The House Special Subcommittee's Findings at CTU

by Marc Cerasini

  In one local Los Angeles interview, Abrams was remembered about atending high school with Bauer. “He tie back then,” said Abrams. “Stil is, I think—and he too. Jack raced motorcycles and surfed. He wasn’t part of the crowd that counts, but all the girls were realy into him.”

  In that same interview, when informed of Teri Bauer’s death, Ms. Abrams expressed concern for Agent Bauer. “Poor Jack. I feel so bad for him, losing his wife and everything. … I wonder if he still lives in the area. …”

  RIGHT: Jessica Abrams, former classmate of Jack and press assistant for the Committee to Elect David Palmer.

  ALMEIDA: I have to assume it was because I convinced Jamey to call her employer and tell him that Division had gone to pick up Bauer at the power plant, since he’d been breaking protocol all night.

  FULBRIGHT: And how did you convince Jamey Farrell to place that call?

  ALMEIDA: Jamey watched the assassination attempt fail on TV right along with us. I reminded her that her boss was looking at the television, too, and that he was going to blame Jack for the screw up and kill his family.

  I told Jamey that if she didn’t place a call to get Jack off the hook, I would personally see her tried for accessory to murder. I assume she realized the only way to keep Jack’s family alive was to place that call, so she did.

  FULBRIGHT: I think I understand. Gaines needed to believe Jack Bauer wasn’t in Secret Service custody, that Bauer was still free. Which meant he still needed Bauer’s family alive to manipulate him. Is that about right?

  ALMEIDA: It’s exactly right.

  8:00 A.m.-9:00 a.m.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: Agent Almeida, I’d like to get something on record here. According to Jack Bauer’s testimony, the assassin called “Jonathan,” who got close to Palmer by posing as Martin Belkin, was about to fire a sniper riñe at David Palmer when Bauer went for the Secret Service agent’s gun. Do you believe Bauer?

  AGENT TONY ALMEIDA: Yes, and it was a brilliant strategy. Jack Bauer knew his family was being held hostage and he couldn’t openly interfere with the shooter without risking their lives. In reaching for the agent’s gun, he caused enough of a commotion to set the Secret Service into motion, whisking the senator out of harm’s way. In effect, he protected his family and saved David Palmer’s life.

  FULBRIGHT: So noted. Now tell us more about your interrogation of Jamey Farrell.

  ALMEIDA: She gave up the name of her boss as Gaines and admitted to setting up the surveillance cameras for him inside CTU—

  FULBRIGHT: (Interrupting) Wait a moment, Agent Almeida. Sam, Where’s that profile on Gaines? (Mumbling, papers shuffling) Yes, here it is. Go on, Agent Almeida.

  FROM THE DESK OF

  MARC CERASINI

  SUBJECT: IRA GAINES

  On condition of anonymity, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL master sergeant and Gulf War veteran agreed to comment for this publication on his service with Ira Gaines.

  “Ira was an arrogant prick, but no more than the rest of us,” the master chief said with a chuckle. “When you get that Budweiser [slang for the brass eagle, trident, and anchor symbol of the Navy SEALs] pinned to your chest, you have a right to feel like a ten-inch hard-on, but Gaines took it to extremes.

  “He was great on a special reconnaissance team, and a good SCUD hunter. For a SEAL, he took to the desert real well, too. The thing about Ira was that he liked to pop hostiles more than he liked finding SCUDs. He must’ve scored ten or twelve of them—all from four or five hundred yards—with that sniper rifle of his.

  “One night Gaines took out a Republican Guard colonel. Blew his head off and knocked the body right off the turret of his armored command car. Trouble was, we were on a no-contact mission, and Gaines compromised us with that shot. Our SEAL team had to exfiltrate before we ever found our SCUD site. NAVCOM [Navy Command] was plenty pissed.

  “After the Gulf War, Gaines got his own team. They were transferred to Mexico—drug interdiction duty. Something real bad must’ve gone down south of the border, ‘cause Gaines was thrown out of his team. Do you know what that means? No one, and I mean NO ONE gets tossed out of a SEAL team. Teams are closer than family. That’s like your mother divorcing you!”

  After Ira Gaines was dishonorably discharged from the SEALs, he took up security work in the private sector. Bobby Laughlin, an ex-marine and hostage rescue specialist, accompanied Gaines on an earlier mission to Mexico. He agreed to go on the record with the following comments.

  “Gaines and me, we were on this hostage rescue mission, trying to find some veep from a big multinational corporation. Turns out the guy was nabbed visiting the bad side of MC [Mexico City]. Some underage hooker lured him away from his bodyguards, and the kidnappers snatched him up.

  ‘The multinational contacted us, and we located the guy for them. These Mex kidnappers weren’t as smart as some others we’d been up against before. They left a lot of clues. We followed the trail and found their hideout.

  “Gaines, me, and a couple of locals busted in, snatched our hostage back, and piled him into the backseat of our van for the twenty-minute ride back to Mexico City. Ira was in the backseat with the victim—I figured he was giving the victim the post-rescue talk. ‘You’re okay now, the ordeal’s over, your family’s waiting for you, blah-blah-blah.’ All of which was true—the guy’s wife and kids were waiting.

  “But I actually started listening. It turns out that Gaines was shaking the guy down! He said to the guy, ‘We know about the teenage prostitute. You don’t want your wife to find out, do you? I can hush this up, but it’s going to cost you …. ’ Two minutes later the victim’s on a cell phone, transferring money to Gaines’s personal account.

  “What a bastard! He got paid a crapload of money by the multinational to get their veep back, but it wasn’t enough for Gaines—he goes and blackmails the victim, too. I wouldn’t do it. But you gotta admit, the guy has balls.”

  ALMEIDA: So we knew Gaines was watching from the active cameras. Because we wanted to kill his tap, but we didn’t want him to know we’d caught Jamey, we got her to call Gaines for us. She told him that Milo Pressman, our computer consultant, was getting close to discovering the camera tap she’d set up within the network, and that’s why she had to pull the plug. Gaines bought it.

  FULBRIGHT: What else did Jamey Farrell confess in that hour?

  ALMEIDA: She divulged that she accepted three hundred thousand dollars to provide Gaines with information, claiming that her low pay at CTU was not enough to raise her son as a single parent.

  She said she didn’t know anyone would get hurt and that I couldn’t possibly know how much “pressure” she was under. “Pressure”—that was her excuse. At the time, that answer really ticked me off.

  FULBRIGHT: Why? You didn’t believe her?

  ALMEIDA: I believed she was under pressure, sure. But so are a lot of single parents. Pressure … we were all under pressure at CTU. It was no excuse for becoming a traitor. Betraying your country, your coworkers, your friends.

  FINAL ANATOMIC AND FORENSIC

  CASE #: 01-180

  SUBJECT: Jamey Farrell

  CTU FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST: George R. Capaldo, M.D.

  CAUSE OF DEATH:

  Cardiovascular collapse secondary to massive exsanguination caused by 4 cm. longitudinal laceration of the left radial artery. No evidence of hesitation marks.

  MANNER OF DEATH:

  Due to surveillance tape—homicide.

  LAB TESTS:

  Alcohol blood level is: 10 mg/dl.

  Corresponding vitreous etoh [alcohol] samples confirm results.* Further drug tests are negative.

  NOTE:

  No evidence of superficial electrical burns secondary to videotape evidence of administration of taser, consistent with the insulating effect of the protective overlying clothes.

  ADDITIONAL COMMENT:

  Although there was no evidence of hesitation cuts, which are often seen in suicide attempts, this is not 100 percent, and the autopsy
alone cannot determine manner of death. However, in conjunction with the video evidence, homicide is our final determination.

  [* The vitreous fluid of the eyes can have a level that corresponds as a certain multiple of the blood level and lasts longer.]

  FULBRIGHT: Go on, Agent Almeida. What more did she tell you?

  ALMEIDA: At that point Jamey refused to say anything else until she got immunity in writing from our regional director, Ryan Chappelle. Well, there was no way I was going to contact Chappelle. IA [Internal Affairs] would have been called in, and who knows who else. We just didn’t have the time for a production like that. Palmer was exposed, and Jack’s family was in danger. We needed Jamey to tell us everything she knew as soon as possible. It was Jack’s idea to have us bring her young son in to CTU. He believed it would create the kind of pressure needed to crack her.

  We told Jamey that Kyle was being brought in. We drove home the point that her boy was about to see his mother disgraced—and worse than that, Gaines would probably go after her son once he discovered she was in custody. Logically, he’d use threats against Kyle to prevent her from testifying.

  This hit Jamey very hard. It appeared to me as if the full magnitude of what she’d done and the consequences of it were finally beginning to sink in. She asked to be given some time to think about her decision.

  Nina and I left Jamey alone in the locked tech room, maybe about ten minutes. I remember that Nina went to the rest room during that period. At the time I thought nothing of it.

  When I returned to the tech room with Nina, we found Jamey •unconscious, a pool of blood at her feet. She’d been cuffed to a stationary table, but it appeared as if she’d broken a nearby coffee cup and used the sharp shards to vertically slash her left wrist.

  Nina called for medics. Jamey was rushed to the hospital, but she died within the hour.

  POLITICAL CORRECTION

  Pundits and insiders have a few things to say …

  THREE LITTLE WORDS

  By Stanford Shepard

  Fox News Anchor

  Photo ops with hard hats are about as predictable during campaign season as bitter coffee and stale doughnuts. Candidates like to be seen giving speeches to crowds of working people—because those are the folks who go to the polls. True to form, David Palmer’s Santa Clarita power plant breakfast was vintage election-year stumping.

  What wasn’t so standard, however, was the shout of “Gun! Gun!” that echoed from the back of the room just before Palmer was about to deviate from a canned speech.

  There I was, waiting in the press stable, knee deep in coaxial cable, portable audio tape machines, and reporter’s notebooks. I was reading over the preprinted speech Palmer was supposed to be giving. I was ready for my live report. And I was genuinely excited.

  Yes. it’s true, your favorite jaded journalist was excited. Despite the fact that I’d seen it all before (the ubiquitous red-white-and-blue balloons, the prosaic party banners, the crowd of ebullient supporters and skeptical union rank-and-file) I sensed a different kind of charge in the air—and not just because the planners happened to put the press near the plant’s massive power generators. We all knew that eleven other states were holding their primaries that day. but the truly righteous buzz was in California, because that’s where David Palmer chose to spend his day.

  Now. of course, the election year is over. It’s the end of December as I write this, and we all know President-elect Palmer annihilated the competition. In January he will take the oath of office and become the first African-American commander in chief in U.S. history.

  Last spring, however, on that sunny Super Tuesday, Palmer’s big primary day got off to a supremely rocky start.

  “Seven years ago …”

  Those were the three little words he spoke just before the word “Gun!” ricocheted through the crowd. Within seconds. Palmer was blanketed with a shield of Secret Service suits and rushed from the building. We all watched as a then unidentified man was tackled and arrested at the back of the crowd.

  What a day!

  We now know, of course, that those three little words—“Seven years ago … “were supposed to continue”. my son was involved in an accidental death.” Palmer would come out with the end of that bombshell sentence later that evening. He would tell us that his son, Keith Palmer, had left the scene of an accident seven years ago. The accident involved a young man named Lyle Gibson.

  Gibson had raped Keith’s sister, Nicole Palmer, the night that Keith went to see him. According to Keith’s testimony to the grand jury that convened that summer to review his case, he had gone to Gibson to convince him to turn himself in. Keith’s sister was in a terrible psychological state, and Keith confronted Lyle to see if he could prevent a media circus. Lyle was white. Nicole was black. Lyle was rich. Nicole was the daughter of a prominent politician. Gibson’s body was found on a concrete slab below his apartment balcony. His death was ruled a suicide. But Gibson had not committed suicide. He had gone over the balcony in a struggle with Keith.

  The scandal that David Palmer was about to announce at the Santa Clarita power plant breakfast was that Keith had not reported the truth to the police seven years before. He had covered it up.

  As we all now know, a grand jury cleared Keith. Because Gibson had pulled a knife. The grand jury saw the situation as one of self-defense, not manslaughter, and refused to hand down an indictment. So Keith was exonerated—and the news story about these events eventually ran its course.

  But that spring morning on Super Tuesday, swilling our stale coffee, none of us knew anything about all that. We. the press, were left to wonder what the hell had happened “seven years ago.” We had a hell of a field day with our speculations.

  Just hours after the event, rumors spread like wildfire through the print and broadcast journalism community—rumors that continue in newsrooms and back rooms to this day—that a “government conspiracy” existed to have David Palmer killed, perhaps before he continued with whatever the heck happened seven years ago.

  Staring at our preprinted speeches, we had no real leads. We were stuck wagging our tongues at the cameras with nothing to say, because no one close to Palmer or in the federal agencies would talk. And if there’s one thing journalists hate—more than getting our stories cut from final broadcast—it’s being left out of that all-important loop.

  The publication of this subcommitee report pretty much opens up that loop to anyone willing to read it. We always knew that Special Agent Jack Bauer was a hero. He’s been credited with saving David Palmer’s life since the evening of Super Tuesday. What we now know because of this subcommittee’s report is how he saved Palmer’s life—at this breakfast, anyway. (He’d save it again later in the day.)

  Busy boy, that Jack!

  Bauer went for a Secret Service agent’s gun because another assassin—the one that got away, as the saying goes—was waiting in the wings to gun down our next president. Thanks to Bauer, he never got the chance.

  This finally clears up the ongoing rumors that a “government agent” was arrested for the attempted assassination of Palmer. A government agent was arrested, folks. But this subcommittee report proves he wasn’t part of some inside-the-Beltway conspiracy to assassinate Palmer. It was a misunderstanding of supersize proportions.

  This subcommittee report also makes some other things clear. Some not so wonderful things. We now know that David Palmer himself didn’t mind ordering another fellow be placed in front of the business end of a gun barrel. That fellow was, of course. Victor Drazen. (If you doubt me. read over the testimony between the hours of 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 P.M.)

  Drazen was admittedly a loathsome, genocidal nut job (to use the technical term), but it’s worrisome that our next president cut so many legal corners to have him wacked. (The three little words in this case would clearly be: Kill Victor Drazen.) I mean, what are we, a nation of laws or an HBO mob family?

  The other bone I’ve got to pick has to do with the scandal inv
olving Palmer’s son. Keith. Now, I know the public is supersick of the KP story. Once it broke that evening on Super Tuesday, it played on television, in newspapers, and on the Internet 24/7 through the rest of the spring, all summer, and part of the fall. I tell you. folks, even we got sick of reporting on it—I mean, there are only so many angles to a story. I admit, this one had about five or six hundred, but exhausting them was inevitable. We played it out; we moved along.

  What is nor known by the public, however, is how a respected cable news reporter got the stuffing scared out of her that Super Tuesday afternoon by some political thugs who didn’t like the fact that she was about to break the Keith Palmer story—yes, the very one David Palmer broke himself in a speech at 6:30 P.M. that same day.

  I’m talking about Maureen Kingsley. Forgive me. Maureen, but the First Amendment truth is that your life was threatened, and you quit your broadcast job because of it. I say this now because the assumption in the journalism community for months has been that Maureen pushed a false story and was tired by her network.

  NOT TRUE.

  Maureen had the Keith Palmer story cold in the wee hours of Super Tuesday morning. But then her one source (Dr. George Ferragamo, Keith’s therapist) died mysteriously in a fire, which also destroyed all his tiles—and the piece of physical evidence that Maureen held mysteriously vanished.

  From a source close to Maureen (that would be me—her longtime friend and colleague). I understand that David Palmer tried to talk to her that day, but Maureen wouldn’t listen, believing that he was behind the thugs threatening her. When Palmer appeared on TV that evening, however, Maureen did listen, and she knew then that David Palmer had nothing to do with what had happened.

  Palmer had confessed the not-so-pretty truth about Keith. Nicole, and his duplicitous financial backers to hundreds of millions of Americans, and for all he knew, he’d made himself textbook unelectable.