500 Days

by Kurt Eichenwald

  • • •

  The force of the explosion lifted Michael and Jason off the floor, then slammed both men into the ground. Natalie was knocked unconscious. Something—she would never know what—hit Nicole in the arm and sent her flying.

  The lights went out amid pandemonium. Jason struggled to open his eyes, but couldn’t. “I can’t see!” he yelled. “I’m blind!”

  He wasn’t. His eyelashes had been welded together by the heat.

  Nicole couldn’t move one of her arms. She reached down to pick it up. It had been severed and was attached by only a flap of skin.

  Nearby, Michael got to his feet and gaped at the bloodbath surrounding him.

  • • •

  A few people left the Sari Club to find out what had happened. Their view was blocked by the white van parked directly in front of the door in the drop-off area.

  Inside the ladies’ room, Shelley Campbell felt a vibration. The floor and walls shook. A woman beside her glanced around.

  “What the fuck was that?” she yelled.

  “Must have been an earthquake,” Shelley replied.

  Out in the bar, Bradley McIlroy still had his arm around Joanne when he heard what sounded like firecrackers. He looked through a window and saw the white van.

  • • •

  Fifteen seconds had passed.

  Sitting at the wheel of the Mitsubishi, Jimi had his hand on the electric switch. He flipped it, sending current to dozens of detonators.

  • • •

  The oxygen in the air caught fire amid the tremendous release of gas, heat, and light. A massive wave of pressure blew a rolling wall of flames in every direction.

  The taxi behind the van was thrown skyward, flipping several times before it landed on its wheels three car lengths back. The driver and his passengers, the Japanese newlyweds, were killed.

  • • •

  Inside Paddy’s, the fireball hit Michael Martyn in the face. He and his friend Jason McIntyre burst into flame. Burning people and body parts were thrown everywhere. Pieces of the wall and ceiling collapsed.

  • • •

  The blast propelled Marc Gajardo backward and the front wall of the Sari Club fell on him. The building’s roof collapsed in a rush of flame and pressure.

  Bradley McIlroy was blown away from Joanne, but he got up quickly as fire and screams filled the room. He was about twelve feet from Joanne and took a step toward her.

  He stopped in his tracks. She had been cut in half, just above the waist.

  Back in the ladies’ room, the blast hit Shelley Campbell and flattened the wall beside her. As she screamed, another woman, Deborah Carey, burst out of a stall and grabbed Shelley, pulling her away from the rapidly moving flames.

  Then Shelley saw Belinda’s feet. The stall door had blown in on top of her, and her legs were sticking out from under it.

  “Belinda!” Shelley screamed, shaking her friend’s leg.

  She didn’t move or respond. Shelley tried to lift the door, but it wouldn’t budge. She glanced around and saw some men climbing a wall to escape.

  “Help!” she screamed to them. “My friend is trapped!”

  The men ran toward her, but were blocked by the fire.

  “You have to get out!” one of them yelled.

  He grabbed Shelley and Deborah Carey and pushed them into a line that had formed of people trying to get over the wall. Neither woman could climb it. Two men appeared at the top of the wall, grabbed their arms, and pulled. Another man pushed them from behind.

  Jake Ryan, one of the soccer players in the club, was knocked flat onto his back. People started running over him in a desperate effort to escape. He sat up, pushing off two corpses, then saw the fire.

  Shit! It’s time to get out of here!

  He glanced around. His teenage brother, Mitch, was somewhere in the building, but Jake couldn’t see him. He heard an Australian voice calling from a wall. “Up here, mate!”

  “My brother’s in here!” Jake shouted. “I can’t leave him!”

  “Look around!” the Australian yelled back.

  He turned. All he saw were people on fire. He couldn’t walk forward into the blistering heat. So instead, he climbed the wall and scrambled across a roof to safety. He was bleeding profusely; one of his heels had been cut off and he had a gaping shrapnel wound in his stomach. But he wasn’t going to give up on saving his brother. He hobbled to the front of the club, where he saw Steven Febey, a fellow soccer player. The two rushed inside the burning building, looking for people to help. Mitch was nowhere to be found; Jake wouldn’t discover until the next day that his brother had survived.

  Jake and Steve stumbled through the wreckage when they heard a woman screaming for help. Her legs had been cut off and her body was in flames. Both men struggled to reach her, but the fire was too intense. They saw her burn to death.

  • • •

  On the motorcycle roaring blocks away from the Sari Club, Idris and Ali Imron heard the tremendous explosion. Seconds passed, then Idris hit the send button on his phone.

  The call connected to the cell phone in the bomb near the American consulate. The component that allowed the phone to vibrate rotated as usual, completing a circuit. Electricity shot through an attached wire to a detonator.

  The small amount of TNT exploded, ripping a chunk out of the curb. Message delivered—the bombing at the nightclubs was about America.

  • • •

  Blaine Pecaut was still asleep in his hotel room when the ceiling partially collapsed on him. The mirror on his closet shattered, everything on his nightstand fell to the floor, and the lights went out. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

  Down in the hotel courtyard, he heard screaming and yelling. One of his friends called out, “Bomb! Bomb! Where’s Blaine?”

  “I think he’s at the Sari,” came the response.

  Pecaut groped in the darkness. The floor was covered with glass, but he managed to find his sandals. He sprinted out of the room to the courtyard. The scene was mayhem, with people running and screaming. He tracked down his two friends to let them know he was all right, then ran to Legian Street, hoping to find the three British surfers he had befriended, including Marc Gajardo.

  He turned the corner and stared into the horror. Corpses everywhere. People walking in a daze, missing arms and legs, skin blackened from burns. Pecaut saw a man on the ground, still alive but severely wounded, with fire inching toward him. He bent down and wrapped his arms around the stranger, trying to drag him away from danger. Before they could move, Pecaut felt something wet and slippery. He pulled back his arm and saw it was dripping with blood, but not his own—the man had a three-foot gash running down his back. Pecaut hadn’t put his arms under the stranger; he had slid them inside his body.

  He looked at the injured man’s face and saw only a blank stare. Pecaut was sure that he was watching the expression of someone who knew his death was moments away.

  • • •

  In the aftermath of the Bali attack, world leaders faced the same question: With Islamic terrorists still slaughtering innocents, why focus on Iraq? Saddam wasn’t indiscriminately killing civilians; bin Laden was.

  The criticism began in Australia, which lost dozens of its citizens in the bombings. Speaking from Canberra, Senator Bob Brown challenged the decision of Prime Minister John Howard to stand with America in pursuing Iraq.

  “This event underscores the need for Australia to have a policy of regional defense and engagement rather than global stratagems at the behest of Washington,” Brown said. “Australia should not join the invasion of Iraq. We should concentrate our resources in the neighborhood.”

  Another senator, Andrew Bartlett, joined in urging a policy shift. “We expect in the coming months the debate on Australian security will focus more on Southeast Asia and our nation’s responsibilities in our region,” Bartlett said.

  But Howard would have none of it. In a hastily arranged press conference that a
fternoon, he declared that the peril from al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists could not be separated from the dangers posed by Iraq.

  “It’s unrealistic of anybody to believe that if you just deal with terrorism in one part of the world, then it’s solved in other parts of the worlds,” he said. “Terrorism is a worldwide threat. It needs to be responded to on a worldwide basis.”

  In the United States, Bush addressed the question three times that day—once in a press conference on the South Lawn and twice in speeches in Michigan. His message: The Bali attack only made the case against Saddam Hussein stronger. If this was what terrorists could do on their own, he said, imagine what would happen if the Iraqi dictator armed al-Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction.

  “This is a man that we know has had connections to al-Qaeda,” Bush said at a fund-raising dinner in Dearborn. “This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al-Qaeda as a forward army.”

  Tony Blair confronted the issue two days later, during the “Prime Minister’s Questions” session with Parliament. Before any of the members could ask, Blair attempted to shoot down the controversy in an opening statement.

  “We have had a fresh reminder, if we needed one, that the war against terrorism is not over,” he said. “Some say that we should fight terrorism alone, and that issues to do with weapons of mass destruction are a distraction. I reject that entirely. Both, though different in means, are the same in nature.”

  He glanced up from his prepared statement. “Both are threats from people or states who do not care about human life, who have no compunction about killing the innocent,” he said. “Both represent the extreme replacing the rational, the fanatic driving out moderation.”

  Then, the questions from members. “Does the prime minister agree that, in the wake of the tragedy, the international community must take stock of the campaign against terrorism?” asked Charles Kennedy. “Does he share the anxiety expressed by European Union commissioner Chris Patten, who said that he hopes that the efforts against Iraq do not distract us from the needs for further efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and against al-Qaeda itself?”

  Blair gripped the lectern. Both Iraq and Islamic terrorism were threats that had to be addressed, he said. “We should show the same firmness with respect to both.”

  Another member, Alice Mahon, sharpened the tone. “In light of the latest outrage,” she said, “should we not be targeting all our resources and energies on fighting terrorism, rather than starting another war in the Middle East? Surely the prime minister will agree that to start such a war would fan the flames of fundamentalism across the whole area and make matters much worse.”

  Blair stuck to his guns. “This is not an either/or. We really need to tackle both of these issue, as both are threats to the stability and order of the world.”

  The critics were not appeased.

  • • •

  Almost daily, Washington grilled the officers running Guantanamo about their floundering efforts at interrogating Mohammed al-Qahtani. How, the officials demanded, could a terrorist who had been one of the conspirators in the 9/11 attacks not know volumes of information about al-Qaeda?

  Immediately after their October 2 meeting with the CIA about counterresistance methods, military interrogators at Guantanamo began employing SERE techniques against al-Qahtani—depriving him of sleep, blaring loud music, and flashing bright lights into his cell, confronting him with military dogs to scare him. But nothing had worked.

  So, on October 11, Guantanamo officials sought permission to get tougher with al-Qahtani. The director of intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Jerald Phifer, prepared the requests.

  He broke them into three groups, from least to most aggressive. The first category would allow interrogators to yell at the detainee and deceive him, specifically by misrepresenting themselves as being from a foreign country with a reputation for torturing prisoners. Category II stepped things up a bit—interrogators could force detainees into stress positions, like standing, for up to four hours; show them documents and reports; isolate them for up to thirty days; deprive them of light, sound, or anything else that would give them comfort, including religious materials; question them for twenty hours at a time; remove their clothing; forcibly shave off their facial hair; and exploit their phobias by exposing them to whatever they found frightening.

  The techniques in Category III were the most drastic—convincing detainees that either they or their families were about to be killed; exposing them to cold weather; waterboarding; and using noninjurious physical contact, such as grabbing or poking them.

  Phifer’s memo went to Diane Beaver, the chief legal advisor at Guantanamo, and she prepared an analysis concluding that the suggested tactics were lawful.

  Beaver noted that, by Bush’s order, the Guantanamo detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. What that meant, she wrote, was that only domestic laws against torture were relevant. “An international law analysis is not required for the current proposal because the Geneva Conventions do not apply to these detainees.”

  On the other hand, she wrote, military interrogators were bound by the federal antitorture statute, the Eighth Amendment’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Constitution presented no problem. If an interrogation technique was used for a legitimate government purpose, then it wasn’t cruel or unusual.

  Nor would any of the practices lumped into the three categories violate the antitorture statute, she wrote. So long as they were employed without the specific intent of causing physical or mental pain or suffering, they would pass legal muster. In al-Qahtani’s case, for example, the intent was to gain information, not to inflict pain. But it would be illegal if motivated by sadism.

  To reach that conclusion required a mix of verbal gymnastics and Orwellian logic, where the word forbidden became the word permitted. The antitorture statute specifically stated that threats of imminent death violated the law. But, Beaver wrote, that didn’t mean such threats violated the law. The words of the statute could be ignored if the administration, by virtue of its duty to protect American citizens, declared it so. Black was black, unless the government decided that it should be white.

  The Beaver analysis and the Phifer memo were sent to General Dunlavey, the commander of the intelligence unit at Guantanamo. He signed off on the proposal, and forwarded it to the SOUTHCOM commander.

  In a cover memo, Dunlavey, who was just days from being replaced at Guantanamo, wrote that the proposed methods would make it easier for interrogators to extract information from detainees.

  And, based on Beaver’s analysis, he wrote, “I have concluded that these techniques do not violate U.S. or international laws.”

  • • •

  A video teleconference over a secure satellite link was set up that week between Guantanamo and Washington. By then, the working relationship of FBI and military intelligence had frayed beyond repair, with each side arguing that the other had no clue how to question al-Qahtani.

  This call was the chance for both sides to make their case. Almost everyone directly involved with interrogation issues was either on the line or in the room—officials from the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Justice Department; law enforcement agents; and Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had just been named to replace Dunlavey.

  The military interrogators were preening—after many hours of questioning, they bragged, al-Qahtani had blurted out the name “Mohammed Atta.” A real breakthrough, they asserted, and indisputable proof that harsh tactics worked.

  Ridiculous, an FBI psychologist replied. Al-Qahtani had yelled out a name that had been on the front pages of every newspaper in the world and only because he wanted the interrogators to let him eat and go to the bathroom. That was hardly “intelligence.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Phifer described the new tactics that he wanted approved, saying they would build on the military’s already impressive achievements.

  “The aggr
essive approach we’ve used up until now has already produced some useful intelligence,” Phifer said. He began to tick off information he claimed had been extracted from al-Qahtani.

  The FBI unit chief broke in. “Look, everything you’ve gotten thus far is what the FBI gave you on al-Qahtani,” he spat.

  Nods around the room.

  “That is not true,” Phifer shot back.

  “It is,” the psychologist said.

  “Look, the techniques you guys are using don’t work,” the unit chief said. “They’re completely ineffective. You’re not getting good intelligence.”

  Voices were raised and accusations flew. There was no bridging the gap between diametrically opposed and inflexible positions. The meeting broke up and the teleconference ended.

  • • •

  The news from Bob Lady was a nasty surprise.

  For the first time, the CIA station chief in Milan was informing his counterpart with SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, about the American plan to kidnap one of the city’s residents. Months before, he had tipped off a friend who was an officer with the Carabinieri, but this time, while speaking to an equal, he held back nothing—the entire idea, Lady said, was stupid.

  The SISMI officer, Stefano D’Ambrosio, could only listen in disbelief as Lady described the madness of the undertaking. Snatching the suspected terrorist, Abu Omar, from an allied Western country—one that was more than willing to share intelligence about the man—was irrational. Italy wasn’t Pakistan; there was no reason to take such an extraordinary step.

  Worse, Lady said, he now knew that Italy’s premier law enforcement and state security service—DIGOS—was conducting surveillance of Abu Omar. The group had tapped his phones, which had already led to other suspects. Investigating the Egyptian cleric was invaluable in obtaining new intelligence about Italy’s Islamic extremists. Leaving him alone while law enforcement watched was certainly a better choice than making him disappear.

  “I’m telling you this because I wanted to see if you were already aware of the plan to collect him,” Lady said.