American Warlord

by Johnny Dwyer

  On the first day of the trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Graveline rose to address the jury. Graveline was a Department of Justice trial attorney who had joined the case earlier in the year. He carried himself to the lectern set up between the prosecution and the defense as if he were in uniform; square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he had spent much of his career as a judge advocate general in the 101st Airborne Division and V Corps, before joining the Department of Justice.10 His last significant military case—prosecuting the American men and women accused of abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison—provided one of the few discrete connections between Chucky’s case and the political issue of torture engaged in by U.S. personnel; jurors would not be aware of this, however, unless they had followed the Abu Ghraib prosecutions closely.

  Graveline’s first words to the jury turned their attention toward the basic human brutality that this case would consider. “Burning flesh, beheading, fiercely stabbing men’s hands with sharp metal rods, cutting a man’s penis with a sharp blade, shocking a man’s genitals with electrical prods, sodomizing that same man with electrical prods,” he began in his opening statement.11 These were just some of the crimes that the government would outline, all in support of the allegations that Chucky Taylor, referred to by his legal name, Roy Belfast Jr., had committed torture.

  The stark, descriptive language took these acts out of any political or cultural context and presented them in explicitly physical and anatomical terms. Graveline’s opening introduced one of the prosecution’s themes—and telegraphed a challenge the government faced: that the evidence provided by the witnesses and victims, some of whom had never set foot outside Liberia, should be considered with equal weight and authority as if it were coming from an American.

  The jury listened as Graveline recounted Chucky’s family history and the creation of the ATU, and as he introduced the victims from the indictment by name, he described what they would testify to and ultimately how these acts tied back to violations of U.S. law. It was a dizzying summary of a case that would require the jury to make more than a simple determination of guilt or innocence. The jurors sitting in Judge Altonaga’s courtroom would be asked to navigate a foreign culture and history to come to their verdict.

  But as he concluded, Graveline grounded the government’s case in a simple, understandable rationale: power. “Chucky Taylor conspired with others and tortured men in Liberia in order to keep his father in power,” he said.

  Developing a theory for Chucky’s defense relied on exploiting the weaknesses in the government case. Chucky’s statement at the airport to Agent Baechtle provided a strong admission of the core facts of the case, but he did not implicate himself explicitly in all the charges brought against him. That would be the role of the witnesses. Even though Chucky’s team knew little information beyond the names of many of the witnesses, they could infer some motivations, particularly for those who no longer lived in West Africa. If the defense could discredit the witnesses against Chucky, they stood a shot at creating reasonable doubt.

  Federal public defender John Wylie immediately made clear that that would be the focus of the defense.12 “Desperate and disgruntled Africans accuse American to escape war-torn Liberia” was how he characterized the victims to the jury in his opening. He seemed to be cognizant of the media presence in the courtroom, explaining that that would be the headline if this case were a newspaper article. He portrayed the prosecution’s case as a fraud perpetrated against his client and the American criminal justice system. It was a novel idea, turning Liberia’s weaknesses into strengths for Chucky’s defense. The broken, traumatized, and dangerous world of West Africa was motive alone to lie, cheat, and steal.

  To illustrate this point, Wylie played a video to the jury. It was a handheld moving panorama of downtown Monrovia, shot from the front passenger seat of a vehicle. In it the jurors caught a glimpse of the elements of daily life in the capital: the crowded and chaotic streets, peopled with black Africans, many wiry thin, dressed in flowing robes, shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops, peering out of tin-roofed shacks or impossibly smashed into the cramped backseats of yellow cabs. The point was clear: Liberia was nothing like Miami or the surrounding suburbs.

  “Liberia is literally one of the poorest countries in the entire world,” he began. “There is no electricity throughout the entire country. The wealthy have generators, and they get their power that way, but there’s no power grid. There are no landlines, no telephone lines. So only the people lucky enough to have cell phones are able to communicate by telephone. Because there are no landlines, there are no ATMs. Unemployment is 85 percent. The life expectancy of a Liberian man is approximately forty years old. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the entire world.”

  Wylie cast the prosecution’s case as the latest episode in a long-running conflict in Liberia. The witnesses who would appear were not disinterested victims, he stressed; they were enemies of Chucky and his father. Some had manipulated the international community to leave Liberia. All were manipulating the truth to attack Chucky.

  “Someone once said the first casualty of war is the truth,” Wylie said. “You are going to see that in this case.” He reminded the jury of the prosecution’s primary burden: to prove its case beyond all reasonable doubt. “The Government is asking you to take yourself back in time on the other side of the world, drop yourself in the middle of a war, and determine if these acts actually happened,” he said. “That’s impossible.”

  It was an impressive showing, but it didn’t undo key setbacks that jeopardized the defense’s case. Weeks earlier John Wylie had flown to South Africa to depose a witness who the team felt could potentially upend the government’s case.13 It was highly irregular for a federal judge to allow a deposition to be taken in lieu of live testimony, but the witness, a former military trainer, worked in Afghanistan and lived in South Africa. The defense argued that he was “present on the ATU training base at Gbatala throughout 1999 and can testify that none of the alleged acts of torture supposedly committed at the base ever occurred.” The deposition required authorization from South African authorities, which the attorneys expected would be forthcoming within days after their arrival. But days turned to weeks, and the attorneys still hadn’t received the necessary approvals. Wylie couldn’t tell whether the reason was incompetence or willful neglect, but it didn’t matter. The opening of the trial loomed large. The defense team was forced to pack up without ever sitting down with the trainer. Chucky’s attorney would have to go to trial without one of his potentially most important witnesses.

  To make matters more difficult, Chucky’s defense team didn’t receive the names of potential prosecution witnesses until late August, just weeks before the trial opened. With that list in hand, they realized the witnesses weren’t only Mandingos and members of the opposition but insiders, fighters from the ATU and SSS who had served under Chucky and his father at Gbatala and on the Executive Mansion grounds. The list posed a frustrating problem for the attorneys. It wasn’t clear to them which witnesses correlated to which counts in the indictment—the defense counsel pressed for further information prior to receiving the final witness list so they could anticipate each person’s testimony and, as much as possible, investigate the allegations before the witness took the stand. At a minimum, the lawyers expected that regardless of who took the stand, they would have a chance to impugn their testimony based on ulterior motives.

  Rufus Kpadeh appeared as the prosecution’s first alleged victim.14 He stepped into the courtroom in the late afternoon, clothed in an incandescent green and orange smock, ornately detailed with gold thread. Against the backdrop of the futuristic courtroom, a sort of asymmetrical moonscape of soundproofing, speakers, lighting, and flat panel monitors, his traditional African garb was jarring.

  Before Kpadeh took the stand, the defense learned that the government planned to lead with a witness who would not only provide strong evidence but also would refute the defense theory. Chuc
ky’s counsel wished to portray the witnesses as opportunists willing to say anything to secure their immigration status, but Kpadeh lived in Liberia and had no intention of leaving. “We knew that he was the only one that … had not received some sort of asylum in another country,” Wylie said.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Miller opened the questioning of Kpadeh. Her presence in the courtroom was unassuming. Her tiny, stooped frame and drowsy, heavy-lidded eyes were countered by a deep, authoritative voice. In conversation, she had a warm, natural presence that put people at ease—even when she was questioning them. Perhaps that could be attributed to her beginnings as a reporter—her first lessons in the law had come while covering trials for the St. Petersburg Times.15 When she began questioning Kpadeh, she wanted more than a recitation of facts from him—she wanted the jury to understand who he was as a human being and what had happened to him. The credibility of his testimony depended on it.

  “A trial is a dialogue—truthfulness and accuracy is of paramount importance,” she said in a later interview. “A good witness is a witness who listens carefully.”

  Kpadeh returned in his testimony to the events of August 1999 at the St. Paul River bridge, the peremptory interrogation by Chucky, his arrest, and his being forcibly tabayed and tossed into the truck. He retold these things in a quiet, raspy voice, wheezing softly. He spoke in English, though his accent made it difficult at times for the judge and the jury to immediately recognize what he was saying. Eventually Miller asked Kpadeh to show the jury the scars from the ropes.

  He stood and stepped out of the witness stand, took several steps toward the jury box, and rolled his sleeves up. He held his arms straight out from his body, so that the jury could examine him. As a still life, the gesture might otherwise have registered as pleading, but the unfaltering purpose with which Kpadeh approached the jury box showed no such signs. Chucky watched, expressionless, from behind the defense counsel’s desk, a yellow legal pad in front of him, as the display played out a few feet away. The secrets of Gbatala had crossed the ocean.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kpadeh,” Miller said. “You may take the witness stand again.”

  Kpadeh gave the clear impression that he had prepared to testify. When Miller probed the specific acts of torture, such as “running the rim”—where Kpadeh stated he was flogged while running in circles carrying a large log—the questions and responses circled around the statutory language that defined torture.

  “Was it painful?” Miller asked.

  “Yes,” Kpadeh replied.

  “In what way would the pain change?” she pressed.

  “I would always feel severe pain running down my shoulders,” he replied; the phrase severe pain was a direct echo of the statute.

  But the government had to go further than matching witness statements with the law. It had to prove intent. Intent figures into the legal definition of any criminal act, but with the antitorture statute it remained especially muddy legal territory. Could an act be considered torture if it was not intended to be? For example, if the intent was not to harm a person but rather to elicit information, did that constitute torture? That was the 24 scenario. The Bush administration argued that intent was a pillar of interpreting the statute. That position opened the door to a universe of ugly hypotheticals, perhaps most graphically illustrated when Bybee Memo author John Yoo was asked whether the president could legally order a child’s testicles to be crushed: he responded, “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.”

  But for the defense, the primary issue was not the definition of torture but witness credibility. On cross-examination, John Wylie set about attempting to unearth inconsistencies in Kpadeh’s testimony. He probed the allegations of torture and, focusing on “running the rim,” asked how, given the abuse he had allegedly suffered and the conditions he had been detained under, he had been able to complete such an arduous task.

  “You must have been feeling very weak after you had been at this base for two weeks?” the attorney asked.

  But Kpadeh’s matter-of-fact answer, if anything, bolstered his credibility. “It depends on the strength you have,” Kpadeh answered plainly. “I am an African child. I am very strong.”

  Ultimately Kpadeh’s testimony effectively stood the defense theory on its head. He had not considered seeking asylum or resettling in the United States. If anything, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Miller elicited on redirect questioning, he had spent his free time in Miami pricing out chain saws to bring back to his farm near Voinjama. For all the difficulties that went along with living in Liberia—and all the perceived advantages of living in a developed country—Kpadeh explained to Wylie during cross-examination, “My home is the best for me.”

  Shortly after ten-thirty a.m. on October 1, 2008, Chucky’s stepfather, Roy Belfast Sr., walked into the courtroom.16 The prosecution had already demonstrated the brutality Chucky was allegedly capable of. Now they would show exactly who the person sitting at the defendant’s table was. Belfast strode past the gallery in loose olive slacks and a faint gingham shirt, untucked. His presence appeared to catch the defense by surprise. Turning to see his stepfather, Chucky appeared stricken. He stopped writing on his notepad, as had been his habit throughout the trial; his mouth was slightly agape as his stepfather took the stand and recited his oath. Belfast had little choice in being there; he appeared under prosecution subpoena.

  The government wanted to use Belfast to establish a fundamental fact: that Chucky was Charles Taylor’s son. But it also asked him to help explain the complicated family history and the eventual disappearance of his stepson.

  Belfast spoke in a soft, lilting Trinidadian accent. As he testified, he called his stepson “Charlie,” recounting the first time he met the boy, when Chucky was just five. Chucky eventually came to call him “Pop.” The family’s migration south to Orlando, Belfast testified, was a deliberate act of protection. He and Bernice had intended to “put some distance” between Charles Taylor and Chucky, but as events unfolded in West Africa and Belfast’s marriage unraveled, Bernice no longer felt the need to protect her son from his father. In fact, she chose to close that distance.

  Chucky wiped tears from his eyes with a folded handkerchief. Wylie patted his back, as if to console him. On cross-examination, public defender Caridad made Chucky stand so that Belfast could identify him.

  “Did you consider him your son?” Caridad asked.

  “He was considered my son. I was his father,” Belfast said. He stood and stepped down from the stand. As he passed the defense table, he nodded toward Chucky, who looked back at him, then leaned forward, holding his hand over his eyes, rocking slightly in his chair.

  On October 1, 2008, two men milled about the fourteenth-floor lobby of the courthouse waiting to testify: Sulaiman Jusu and Momoh Turay. Baechtle had tracked them to Sweden and, after the U.S. attorneys interviewed them, determined that they would appear at trial. That day Turay, a small, broad-chested man, wore a denim suit; Jusu, lanky and tall, donned more traditional linen garb. From the east, fragments of Biscayne Bay shone through the buildings and rooftops of downtown Miami as glints of cobalt. A calm quiet echoed through the hallway as they entered the courtroom.

  Nearly a decade had passed since their ordeal ended in Liberia. After the United Nations secured their release in Monrovia in 1999, the men had received treatment in a clinic adjacent to the U.S. embassy for several weeks, then were relocated to a refugee camp outside Monrovia.17 Eventually Taylor’s security forces discovered the men there, harassing and beating them until they were forced to flee again. As horrifying as their ordeal had been, it proved helpful in establishing a case for resettlement. Finally, Sweden accepted both, along with their families, for resettlement, and they left Liberia in March 2000. Jusu settled in Stockholm, and Turay, farther north, in a small Swedish town just below the Arctic Circle.

  It was there that Special Agent Baechtle had found them.18 In interviews, they offered parallel accounts of arrest, detentio
n, and torture at the Gbatala base, but more significantly, both implicated Chucky in killings. He had not been indicted for murder but faced potentially harsher sentence under an “enhancement” if murder were proved.

  The government put both men on the stand and took the jury through each one’s experience in painstaking detail. When Jusu testified, he recalled the executions the men had witnessed Chucky carry out at the St. Paul River bridge. He described the decapitation they had seen Chucky order at Gbatala. For the jurors, this testimony illustrated that there were no boundaries to the brutality the defendant had been accused of. It also lent credibility to the fear of death that other victims in the case would testify to.

  Credibility was a problem for both men, though.19 They had lied during the process of resettlement, to allow women who were not their wives to accompany them to Sweden. That made the men vulnerable under cross-examination. During cross-examination, John Wylie often talked over Turay, trying to raise any skepticism he could from the jury—drawing attention to the fact that he’d been convicted of hitting a child and pushing him to acknowledge past lies. Wylie was laying the groundwork for his closing, where he would seek to discredit Turay, portray him as an opportunist, and sow seeds of doubt in the veracity of his testimony.

  On October 10, Varmuyan Dulleh took the stand; as the first victim to appear in the indictment, his testimony was crucial to the government’s case.20 If the idea of Charles Taylor’s power, and Chucky’s connection to it, had been abstract for the jury, Dulleh’s account of his arrest brought the jurors directly into Taylor’s inner sanctum. Assistant U.S. Attorney Graveline asked Dulleh to describe the scene at White Flower after he had been hauled there from his home. Dulleh related that Taylor’s commanders Momoh Gibba and Benjamin Yeaten, along with his ministers, had been sitting along a wall, and he explained where Chucky fit within this group.