Or that the same story won’t repeat itself as we withdraw from Afghanistan. I’ll stop believing in the power of a perfectly worded op-ed or that legislation and the intent of Congress still mean something. Or that bureaucracies shouldn’t be allowed to wield the moral compass of the nation.
I’ll leave the State Department alone. I’ll get a steady job and stop responding to Iraqis. I’ll sleep through the night and stop grinding down my teeth. I’ll stop talking about wars nobody remembers. I’ll click and post and retweet my outrage and feel content.
But until then, I’ll wonder: Is it too much to hope that the government creates an assistant secretary of state for protecting local allies, with equivalent secretaryships at Defense and Homeland Security? Is it so far-fetched to imagine appointing someone to start building a list on the first morning of the next war? Is it too naïve to propose that all future war authorizations be coupled with a minimum number of visa slots for those who step forward to help? Ten thousand per year?
Until then, the List Project will carry on. In the spring of 2013, I initiated talks with an Afghan woman to join the organization on a part-time basis to begin compiling a list of US-affiliated Afghans. Maybe the president will help them before it’s too late.
On the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Yaghdan and Haifa had their first child, a boy named Ali. Their son arrived two months premature and weighed less than four pounds, but he was born a citizen of the United States. For the first eight weeks of his life, Haifa and Yaghdan could only visit him in the intensive care ward of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Illinois, where a tiny feeding tube ran into his right nostril. I flew home and stood over his little hospital bed with his parents, who told me that Ali never would have lived had he been born in Baghdad so prematurely.
But Ali survived the challenges of his first weeks of life and grew quickly. A year later, Yaghdan graduated from DeVry University’s Keller School of Management with a degree in accounting. We all gathered at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago to attend the fourth Johnson brother’s commencement, crying and roaring with applause as he strode across the stage.
On October 19, 2012, almost six years to the day after receiving the death threat, Yaghdan and Haifa swore the oath of allegiance and became citizens of the United States of America. Ali looked on with large black eyes.
Zina, Tara, and their mother are thriving in Virginia. The sisters both work as translators for the State Department, interpreting for visiting dignitaries from the Middle East. Their father died in December 2012, but they were unable to return to Basrah for the burial.
Hayder, Dina, and Ali moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where Hayder took a job in a carpet factory. Then he found a job as a food prep at Isaac’s Mediterranean Restaurant on Memorial Avenue. His boss used to bring over other employees and say, “Look, he works harder than you, and he’s only got one leg!” Before long, he was put on the cook line, where his coworkers asked him questions such as “Why did America go over to Iraq again?” “What was it like getting shot?”
By the end of 2012, many Iraqis who had been resettled through the List Project began calling me to excitedly announce their new citizenship as Americans. Zina, Tara, Hayder, Dina, Ali, and hundreds more will take the oath in 2013.
Was this whole war in Iraq worth it? Me and you will say no, but the politicians will say it was worth it.
I always look back at that first day, when the 101st rolled into Baghdad. I ask myself why they didn’t do this. Or if they did this, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. Or why did I step forward? I ask myself these questions, but I always get the same answer: somebody had to do it.
Look, when I jumped in that day, I didn’t look at him as a soldier or as an American, I looked at him as a human. And if I saw an accident on the street over here, I would do the same thing, I wouldn’t hesitate. Although they tell me over here, I shouldn’t because maybe he’d file a lawsuit against me. But I don’t care, I’m gonna help, no matter what the law says.
To be honest with you, sometimes I drink at night to get over this stuff. I drink. Sometimes I remember, like flashbacks. And you know, these memories, although they hurt, they give me hope for the future. Because after they took my leg, a second part of my life began. “I have to reach America. I have to get out of Iraq and start my life all over again.” Doesn’t matter with one leg, with two legs.
Look, I love Iraq to death. I love America to death. If something happened here, I would stand up to help just as I did over there. But if I was born in America, I wouldn’t have the feelings I have today.
My son sounds like a Turk when he speaks Arabic. It’s funny! He is still too young to understand what happened to us. He sometimes doesn’t even know that he’s an Iraqi. Once, my neighbor asked him where he was born, and he said Jordan. I said, “No, you’re not a Jordanian, you’re Iraqi!” In school they asked him where Iraq is, and he said California. I asked him why he thought it was there, and he said, “Well, I heard all the Iraqis live there.” In the future, he’ll learn a few words of Arabic. But he’ll maintain an American life more than an Iraqi life. Dina and I try a lot, but we can’t change his life. I don’t mind if he marries a white girl. We know Ali, though, he’s gonna be a player for a long time! It’s in the genes.
I don’t make enough money to afford health care yet. I need a new leg, but you know how much they cost? Forty thousand dollars! I need a new silicone sleeve that helps connect my flesh to the leg, too. You’re supposed to get a new one every six months, but they’re eighteen hundred dollars, so I’ve just been wearing the same one for three years. It has some holes in it, and it’s a little painful sometimes, but it’s okay. These aren’t real problems.
I’m not looking for great wealth. I just wanted to show that all Iraqis are not terrorists. Muslim people are not terrorists. Most people think the same way when you talk to them. I am a human being. I have the right to live on this earth. I have the right to work. I like to try to fix what is wrong.
But there are some issues that are out of our hands, because they’re in the hands of people more powerful than we are. I’m just a little person, sitting in Roanoke, thinking about my future for me and my family.