by Masha Gessen
A short while later, Rochowanski and the ACLU put together a one-page Russian-language memo on how to act when the FBI comes to your door. Most important point: “You don’t have to let them into your home.” Other most important point: “You don’t have to go with them.” But, sighed Rochowanski, “most are too intimidated not to let them in.”
• • •
ROCHOWANSKI HAD TRAINED as a lawyer in her native Austria, then continued her studies at Columbia and ended up spending many years working in and around the North Caucasus, which boasts some of the world’s highest concentrations of uniforms per square kilometer, but she had never spent time dealing directly with law enforcement. “It’s the first time I became intimate with this,” she told me. Up close, it was not pretty. “You don’t want to think that they take a kid in their early twenties and interrogate him for eight hours without giving him a drink of water. Which probably amounts to torture. But then you hear about it and you think, ‘Right, this is how law enforcement works: it breaks people down.’”
Rochowanski is wrong, legally speaking: these coercive interrogation practices used by the FBI in the course of the War on Terror would probably not be considered torture if an international court were to review them. A possible exception, according to legal scholars Philip Heymann and Tom Lue, is the prolonged withholding of medical treatment, which has been a part of the interrogators’ repertoire. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court took up the question of coercive interrogation practices in the case of Chavez v. Martinez but was unable to render a majority decision. Six separate opinions resulted. The question of whether it is constitutional for law enforcement to employ such techniques as sleep deprivation, the withholding of treatment, and hooding remained open.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States declared the War on Terror. “Terror, like fear, is an emotion, so declaring war on an emotion is hardly a strategy conducive to success,” snapped terrorism scholar Louise Richardson in a 2006 book. President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy narrowed the focus of the so-called war, but only slightly: “The enemy is terrorism—premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against civilians.” Unlike terror, terrorism is not an emotion but rather a phenomenon, or even an instrument, but that does not make it any easier to fight. And as Heymann has pointed out, declaring war against an enemy who is not a state or a person or a group of people makes it impossible to determine when the war has been won—or lost, or otherwise ended.
President Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published in 2010, retrospectively redefined the War on Terror as “a war on al-Qa’ida and its affiliates” and responded to Heymann’s criticism: “This is not a global war against a tactic—terrorism [sic] or a religion—Islam. We are at war with a specific network, al-Qa’ida, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.” This may have sounded more specific, but the basic political and legal problems of the war, by then nine years old, remained unresolved. What laws govern an American war against something that is not a state or even a circumscribed entity? And considering al-Qaida’s loose structure, how are the generals and soldiers of this war to define the enemy? A lack of clarity persisted on the issue of the objective, or the end point, of the war: When would it be over? When there are no more attacks on U.S. soil? But for over ten years following September 11, there were no attacks that were attributed to al-Qaida. When there are no more attacks on Americans anywhere in the world? When there is no one left who is capable of launching such an attack? The War on Terror—or on terrorism, or on al-Qaida—remained a shapeless and an endless one.
It is in the nature of terrorism to engender an outsize response. “A little bit of terrorism goes a long way,” writes Heymann.
Even small-scale terrorism possesses an almost magical ability to produce fear, anxiety, anger, and a demand for vigorous action in a sizeable portion of a country’s population. A handful of terrorists led Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to declare a state of emergency in Quebec province [after the kidnapping of two government officials in October 1970]. Belgium responded powerfully to a similar concern flowing from an equally small group [following the 1981 bombing that killed three and injured 106 people outside a synagogue in Antwerp]. The Red Army Faction, which preoccupied Germany for more than two decades, rarely had more than a few active members. Even the Provisional IRA at its most active in Northern Ireland involved only hundreds, not thousands, of armed opponents of the British government.
And a nineteen-year-old kid escaping on foot compelled the governor of Massachusetts to put the state’s largest city on virtual lockdown—what seemed like a reasonable safety measure at the time but was also one of the most extraordinary curtailments of liberty experienced by Americans in living memory.
Perhaps it is just too frightening for most people to believe that a small group—or just a pair—of ordinary people using means most of us could have at our disposal and following a plan that spanned barely an afternoon could inflict so much pain and suffering on so many. Behind such great fear, surely there must be an equally great threat.
Using the language of war when talking about terrorism enabled the Bush administration to draw on the practices of war as well. The legal waters were murky, particularly because much of what was being called war was taking place on U.S. soil, and the enemy was ill-defined. Immediately following the September 11 attacks, the president claimed the right to detain anyone, including United States citizens on American soil, indefinitely without charges. And since this was war, the president also wanted detainees who were not U.S. citizens—but who may have been longtime legal residents—tried by military tribunals, which would have extraordinary powers and whose proceedings would be closed to the public. Some of Bush’s more far-reaching measures were rolled back over the following few years, but the practice of targeting noncitizens—“investigative profiling on the basis of immigration status,” in Justice Department terminology—persisted. This happened in part because, unlike such extraordinary measures as the indefinite detention of citizens, the indefinite detention of noncitizens in practice required no change in the law. For the majority of the more than twelve hundred aliens detained in the wake of September 11, visa violations or other immigration-status irregularities could be found to justify detention. For the rest, a novel way of applying an existing statute was introduced: simply by being noncitizens they became, in the eyes of the law, witnesses who might not be available to testify unless detained. An untold number of people were deported after being detained. Testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, in December 2003, Heymann pointed to this cycle—detention, closed hearing, deportation—as one of the greater threats to liberty contained in new antiterrorist policy and practice, calling it “what amounts to a claim of a right to make individuals disappear from American society on executive orders and without the public openness that is necessary for trust in the legitimacy of your government.”
The practice of targeting aliens long predated Bush’s counterterrorism policies, however. In 1986, amid that era’s fears of international terrorism, President Ronald Reagan issued a secret directive establishing the National Program for Combatting Terrorism, which in turn created the Alien Border Control Committee, charged specifically with finding ways to quietly deport suspected members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The best-known case to have resulted from the ABCC’s activities was that of the L.A. Eight, six student-visa holders and two longtime permanent residents who were arrested in 1987 and held in maximum-security cells without ever being charged with a crime. The L.A. Eight tried to sue, but the government turned itself into a moving target, continuously switching what was presented as grounds for detention and deportation: the arsenal of rules and regulations of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service made that eminently possible.
B
ush’s counterterrorism reforms created the vastly powerful Department of Homeland Security, which subsumed the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Aliens remained the target. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, following established policy and practice to focus on noncitizen immigrants from Chechnya seemed the obvious thing to do. Never mind that the brothers themselves were not from Chechnya, that there was no indication—only the assumption—that they were part of a larger network, that Dzhokhar was a United States citizen, and that one of the last things Tamerlan is known to have said is, “I am a Muslim American.”
• • •
IF CHECHEN IMMIGRANTS were the obvious focus for the FBI investigation, then Musa Khadzhimuratov was the obvious first suspect. He had been a fighter in the Chechen insurgency—indeed, he was chief bodyguard to one of its leaders in the 1990s. He owned firearms. He lived in New Hampshire, where Tamerlan had apparently purchased the fireworks used in making the bombs and where he had gone to a shooting range. Tamerlan had visited Musa at his house less than three weeks before the bombing. From Musa’s point of view, he was just as obviously beyond suspicion: he came from an earlier, secular generation of Chechen resisters, as foreign to the proponents of an Islamic state as the Russians themselves; owning guns is the norm for a Chechen man, and since New Hampshire places no restrictions on the purchase or possession of firearms, it should not, Musa figured, make him subject to scrutiny; and most to the point, he was so obviously and profoundly disabled. Though after several years in the United States he could drive a car and lift himself in and out of it, he needed help stowing his wheelchair in the trunk and removing it. More generally, in order simply to live he needed the around-the-clock care of his wife, who helped deal with everything from his persistent petit mal seizures to his procedure for emptying his bowels.
Just a bit less obviously but even more crucially, the Khadzhimuratovs were deeply aware of the precariousness of their good life. They had everything—the credenza, the chandelier, the crystal glasses from which they had never removed the tiny oval paper stickers, the used car—but all of it had been bought on credit, all of it paid off by scrimping enabled by a most powerful desire to build a normal life in peace. They now had friends here, and their kids had friends, and the kids were using Americanized names at their American school—fourteen-year-old Ibragim was calling himself Abraham—but they themselves had been teenagers when the first war in Chechnya began, and they knew how life could change drastically and irrevocably. When they came to the United States, they made the unspoken new-immigrant pledge: though nothing in their lived experience had taught them to put their trust in a state, or in the future, they did—they chose to believe that the United States would shelter them and care for them. The country met them partway. They came bearing refugee “white cards,” entitling them to public assistance, but after a couple of years only Madina and the two kids got their permanent-resident green cards; Musa was rejected for having been part of the insurgency, which, in the post-9/11 era of Russian–American cooperation, made him an accessory to a terrorist organization in the eyes of not only the Russian but also the U.S. government. Musa could continue to live in the United States as a refugee, but unlike the rest of his family, he would never be entitled to apply for citizenship and his status would remain forever temporary, subject to being revoked by the authorities. More important to his everyday life, as a noncitizen he would be entitled to medical help from the state for a maximum of seven years—and that time had just run out when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon.
They came for Musa. Two FBI agents questioned him in his apartment. “They wanted to know why I didn’t go to the authorities to say that I know him. I said, ‘I was waiting for you to come to me.’ I guess that response kind of got to them.” It probably did. It was a dumb thing to say, too, because it was not exactly true. Like some other immigrants who came to the United States in the Internet era, the Khadzhimuratovs left Chechnya without leaving it: they were constantly, for hours on end, on Skype with Madina’s older sister in Grozny, and while they followed the news, they got it by way of the Caucasus, reading the websites that covered their native region. The Caucasus was not interested in the Boston Marathon bombing—the Caucasus was not exactly impressed by a bomb that killed three people, well below the weekly average for that region—until the suspects were identified as Chechens. By that time, the names of the Tsarnaev brothers were known and Tamerlan was dead. There was nothing to do but wait for the FBI to come with its questions.
When the FBI came again, the agents took Musa to a local office for questioning. It was a typical FBI interrogation room: windowless, lit with a flickering fluorescent light. And it was a typical FBI questioning session—no audio or video equipment was used. The FBI records its interrogations only if the subject is in the Bureau’s custody, but Musa, like most of the Chechens, submitted to the questioning voluntarily and without engaging a lawyer, not only because he knew himself to be innocent but also because he thought that this way his innocence would be all the more obvious.
“It turned out they thought I was the mastermind,” he discovered. “Because I keep guns at home. And also because I’m into sports and so I would have chosen the Boston Marathon as a target. I said, ‘If I’d had anything to do with it, do you really think I would have gone out and bought guns under my own name, or let him come for shooting practice right here, under my nose?’”
Several hours into the interrogation session—by this time Musa had been without food, water, or medication for eight hours, so he was beginning to slip in and out of consciousness—he was hooked up to a polygraph machine.
“Let’s see how you are going to lie now,” he remembered one of the agents saying.
“Look at the wall!” he remembered one of the agents shouting. Musa was having difficulty holding his head up and his eyes open. “Lift up your head and look at the wall when we ask you questions!”
“Did you help the Tsarnaev brothers plan the bombing?” he remembered one of the agents asking.
“I freaked out,” he told me a couple of weeks later. “I tore the wires off me and said, ‘You can’t treat me like a criminal. This is the last time I set foot in this building. You can arrest me if you want, you can never give me a green card if you want, but I’m going home now.’”
“You can’t,” he remembered an agent saying. “Your apartment is being searched right now.” He also remembered being told that his refugee status would be revoked and he would be deported. At this point, Musa felt that he no longer cared: he wheeled himself out of the FBI office.
• • •
MUSA, like other Boston-area Chechens, and like Almut Rochowanski, who was trying to help them, was just beginning to discover how, exactly, law enforcement casts a wide net in the age of the War on Terror. “This is what they [the FBI] do,” Rochowanski told me. “The policy priority is to get as many of them [aliens] out of the country as possible. You would think you’d want to keep them where you could watch them, but I don’t know, I’m not a policy expert for Homeland Security.”
Indeed, for nearly thirty years the main threat American law enforcement has used against aliens suspected of supporting terrorism has been deportation. It has remained the weapon of choice even in the dozen years since the September 11 attacks showed clearly that a terrorist attack on the United States could be planned and directed from overseas. From a policy or strategic standpoint, deporting suspected terrorist supporters to countries that are themselves suspected of supporting terrorism makes no sense. But it suits the bigger imagination of the War on Terror, in which terrorists are larger than life and have America under siege.
Ten
THE STRANGE DEATH OF IBRAGIM TODASHEV
On May 1, 2013, twenty-four-year-old Reni Manukyan landed at JFK Airport in New York. She had been traveling for a while: a two-hour flight to Moscow from a southern Russian city where she had been visiting cousins, then the ten-hour fl
ight to New York, and now she had to recheck her luggage for the final leg to Atlanta. But before she could get her bags, the Homeland Security officer at passport control instructed her to follow another officer to a room off the giant baggage hall. The room is large and windowless, and at any given time three or four officers are seated behind metal desks there, talking to passengers who have just arrived from some foreign country, while other similarly inconvenienced passengers wait their turn in stiff plastic chairs. The space is eerily bright and still; the optimistic din of the arrivals hall disappears the moment an officer shuts the heavy door. The use of any electronic devices is forbidden. People spend their time waiting with nothing to distract them from the dread of not being allowed to enter the country.
A few minutes after Reni was led in, the door closed behind a woman wearing a hijab, and Reni knew why she was here: “What, are you taking all the Muslims off their flights?” she snapped at the officers. Reni herself was wearing a tracksuit and a simple black-and-white-patterned scarf on her head—she liked to be comfortable when she traveled—but in her passport picture, taken soon after she converted to Islam in the summer of 2010, she was fully covered. That must have been what drew the officer’s attention, because nothing else about Reni could arouse suspicion. She was born in Russia but had lived in the United States since she was a teenager; her mother was serving in the U.S. Army; Reni herself had a good steady job as an assistant housekeeper at a big chain hotel in Atlanta; and she traveled back to Russia to visit relatives with some regularity.
