American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  Kpadeh had met the agents once before, three months earlier, inside the U.S. embassy.21 The path that led the agents to Kpadeh illustrates the networks Taylor had inadvertently fashioned with his brand of authoritarian rule. Early in the investigation the agents had located Nathaniel Koah, the diamond broker who had been arrested and brutalized at Gbatala. Koah’s vocal publicity campaign following his arrest by the Anti-Terrorist Unit had drawn considerable attention. A human rights group took up his cause and brought it to the attention of the U.S. embassy, which worked directly with the visiting ICE and FBI agents. But Koah was a complex witness: raw and excitable, a former Taylor supporter who had abandoned his wife and daughter to be sexually assaulted as retribution for his decision to go public. His primary motivation now was not to see Chucky and the other perpetrators punished but to be compensated for his ordeal.

  In the course of the agents’ interview with Koah, he mentioned that he’d been detained with another man from Lofa County. Unlike Koah, Kpadeh had never gone public with his story and had only recently returned to Liberia from refuge in Ivory Coast and Guinea. He made his living farming and building furniture. While he belonged to an opposition political party, his political affiliations did not run much deeper than that. He was, compared to Koah and Dulleh, relatively unattached to the parties involved in the civil war; most important, he wasn’t interested in money.

  When Kpadeh first met with the investigators, he told them his story: he fled Voinjama in August 1999, was detained at the St. Paul River bridge, and was brought to the office in the building alongside the road. There he met Chucky for the first time and on his orders was sent to Gbatala.

  He spoke with a soft, raspy voice—when he paused, he wheezed audibly.22 While Koah remained deeply angry and vengeful over the suffering his family endured, Kpadeh presented himself as calm and free from ulterior motives. When pressed, he acknowledged he wanted justice, but mostly he wanted to continue with his life in Liberia.

  News of Chucky’s arrest and indictment had made it back to Monrovia, but the indictment listed only one, unnamed victim. The secrecy was meant to ensure the safety of Dulleh and his family prior to trial. But whether through Monrovia’s gossip mill or because of familiarity with the circumstances surrounding the accusations, Chucky’s former commanders quickly learned the accuser’s identity.

  They did nothing, however; they had no incentive to help Chucky. Taylor-era figures, by and large, were keeping a low profile. Chucky’s former fighters felt no loyalty to a commander who had abandoned them. Finally, there was no money in helping him.

  Yet Kpadeh faced a risk going into his first meeting with the Americans. He lived in Voinjama but spent enough time in Monrovia to be targeted by former ATU members living in the capital. Despite this risk, he told his story to the agents. At one point he stood up to remove his shirt—revealing a trail of scars stretched across his torso. He agreed, upon the agents’ return, to take them to the place where he’d received those injuries.

  Some three months after that initial meeting, the agents prepared to travel into the countryside with Kpadeh and an attorney overseeing Chucky’s new criminal case. The group left Monrovia before daybreak, threading through the capital’s streets to Paynesville, where the typically overrun, trash-strewn marketplace of Red Light—named for the single, out-of-service traffic light—began to stir with activity. By the time the group reached Margibi County, an hour’s drive outside the capital, the road pointed through the rolling green groves of the hinterland toward the rising sun.

  Nearly one hundred miles from the city, the group passed over a small bridge into the village of Gbatala. On the left side of the road stood a hand-painted billboard dug into the mud shoulder. It depicted a reunion scene, set against a village backdrop: a sleeveless teenager with a headband discarded a machete and an AK-47 with one hand and shook the hand of a neatly dressed older man with the other.23 In the background, a woman and two children—a boy and a girl—rushed out from a tin-roofed hut wearing jubilant smiles. In large block letters it read THE WAR IS OVER.

  Their truck veered off the road, then went up a steep gravel incline, barely visible from the roadway. Within moments the vacant stretch of buildings that was once the Anti-Terrorist Unit base appeared. Kpadeh stepped out of the vehicle with the attorneys and agents. The site had returned to its original use: a quarry. The sharp white light of the sun refracted off granite boulders, and tidy pyramids of gravel interspersed across the hilltop. In the distance stood the College of Knowledge, faded but still identifiable. As the building came into view, they could see that the roof was missing; the rear cinder-block wall had collapsed; weeds had grown through the floors and the walls.

  Kpadeh recalled to the prosecutors and agents how he had been carried here in the back of a pickup truck, laid across the bed of the cab with other prisoners.24 How the soldiers had bound his arms, elbow to elbow, behind his back and tied his ankles together. And how he could see only what bled through the edges of his blindfold, as the sounds of others shouting for help filled the darkness.

  When Kpadeh was first brought to Gbatala, he recalled, he had been pulled from the truck and brought into this building. He couldn’t see faces, but he recognized voices; one was Chucky’s—who had ordered his arrest—and the other belonged to David Campari, the base commander. Again Chucky had demanded to know if Kpadeh was a rebel. And again Kpadeh denied it.

  That answer wasn’t sufficient. He was pulled up to his feet and dragged out of the building to a nearby creek, where the questioning continued. Each time Kpadeh denied the accusations thrown at him, a soldier plunged his head under water. Finally the soldiers pulled him from the water. He heard Chucky’s voice order, “Campari, cut under his nuts.”

  Campari, he recalled, pulled out his knife and carried out the order.

  As the American team took in the surroundings at the base, Kpadeh wanted to lead them toward Vietnam, but the narrow dirt path that ran down the hillside toward the area was impassable. The rainy season had just begun, and a dull, green swamp had formed at the bottom of the slope. Kpadeh told the investigators there was an alternate route, a road that wound around the base. The group climbed into their SUVs to drive the short distance to the location Kpadeh pointed out.

  When they arrived, he led them toward the dense undergrowth. The ground turned from gravel roadway to swamp, water soaking through the investigators’ shoes as they moved into the bush until they could go no farther. Then one of the agents found two logs propped in the water as a makeshift bridge. The terrain ahead remained damp but navigable.

  A tent-shaped thatched hut stood in a clearing ahead. As the group approached, about a dozen holes in the terrain became visible. The holes varied in depth and shape, the deepest approximately four and half feet. Many were overgrown with vegetation, looking like unused open graves. Kpadeh climbed into a hole to demonstrate its depth.

  Kpadeh had been brought here, bleeding from underneath his testicles; soldiers guarding Vietnam had stripped him and thrown him into a hole near the riverbank. Filthy water had accumulated at the bottom of the hole. The guards closed the steel gate over his head. He discovered that he could not stand: he could only squat or sit in the stagnant water. The soldiers called this hole “Waterfall.”

  Kpadeh lived in this hole for several weeks. The other holes adjacent had names that he went through for the agents: one was called “Bella Yella” after the notorious prison in central Liberia; another was called “Advise Yourself”; another, “Survivor.” Occasionally the guards would remove Kpadeh from the hole, he recalled. Once he was brought to a ring on the hillside and forced to run around it, carrying a heavy log: soldiers beat the log with sticks and bars as he passed by. This was a torture called “running the rim” that prisoners and recruits alike were subjected to. Another day he and other prisoners were forced to play soccer by kicking a large stone across the gravel, while Chucky and the soldiers stood by and laughed.

  Chucky wasn’t a cons
tant presence on the base, Kpadeh explained, visiting only once or twice a week. In his absence the abuse persisted, particularly at the hands of Campari. Once when Chucky arrived at the base, a prisoner complained to him that the guards had raped him and other prisoners while he was away. Chucky, Kpadeh recalled, told the men he wanted to find out if this was true. He marched down to Vietnam and ordered Kpadeh and another prisoner pulled from their holes. Kpadeh was handed a bar of soap and ordered to sodomize the other man; the man was then forced to sodomize Kpadeh. Chucky sat and watched, Kpadeh remembered. Chucky didn’t say anything; he only laughed.

  Most of the time the prisoners remained in Vietnam. The guards subjected the men to strange, terrible abuses, Kpadeh explained: they jabbed the men’s hands and bodies with the long rod used to clean the barrels of their guns, they poured driver ants—insects with jaws so strong that traditional healers used their bite to serve as sutures to close wounds—into his hole. Kpadeh had struggled to kill them all before they could bite him. Some soldiers burned sheets of plastic over Vietnam, so the molten drippings would fall on the prisoners.

  One night, Kpadeh recalled, Chucky arrived at Vietnam and ordered four prisoners out of a nearby hole. Kpadeh recognized one of the prisoners as a Mandingo man named Richard Abu. The men were led off into the darkness toward the barracks. For ten minutes he heard nothing; then gunfire crackled over the quarry, and Abu’s voice cried out, “Eh Allah! Eh Allah! Eh Allah!” Then there was silence. Kpadeh could see only a large fire burning on the hill.

  Agent Baechtle took in the scene. He was surprised that the base had remained intact after so many rainy seasons, that the holes hadn’t washed away or collapsed. For the purposes of the prosecution, the base provided a crime scene, one that corroborated the accounts of what had occurred here. More personally, walking into this environment and seeing the basic, physical reality of the base made the horrors that had occurred here resonate more deeply.

  The other agent, Julian Doyle, inspected the surrounding area.25 He came across a clearing, beyond the hut where three stakes stood in a line. Lodged in the copper-colored dirt amid the dead vegetation, he found rusted shell casings and an empty, three-pronged clip with the inscription “M 13,” typical for housing 7.62mm rounds used in AK-47s.

  Kpadeh’s ordeal at Gbatala had come to an end in October 1999.26 But now as he led the agents and prosecutors through the base, the memory of the day when he and other prisoners had been pulled from Vietnam came back to him. They were hauled toward the barracks, where they saw Chucky standing, waiting for them. Kpadeh was naked and filthy; his hair had grown thick and matted, and he’d lost a third of his body weight. Chucky conferred with Campari in front of the prisoners, telling him that “human rights people” were coming to the base to investigate abuses. The prisoners were given soap, clothing, and shower slippers and told to bathe and cut one another’s hair. They learned they were being transferred to police custody at the Gbarnga LNP Station.

  Do not tell any human rights groups that you were jailed at Gbatala, Chucky warned the prisoners. That was the last time Kpadeh saw Chucky Taylor, until he faced him nine years later at his trial.

  The sun had already climbed high above the base. The team had quite a bit of ground to cover in order to return to the embassy before sunset. Kpadeh climbed from the hole and back into the truck with the Americans.

  17

  Testimony

  Power move, try the best to believe you’ll need nuff guns from da feds, And a fuckin’ armory, come clean, man we bombard your scene, raise you up out your green.

  —United States vs. Belfast, EXHIBIT CE-4

  Vultures floated in slow rising circles over downtown Miami, chased by their shadowy reflections in the mirrored glass of the skyscrapers. It was September 29, 2008, a bright, hot Monday. A stream of people walked across the open, concrete esplanade toward the entrance of the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. Federal Courthouse.

  Shortly after nine-thirty a.m. Chucky was led into courtroom 12-2 to take a seat with his defense counsel. Clad in a gray blazer and black slacks, he resembled a museum security guard more than the former commander of an elite paramilitary unit. He wore a trimmed beard and a cowed expression as the room waited quietly for the judge to enter. Law students, human rights attorneys, and a handful of reporters filled in the gallery. Nobody—not Chucky’s mother, not Lynn, nor any of his family members—appeared to support him. He was nonetheless defiant. “There is nothing in my past that I am afraid to confront,” he wrote in a letter before the trial.1

  A year earlier the government had filed a superseding indictment including the accounts of Rufus Kpadeh, Momoh Turay, Sulaiman Jusu, and another man, Mulbah Kamara, making up eight separate counts of torture, conspiracy, and firearms violations.2 The additional charges rendered the task of defending Chucky extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. The new victims were also unnamed, and every act they accused Chucky of committing would likely require a dedicated set of witnesses to refute. The defense team had already traveled to Liberia several times chasing the shadow of the unidentified first victim in the original indictment: Varmuyan Dull eh.3 The new charges—and the string of unidentified victims attached to them—effectively multiplied their already insurmountable challenge.

  Yet potential witnesses had arrived in Miami who could cast doubt on the government’s case. The defense team located one potentially significant witness, an ATU commander who told them that he had accompanied Chucky to St. Paul River in April 1999 and that nothing had occurred there.4 The commander, who would not speak for attribution, was also posted to Gbatala during the period of Kpadeh’s detention. In an interview he appeared to offer evidence contradicting some details outlined in the indictment. Asked whether Chucky had ordered executions at Gbatala, the commander responded, “Oh, no. My God, no.

  “He never ordered anyone’s execution in my presence on the base,” the commander, who asked not to be identified, said.

  Yet the same commander confirmed certain aspects of the prosecution’s case, such as the existence of the detention facility at Vietnam, the mistreatment of both recruits and prisoners, and Chucky’s presence at the scene of the crimes alleged in the indictment. He readily acknowledged Chucky’s role in the deaths of Justin Parker, the SSS officer Kougbay Dunuma, and Isaac Gono. He was far from an ideal witness. The commander remained on the UN travel ban, but he had been approved to enter the United States as a defense witness.5 He ultimately declined to testify because he felt his testimony would be of little help to Chucky.

  “Even if there was no travel ban, I could not have gone, because I was going to look Chucky in the face and tell the facts,” he said. “Things he did wrong: I tell him. Things he did right: I praise him.”

  Several days before opening arguments, legal issues central to the conduct of the trial remained to be settled. Both parties in the case submitted proposed jury instructions, which figured significantly into how the jury would view evidence, but also how they would define the principal charge of torture.6 In its proposed instructions, the defense chose a definition of torture as “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The definition stemmed not from case law but from the Justice Department itself, in a legal interpretation of the federal antitorture statute known as the Bybee Memo, authored by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel.

  It was an attempt to link the public debate over the use of “enhanced interrogation” to the alleged acts Chucky been accused of committing in the name of his father’s regime. He held out hope that the government could be compelled to produce videotapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that the CIA acknowledged had been destroyed—perhaps to seize the moral high ground from the prosecutors. He thought these videos would reveal to the jury the hypocrisy of the same Justice Department that had legalized torture now prosecuting a defendant for it. The public debate over enhanced interrogation had little r
elevance to the trial, but Chucky saw a political connection between the two.

  The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, R. Alexander Acosta, rejected the suggestion of moral equivalence between enhanced interrogation and the torture Chucky had been accused of.7 “This case is in many ways sui generis,” he said. “The acts that were committed were heinous. They were torture. They were committed not just once or twice, but repeatedly.… It’s the first and only time the torture statute has been used and I would defend its use.”

  The judge, a Bush appointee named Cecilia Altonaga, appeared to want to prevent the case from becoming another platform for the Bush administration torture debate.8 She tabled the most controversial issue—the definition of torture—until after each party had presented its case. But when asked to apply the controversial definition put forward by the Bybee Memo, she said, “I will not give an instruction that relies upon that memorandum as its authority.”

  Just as the trial was to open, the prosecution’s case suffered a significant setback. The indictment’s original witness—Varmuyan Dulleh—reversed his decision to testify. In pretrial arguments, Chucky’s defense team had indicated that they would raise Dulleh’s HIV status under cross-examination. (Dulleh had tested positive in 2005.) The stigma associated with HIV, particularly within the Liberian Mandingo community, made him fearful of being forced to disclose this information at trial.

  Another prosecution witness, the former journalist Hassan Bility, pressed Dulleh to reconsider.9 The two were old friends with strong familial and tribal ties, and they had been imprisoned together. When he reached Dulleh at home in Chicago, Bility found him distraught. Bility tried to convince him of the importance of his testimony, but by the time Bility hung up the phone, whether Dulleh would appear on the stand in Miami remained unclear.