500 Days (62 page)

But the most important topic of discussion was al-Qahtani. The lawyers knew that the interrogation of the man thought to be the twentieth hijacker had begun and were eager to learn details of its progress.

“What do we know about this guy?” Addington asked. “Have we gotten anything out of him?”

Not much. Since the military questioning had begun, Qahtani had been unshakable in his resistance; one of the interviewers was a former member of the Jordanian military, but even his knowledge of both Arabic and aggressive techniques wasn’t helping. The interrogations might proceed more quickly, Dunlavey said, if there weren’t so many constraints on what his teams were permitted to do.

“We’d like to be able to take the Koran away from some detainees, and hold it as an incentive,” Dunlavey said. The request had been sent up the line to SOUTHCOM, he said, but no one had signed off on it.

SOUTHCOM approval might not be necessary, Haynes said. “You should have the authority in place to make those calls, per the president’s order,” he said.

After three hours, the tour ended and the entourage flew to the naval brig in Charleston, where Padilla was being held. From there, it was on to Norfolk to see Hamdi.

The group was brought to a room with a black-and-white, closed-circuit television that showed Hamdi’s cell. Jack Goldsmith, who had just taken the job as special counsel to Haynes at the Pentagon, felt uncomfortable as he watched the detainee. Something just seemed wrong.

This twenty-two-year-old American citizen, a foot soldier with the Taliban, was all alone, held in a tiny cell at a dingy prison. He had no access to a lawyer—indeed, almost no contact with any other human being.

Goldsmith had no doubt that Hamdi was being held legally. But, as he looked at this stupefied, pathetic man, Goldsmith was struck by the realization that law wasn’t the point. The administration’s legalistic frame of mind gave short shrift to prudence. Officials had spent plenty of time determining that the rules allowed them to stuff Hamdi into a cell and leave him in isolation. They never stopped to question whether it was a smart thing to do.

•  •  •  

That same morning, Congressman Porter Goss picked up a gavel and pounded it once. It was the fifth day of public hearings—sponsored by the intelligence subcommittees of both the House and the Senate—into the events leading up to 9/11. Until now, no official had stepped forward to explain what the government knew before the attacks and whether they could have been stopped.

At the witness table sat two balding middle-aged men, both looking more like college professors than warriors. They were Cofer Black from the CIA and Dale Watson, a former top official with the FBI’s counterterrorism unit.

“Mr. Black, welcome,” Goss said, glancing up from his prepared statement. “The floor is yours, sir.”

Black folded his hands on the witness table.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I’d like to express my appreciation to you and to the committee for offering me a screen to protect my identity and to enhance my security. Good security is always a very good idea. And if this were normal circumstances, I would accept your offer.”

But, he said, the work of the committee was too important for him to be a
voice behind a screen. “When I speak, I think the American people need to look into my face, and I want to look the American people in the eye.”

After expressing his deep horror over the murder of three thousand people, Black described the realities of his former unit’s work. The CIA
had
provided the administration with warnings of an impending attack, he said, but could not specify the time and place. And that intelligence was obtained despite enormous challenges imposed by Washington.

“You need to appreciate fully three factors,” he said. “There were choices made for us. These choices were made for the Central Intelligence Agency and they were made for the Counterterrorism Center. These involved numbers of people, money, and operational flexibility.”

As cloak-and-dagger as the word
counterterrorism
might sound, his former unit spent a lot of time in mundane—and often unsuccessful—battles against Washington bureaucracy. His people were shortchanged on every side, Black said. The center struggled with constant shortages of cash, forcing a shutdown of some efforts to combat terrorists. The staff was small, given its responsibilities. There were 25 percent fewer covert officers in 1999 than nine years before.

Despite their success in navigating through those challenges, they were impeded when it came time for action. Politicians fearful that someone—even bin Laden—would be killed had derailed plenty of operational plans. There had been proposals to aid Afghanis in an attack on the al-Qaeda leader, to assassinate him, to use an armed Predator, to grab him when he was in Sudan—all of them thwarted. By the late 1990s, they were told that they had the authority to capture bin Laden, but no one would approve actually doing it. What were they supposed to do if they couldn’t kill him or snatch him? Curse at him?

Now, with three thousand people slaughtered, the politicians
got
it. There was no more hand-wringing about whether to strike or what weapons to use. The policy was simple: Destroy al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

Black wanted to discuss everything that had since been green-lighted, but most of it remained classified. He could only hint at the magnitude of the problems caused by skittishness among policy makers—and their recent conversion to born-again belligerence in the war on terror.

“This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11,” he said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off. Nearly three thousand al-Qaeda and their supporters
have been arrested or detained. In Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda who refused to surrender have been killed. The hunt is on.”

Good.
Black had made his point. Sharp, succinct, clear, and without revealing any classified information. Perhaps now, he thought, the public would understand how counterterrorism had been mismanaged—out of neglect and cowardice—and the horrific impact of those mistakes.

It was not to be. Instead, Black learned the danger of speaking in metaphor. Reporters and politicians eventually seized on the “gloves came off” comment as proof that there was a policy to inflict brutal treatment on detainees. He could only shake his head—he wasn’t even
working
with the counterterrorism unit when the decisions were made about waterboarding and other harsh tactics. Did these people really believe he would appear on television, casually disclosing classified programs? Particularly those created after he left the unit? Critics were infusing his clichés with meanings that weren’t there.

It all went to reinforce Black’s long-held opinions: He despised politicians—and hated reporters even more.

•  •  •  

Staff Sergeant Patrick Callaghan of the Mounties’ AO Canada unit received a call that afternoon from the FBI’s legal attaché’s office in Ottawa.

Maher Arar, a target of ongoing inquiries in both the United States and Canada, was due to arrive in New York on a flight from Zurich, the attaché said. Arar had gained the attention of Canadian officials when he was seen having lunch at an Ottawa restaurant called Mango’s Café with Abdullah Almalki, who had already been under investigation. The two men had been seen walking in the rain together—or at least, that’s how the filed reports described what had been in reality a light misting—and that raised suspicions among the Mounties that nefarious intrigue might be hatching.

In recent months, more information had turned up that reinforced those suspicions. Ahmad El-Maati, who had been stopped a year before at the Canadian border carrying a map of federal facilities in Ottawa, had been arrested by the Syrians and confessed to having been trained at al-Qaeda camps with Almalki and Arar. Then Almalki was also seized in Damascus, and he admitted knowing Arar. Those confessions—forwarded from a country notorious for unrelenting torture during interrogations—struck the Canadians as a powerful indictment of Arar’s intentions.

Now, with Arar’s expected arrival in New York, the investigators would have
their chance to confront him. The FBI official told Callaghan that the United States intended to deny Arar entry. If the Canadians had any questions to ask him, the official said, they should send them down in writing. The fax arrived at two o’clock.

•  •  •  

At that same time, American Airlines flight 65 from Zurich reached its gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Arar stood to gather his belongings and squeezed into the line of passengers jammed in the aisle. He had a few hours to kill on this layover before his connecting flight to Canada.

At immigration, the agent entered Arar’s information into the computer, then asked him to stand aside. Minutes later, officials escorted him to another part of the airport.

“Why am I being pulled aside?” he asked.

“Just regular procedure,” an agent responded.

Arar was fingerprinted and photographed. Airport police searched his bag and his wallet. When Arar asked for an explanation, no one replied. He requested to be allowed to place a phone call and was refused.

After two hours, officials from the Joint Terrorism Task Force—including investigators with the INS, the FBI, and the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit—showed up to question Arar.

“I’d like to contact a lawyer,” Arar said.

“No,” an FBI agent replied. “You’re not an American citizen. You have no right to a lawyer.”

The cross-examination lasted hours. The Americans asked Arar about his work, his income, and his travels in the United States. They pressed him for information about a trip he had taken recently to Japan. They fished for details about aspects of his life that were so private Arar assumed they had learned about them from the Canadian government.

The agent then asked if he knew Ahmad El-Maati, the man who, under torture in Syria, had identified Arar as an al-Qaeda member.

“Yes, I know him,” Arar responded. “But not well. I met him a couple of years ago at a garage in Montreal where I was getting my car fixed.”

And what about Abdullah Almalki?

“Yes, I know him,” Arar said. “But I know his brother better.”

The encounter grew increasingly heated. The agents bombarded Arar with rapid-fire questions and raged at him if he hesitated before replying. They
insulted him and accused him of having a selective memory. Arar couldn’t understand why they had become so abusive, or why they seemed to think he was lying.

Still, the interview didn’t produce enough new evidence, even with the information already in investigative files, to justify arresting Arar. All the United States could do was ship him out of the country. An INS inspector led him to an office, asked a few questions, and typed the answers into a Form I-275, a formal request for Arar to submit that would withdraw his application for admission into the United States. The agent printed the form and told Arar to sign it. The Syrian-born engineer had no idea what the document was but was too exhausted and too hungry to put up a fight. He scribbled his name on the signature line. Arar had unwittingly agreed to be sent back to Zurich on a flight the next afternoon. Until then, he would have to be detained.

At 1:00
A.M.
, federal marshals arrived. Arar was chained and shackled, then taken outside to a waiting van. They drove him to another building, a small jail at the airport, and locked him in a cell.

No one had yet told him what was going on.

•  •  •  

That evening in Washington, the INS commissioner, James Ziglar, called his chief of staff and other lawyers to a meeting in his office. He wanted to discuss what to do with Maher Arar.

Just a few hours had passed since Arar arrived at Kennedy, setting off a flood of phone calls between officials in New York and Washington. Word had circulated within the administration that this Canadian was a high-level al-Qaeda member, active in a terrorist cell plotting a new attack against the United States. The evidence was sketchy, little more than raw intelligence, but it was enough to put the White House on edge.

For Ziglar, the Arar issue had popped up at an unusual time. He was winding down a particularly troubled tenure as INS commissioner, vilified for his agency’s slipshod screening of foreign visitors to the United States—a reputation that was sealed when it sent visa approval papers to two of the 9/11 hijackers exactly six months after the attack. Ziglar, who had come to the job with no background in immigration law, would be leaving at the end of November. The decision of what to do with this suspected al-Qaeda member named Arar would be one of his last.

“All right,” he said, “so who is Maher Arar?”

One of the lawyers explained that Arar was a citizen of both Canada and
Syria, and had been the subject of investigations by authorities in Washington and Ottawa. When Arar flew in that day from Zurich, his name popped up during a routine screening through the Advance Passenger Information System, identifying him as a foreigner who was barred from the United States.

Given the criticism over the past year that the INS had been lax in confronting possible terrorists at the border, there was no question that Arar would be refused entry. The agency consulted officials from the Department of Homeland Security and all agreed that Arar had to be removed. Maybe to Canada or Switzerland. Or maybe, one official suggested, to Syria.

•  •  •  

Monia Mazigh, Arar’s wife, saw her husband standing in front of her, scowling. She asked him why he seemed angry, but he would not answer. She tried to approach him. He vanished.

She awoke. It had been a dream. She had stayed up as long as she could the night before, worried that something had happened to Arar. He hadn’t arrived home, he hadn’t called, and no one knew where he was. She had slept only two or three hours, but when she did doze off, the nightmares about the disappearance of her husband returned.

The tense circumstances were suffocating her. Arar’s business was struggling, and they had been forced to give up their rented house in Canada. She was now with her children in her native Tunisia, where the family had traveled for a much-needed holiday. However, this week, Arar had returned to Canada to handle some developments with his work.