Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  After succeeding in getting the PENS task force to endorse the continued involvement of psychologists in the interrogation program, congratulations were in order among the small number of behavioral scientists with connections to the national security community who had been part of the effort. In a July 2005 e-mail to Hubbard from Geoffrey Mumford (on which Gerwehr was copied), Mumford thanked Hubbard for helping to influence the outcome of the task force. “I also wanted to semi-publicly acknowledge your personal contribution . . . in getting this effort off the ground,” Mumford wrote. “Your views were well represented by very carefully selected task force members.” Mumford also noted that Susan Brandon had served as an “observer” at the PENS task force meetings and “helped craft some language related to research” for the task force report.

  At the time of the release of the task force report, Hubbard had just retired from the CIA to begin consulting for Mitchell and Jessen. “Now I do some consulting work for Mitchell and Jessen Associates,” Hubbard wrote in a mass e-mail to many of his friends and colleagues in June 2005.

  Hubbard tried to recruit Gerwehr to join him. In a May 2006 e-mail to Gerwehr, Hubbard told him there was an opening for a psychologist at Mitchell and Jessen’s firm, and that he would be the ideal candidate. “I have attached a position description in the event you know of someone who might fit the bill,” Hubbard wrote. “You would be perfect, but you probably wouldn’t want to relocate to Spokane! Obviously candidates cannot be extreme liberals as some psychologists seem to be.”

  Gerwehr was intrigued, even though he knew full well by then what the firm did. He responded that “I must say that does sound like a dream job that was tailor made for me! I would be very interested in discussing it, though the Spokane thing is probably a non-starter. If they’d let me stay in LA though. . .!”

  But by late 2006, Gerwehr was talking to Katherine Eban for her Vanity Fair article about the role of psychologists in interrogations, particularly Mitchell and Jessen. And there was one final twist for Gerwehr: Geoffrey Mumford and Susan Brandon were desperately trying to conduct spin control on Eban’s story, and consulted with Gerwehr about how best to answer her questions. In an e-mail, Gerwehr disarmed Mumford and Brandon by blithely responding that he had already talked to Eban. “While there is always the chance that reporters will take quotes out of context, or arrange facts in a way that is sensationalist or suggestive of something sinister, I have nothing to hide here and feel transparency on this topic is a good thing.”

  8

  The War on Normalcy

  The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was built more than a century ago to stand as a monument to the enduring friendship between the United States and Canada. The late-Victorian-era building, with a two-tone façade of gray granite and brown brick, was purposely constructed so that it literally straddles the international border, with the front door in the United States and the library’s circulation desk and the opera house’s stage in Canada. It was meant to encourage people from both countries to read books and enjoy musical performances side by side.

  The Haskell is the best-known landmark in the small, adjoining towns of Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, and its quirky status—a black line marking the border runs along the floor through the library—has for generations lent the twin communities their special charm. The Haskell’s staff comes from both countries. The collection has books in English and French. The building has official addresses in both the United States and Canada, on the streets that intersect beside the library—Caswell Avenue in Derby Line and Church Street (or Rue Church) in Stanstead.

  Indeed, the Haskell’s historic role as a symbol of openness and shared democratic values along the world’s longest undefended border was the root cause of the 2010 Battle of Derby Line. The battle was an American classic—a little guy taking on cold and powerful interests. It galvanized an entire town and started a local grassroots rebellion against the excesses of the war on terror and the nation’s post-9/11 fear-driven obsession with security.

  A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorist threat. Fear sells. Fear has convinced the White House and Congress to pour hundreds of billions of dollars—more money than anyone knows what to do with—into counterterrorism and homeland security programs, often with little management or oversight, and often to the detriment of the Americans they are supposed to protect. Fear is hard to question. It is central to the financial well-being of countless federal bureaucrats, contractors, subcontractors, consultants, analysts, and pundits. Fear generates funds.

  One of the most baleful consequences of the toxic combination of fear and money in the post-9/11 era has been the constriction of the physical landscape of the United States. Freedom of movement—one of the greatest attributes of life in the expanse of the United States—has been curtailed. Money has flowed from Washington and corporate America to finance security guards, security gates, metal detectors, and Jersey barriers; bit by bit, the United States has become a nation whose watchwords are now “authorized access only.”

  It is enough to make a lot of Americans claustrophobic and angry. Including Buzz Roy of Derby Line, Vermont.

  Buzz Roy is an institution in Derby Line. Born in 1942, he has lived virtually his entire life in the village, with the exception of his five years as a student at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. Since 1964, he has been the owner of Brown’s Drug Store, which his father owned before him. He can still be found each day personally filling prescriptions at the store’s counter, coming to work dressed in a dignified button-down oxford shirt and tie, looking trim and much younger than his age. He has long been an active community leader, serving as both a member of Derby Line’s elected board of village trustees and a trustee of the Haskell Library.

  Growing up in Derby Line in the mid-twentieth century meant that Roy was used to crossing the U.S. border whenever he pleased. The border between the United States and Canada was nothing more than a line on a map, two blocks down Main Street from the drug store. Americans crossed it to shop for groceries or to go to the barbershop or beauty salon; Canadians crossed to buy cheaper gas and milk. There was a lightly manned U.S. Customs office on Main Street in Derby Line, just one block from Brown’s, but Derby Line and Stanstead really were one community. “Before 9/11 it was very open, it was just a wave and a hi at the customs officer,” recalls Roy.

  But the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed everything. To the new bureaucratic behemoth in Washington, the Department of Homeland Security, America’s 5,500-mile-long border with Canada was a vulnerability that had to be sealed. It didn’t matter that there was no evidence that the Canadian border had become a real threat; Homeland Security could find statistics to prove that it had. What’s more, Homeland Security was flush with cash, and it was searching for ways to spend it.

  Meanwhile, counterterrorism experts, many with lucrative government contracts or consulting deals with television news networks—in short, with an incentive to generate public fear and foreboding—had joined forces with zealous anti-immigration advocates to warn that the Canadian border was a dangerously unsecured back door. Members of the Minutemen, the anti-immigration organization that usually focuses on the Mexican border, even showed up in Derby Line. “They were not well received,” says Buzz Roy.

  Political pressure mounted. Homeland Security began to zero in on the Canadian border. The border crossing at Derby Line had to get with the times and follow new rules. Canadians and Americans who had been living and working side by side for generations had to be treated the same as suspected al Qaeda terrorists. Homeland Security moved in and began to physically break apart Derby Line and Stanstead for the first time in over a century.

  Officials demanded that the streets connecting Derby Line and Stanstead be closed down. New border gates were constructed. Additional customs and border patrol agents flooded into town. Just to run errands, townspeople now had to show their passports
—many locals had to apply for passports for the first time—and submit to lengthy questioning.

  Buzz Roy is a traditional Vermonter, a native of what locals call the Northeast Kingdom. Like most of his kind, he has no use for bureaucrats. And so when Homeland Security officials began to demand changes in Derby Line, Roy began to push back. Along with a few other local leaders, he fought the street closings. Eventually, the local leaders worked out what they thought was a compromise with Homeland Security: two of the three streets connecting Derby Line and Stanstead would be closed. New border patrol gates would be built on those streets to control access across the border. But the third—Church Street, which passed right by the Haskell Free Library as it crossed the border—would remain open, without a security gate. People walking or driving up Church Street would simply have to follow the traditional procedure of checking in later at the local customs office. The open road would mean continued access for both Americans and Canadians to the Haskell Library, and would recognize the landmark’s historic importance to both Derby Line and Stanstead.

  Roy didn’t really like the compromise, since it meant that a new border gate would be built on Main Street, less than two blocks from Brown’s Drug Store. But at least Derby Line had won a small concession from Homeland Security.

  And then it got worse.

  Homeland Security had to find ways to spend the billions of dollars Congress was providing for counterterrorism and border security, and one idea that the Obama administration came up with was called Operation Stonegarden. Homeland Security would give large grants to local law enforcement agencies in states along the northern and southern borders. In exchange, local police, sheriff’s deputies, and other officers would help to patrol the border along with customs and border patrol agents. In June 2009, Homeland Security announced it was giving grants of $60 million for fiscal 2009 to thirteen border states, including Vermont, and to Puerto Rico. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that Operation Stonegarden would help ensure that “our first responders are equipped with the resources they need to confront the complex and dynamic challenges that exist along our borders.”

  For police departments in Vermont and other states, the Operation Stonegarden grants were hard to refuse. For police chiefs, it was almost free money. All they had to do was send an officer up to the border for a while and the federal government would write a badly needed check. Vermont accepted $501,079 in Operation Stonegarden grants in fiscal 2009.

  One of Operation Stonegarden’s early targets was Derby Line, Vermont. Before long, law enforcement officers from all over the state—everyone from police from Vermont’s larger cities to fish and wildlife agents—began to crowd into Derby Line. Unsmiling strangers with shaved heads and sunglasses were suddenly everywhere. It was as if the federal government had decided to conduct an experiment in Derby Line on how to create a mini–police state.

  The Homeland Security surge into Derby Line had predictable and disastrous results. Dozens of out-of-town police officers, with no experience or training in how to work along the border, jammed into a village of eight hundred people. They had to find something to do and someone to arrest. It wasn’t long before they were harassing Derby Line residents with nearly constant traffic stops and tickets for the most trivial violations. “They were enforcing all kinds of rules, they were stopping people for not having mud flaps on their trucks, for having rosary beads on their mirrors, all kinds of things,” said Karen Jenne, Derby Line’s town treasurer. “People were just not coming to Derby Line anymore because there were so many police here.”

  The police lurked on the village’s downtown streets, barking at residents who wandered too close to the border. They barged into the Haskell Library, hunting for Canadians to arrest who had dared to park in front of the building—in the United States—rather than on the side safely in Quebec. At the new border gates, the out-of-town agents were rude to Canadians and Americans alike, demanding that locals submit to lengthy questioning when they were just going to the local mini-mart to buy gas and milk.

  “They were trolling the line and waiting to see if they could get you,” said Kim Prangley, a Stanstead native who had run the Haskell Library for twenty-four years. “People were not very happy with Stonegarden,” added Florence Joyal, the feisty longtime cashier at Brown’s Drug Store. “But they didn’t scare me.”

  Things finally came to a head because Buzz Roy was hungry for pizza.

  On a Saturday night in February 2010, Roy decided to order smoked meat pizza from Pizzeria Steve 2002, one of his favorite pizza places. It happened to be on Boul Notre Dame in Stanstead, two blocks into Canada.

  Roy walked over to the pizzeria to pick up his pizza. When he started back home, he decided to walk up Church Street, the sole ungated road in the village. But just as he passed the Haskell Library, a Vermont state trooper, detailed to the border patrol under Operation Stonegarden, pulled up behind Roy in his cruiser, lights flashing, and ordered Roy to stop. The state trooper got out of his car and demanded to see Roy’s identification. The trooper told him that it was illegal to use Church Street to enter the United States.

  Roy knew that wasn’t true—keeping Church Street open had been part of Derby Line’s compromise with Homeland Security. But the trooper ignored his protests and insisted on seeing his identification. Standing in the cold Vermont night holding his pizza, Roy asked the trooper to hold the pizza box while he reached for his wallet. The trooper refused. Roy laid his pizza on the cruiser and finally found his ID.

  Roy eventually made his way home, but as he sat eating his pizza, he grew increasingly angry. With each bite he thought about the indignity he had just suffered from a stranger in his own village. Like everyone else in Derby Line, he was fed up with Operation Stonegarden and the petty violations of the village’s way of life. About halfway through his dinner, Roy decided to get up and do something about it.

  He walked back to where he had been stopped on Church Street earlier that evening, and walked down the street across the border again. And then he walked up and down the street and crossed the border one more time for good measure. Finally, a sheriff’s deputy pulled up and stopped him, and told him that he was breaking the law. Through gritted teeth, Roy said that it was his right as a U.S. citizen, that he had lived there all his life, and that Church Street had been kept open under Derby Line’s deal with the federal government. The deputy pointed to a new sign that said it was illegal to cross Church Street. Roy, who had never seen the sign before, grew even angrier. Homeland Security had not talked to the village about closing off Church Street; they had just done it and then put up a sign without telling anyone. Roy told the sheriff that Derby Line had never agreed to it. As they were talking, a flock of border patrol agents descended on Church Street, gathered around him, handcuffed him, arrested him, and stuffed him in the back of a cruiser.

  Roy’s longtime partner, Sandra, watched the episode unfold with binoculars through the window of their home, and then listened on a police scanner as Roy was taken away.

  “I was arrested for entering the United States at a nondesignated spot,” recalls Roy. “It was ridiculous.”

  He was driven to a border patrol detention facility down Interstate 91 and placed in a holding cell for three hours. Finally, one longtime border patrol agent who had been stationed in the area for years and knew Roy discovered what was going on and drove him home.

  News of the arrest spread like wildfire, and overnight, Buzz Roy became the hero of Derby Line. The quiet village, which had put up with so much from Homeland Security and Operation Stonegarden, was outraged and rallied to Roy’s defense. At least two hundred people from Derby Line, along with some Canadians from Stanstead, held a rally at the border at Church Street to protest his arrest. They then marched through the village to a local park, many wearing masks with his picture plastered on them along with buttons that said “Free Buzzy” (many people in Derby Line call him Buzzy, even though he goes by Buzz).

 
Daria MonDesire, a local woman, then performed a song she had quickly written about Buzz: “The Feds say Derby Line’s a big ole danger . . . / ‘Give up your freedom for security,’ well Buzzy wouldn’t do it.”

  The Derby Line protest made the television news across Vermont, and Roy’s case became a cause célèbre throughout the state. People from all over the state started sending Roy money to pay his $500 fine and help fight the government. He sent the money back, which only served to enhance his stature. Roy was now better known in Vermont than most local politicians, and Homeland Security and the border patrol were cast as the villains of the Northeast Kingdom.

  Homeland Security officials tried to act like nothing had happened, but they could not ignore the fact that Roy had been turned into a martyr. Without any public announcement, a top regional manager for the border patrol was moved out of his job and replaced. The new manager called Derby Line officials to apologize. “A new guy came and said we’re sorry, we won’t do that again,” recalls Karen Jenne. Operation Stonegarden came to an abrupt end in Derby Line, and Homeland Security transferred the project to other towns along the border. The customs and border patrol agents who remained toned things down and dropped some of their arrogant ways. “They aren’t hassling people as much anymore,” said Jenne. “I think Buzzy’s protest really had an effect.”