Microsoft's Odd Couple
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/05/paul-allen-201105?printable=true¤tPage=all
In 1968 he approached the Lakeside Mothers Club, which agreed to use the proceeds from its annual rummage sale to lease a teleprinter terminal for computer time-sharing, a brand-new business at the time.
(via Instapaper)
BY CLARA JEFFERY AND MONIKA BAUERLEIN
Sometime in the '50s, the story goes, a small plane ran into engine trouble over Bethesda, Maryland, and was forced to crash-land near the 18th hole of a bucolic golf club. Employees rushed to the scene, and—upon discovering that the pilot was a woman—had her "very gingerly and gallantly" removed from the grounds.
Three decades later, when a visiting head of state showed up at the same golf club with a complement of Secret Service agents, the lone woman among them couldn't set foot on the property. In 1981, a new Supreme Court appointee with a love of golf and a 12 handicap—Sandra Day O'Connor—became the first justice not to be offered a membership. That same chivalry has since been extended to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
Honorary membership at Burning Tree Club is not to be sneezed at, seeing as how the initiation fee is north of $75,000, plus another $6,000 per year and tips for the caddie. Still, not all male Supreme Court justices in recent years have accepted the club's offer, though Antonin Scalia did. So did presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and George H.W. Bush. Indeed, according to an encyclopedic 2003 ESPN.com piece by Greg Garber, Ike was persuaded to run for office by fellow club members and subsequently "spent so much time at 'The Tree' that a hot line was installed between the White House and the pro shop."
We were moved to take this detour into archaic Washington folkways because of June's debt ceiling "golf summit" between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, which, as some reporters noted, took place at the Andrews Air Force Base course because the president couldn't very well play Boehner's regular club—Burning Tree.
Deep breath. Okay. It is 2011. Boehner is the speaker of the House. The body that is supposed to, more than any other, represent the people—all the people—of the United States of America. Yet 91 years after women won the right to vote and 40 years after our mothers fought for more than token access to the levers of power, the signal the man second in line for the presidency intends to send to 51 percent of the nation, 40 percent of Republicans, and his own daughters is…well, we're too ladylike to say.
Boehner's message to 51 percent of the nation, 40 percent of Republicans, and his own daughters is... well, we're too ladylike to say.
And yes, intends: The optics of belonging to one of America's last 24 boys-only golf clubs have been brought to Boehner's attention many, many times before. Evidently, Neanderthal sexism is simply another thing he refuses to compromise on.
But don't feel left out, guys: The speaker's contempt is not confined to those of the female persuasion. From the glass ceiling to the debt ceiling, Boehner and the rest of the GOP brass are not only ignoring the needs of the majority of Americans, they are actively flipping all of us the bird. And that is something new.
Back in the innocent days of yore—say, six months ago—a politician who did not at least lip-synch concern for the welfare of the American people in the event of an economic tailspin would have gotten a drubbing in the press and a talking-to from his caucus leader. Now? It's the caucus leader himself who brutally spells out the priorities: No. 1, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is ensuring that Obama is "a one-term president." No. 2 is protecting "your [Republican] brand." That's right—the reason to worry about a downturn that could kill millions of jobs and wipe out what's left of our retirement and housing values is that it might interfere with GOP positioning.
Which takes us back to golf. George W. Bush gave up the game after starting the Iraq War. Boehner's cohorts seem less worried about looking out of touch: Just in the past two years, the speaker's Freedom Project PAC has spent more than $170,000 on golf, $64,000 at the Naples, Florida, Ritz-Carlton alone!
It's worth noting here that Boehner doesn't come to this callousness by dint of entitlement—one of 12 siblings, he was the first in his family to go to college—which makes his constant gestures of fealty to elites all the more striking. His attire the night he told the nation that he was protecting "the jobs and savings of Americans" by setting us on the path to economic calamity? Navy blazer, oxford shirt, kelly-green tie. Preppy Handbook, anyone?
So, note to President Obama: golf summit, sure. But don't forget that barring some Americans from the clubhouse stems from the same part of the cortex as barring others from the lunch counter. The foundational impulse for both is that fairness matters less than power.
Boehner may be, as the president has said, "a good man who wants to do right by the country." But it all depends, as a previous president might have noted, on what the definition of "the country" is. In today's Republican Party, that definition has shrunk to its narrowest point in at least half a century. And that, in the end, is John Boehner's true handicap.
BY JOSH HARKINSON
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY SMITH
for a few days in September 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."
The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties. St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling teargas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.
Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin." The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. "If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus," wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. "The simple truth," he wrote on Indymedia.org, "is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Darby's entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the '70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America's top domestic terror threat. FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.
But it's Darby's snitching that has provided the most intriging tale. It's the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby's interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI's blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) "I feel very morally justified to do the things that I've done," he told me. "I don't know if I could have handled it much differently."
Brandon Michael Darby is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. "He gets in people's minds and can pull you in," Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and antiwar organizer warned me before I set out to interview him. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."
The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin's slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical- marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park's 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read "Medicine." They later "hooked up," Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.
Some local activists wouldn't work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn't get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.
It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. "If I'd had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people," he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he'd since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: "There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents."
But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims. Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.
Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.
The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've replicated every system that I fought against,'" he recalls. "It was fucking bizarre."
By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims. Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later —an apparent suicide.)
more Better This World is a must-see for anyone concerned about the erosion of civil liberties and the creep of domestic surveillance. See a trailer and read a Q&A with the filmmakers at MotherJones.com.
McKay and Crowder first encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin's Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. "I stated that I wasn't interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby emailed his FBI handlers. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."
"I stated that I wasn't interested in being part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby told the FBI. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."
"My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it," fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby's FBI email continued: "I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren't going to be able to fight anybody until they did so." At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: "Look at me, I'm badass. You can be just like me." (Darby insists that this never happened.)
When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group's trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they'd planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. "It started to feel like Darby hadn't amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be," Crowder says. Feeling that Darby's tough talk should be "in some ways, a guide of behavior," they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.
"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them," Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. "I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street," he texted Darby.
"You butt head," Darby shot back. "Text me when you can." He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay's room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.
The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn't have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.
At South Austin's Strange Brew coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he's now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. "The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities," he explains. Climate change is "a bandwagon" and the EPA should be "strongly limited." Abortion shouldn't be a federal issue.
He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn't defending himself against the left's misrepresentations. "They don't print what I say," Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart's takedown of ACORN, he says, was "completely fucking fair.")
Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. "No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," he says. "And I've quit giving a shit."
The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. "I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence," he tells me. "They are complete fucking liars." As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.
He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it's hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby's ex, says he told her of the idea too.) "The guy was trying to put me in prison," Crow says.
Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: "They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack." Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. "Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I."
BY TREVOR AARONSON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEFFREY SMITH
james Cromitie was a man of bluster and bigotry. He made up wild stories about his supposed exploits, like the one about firing gas bombs into police precincts using a flare gun, and he ranted about Jews. "The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion Yahudi," he once said.
A 45-year-old Walmart stocker who'd adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam during a prison stint for selling cocaine, Cromitie had lots of worries—convincing his wife he wasn't sleeping around, keeping up with the rent, finding a decent job despite his felony record. But he dreamed of making his mark. He confided as much in a middle-aged Pakistani he knew as Maqsood.
"I'm gonna run into something real big," he'd say. "I just feel it, I'm telling you. I feel it."
Maqsood and Cromitie had met at a mosque in Newburgh, a struggling former Air Force town about an hour north of New York City. They struck up a friendship, talking for hours about the world's problems and how the Jews were to blame.
It was all talk until November 2008, when Maqsood pressed his new friend.
"Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man?" Maqsood asked.
"I'm both," Cromitie bragged.
"My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly."
"Who's your people?" Cromitie asked.
"Jaish-e-Mohammad."
Maqsood said he was an agent for the Pakistani terror group, tasked with assembling a team to wage jihad in the United States. He asked Cromitie what he would attack if he had the means. A bridge, Cromitie said.
"But bridges are too hard to be hit," Maqsood pleaded, "because they're made of steel."
"Of course they're made of steel," Cromitie replied. "But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down."
Maqsood coaxed Cromitie toward a more realistic plan. The Mumbai attacks were all over the news, and he pointed out how those gunmen targeted hotels, cafés, and a Jewish community center.
"With your intelligence, I know you can manipulate someone," Cromitie told his friend. "But not me, because I'm intelligent." The pair settled on a plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx, and then fire Stinger missiles at airplanes taking off from Stewart International Airport in the southern Hudson Valley. Maqsood would provide all the explosives and weapons, even the vehicles. "We have two missiles, okay?" he offered. "Two Stingers, rocket missiles."
Maqsood was an undercover operative; that much was true. But not for Jaish-e- Mohammad. His real name was Shahed Hussain, and he was a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ever since 9/11, counterterrorism has been the FBI's No. 1 priority, consuming the lion's share of its budget—$3.3 billion, compared to $2.6 billion for organized crime—and much of the attention of field agents and a massive, nationwide network of informants. After years of emphasizing informant recruiting as a key task for its agents, the bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies—many of them tasked, as Hussain was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States. In addition, for every informant officially listed in the bureau's records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one former high-level FBI official, known in bureau parlance as "hip pockets."
The informants could be doctors, clerks, imams. Some might not even consider themselves informants. But the FBI regularly taps all of them as part of a domestic intelligence apparatus whose only historical peer might be COINTELPRO, the program the bureau ran from the '50s to the '70s to discredit and marginalize organizations ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to civil-rights and protest groups.
The bureau's strategy has changed significantly from the days when officials feared another coordinated, internationally financed attack from an Al Qaeda sleeper cell. Today, counterterrorism experts believe groups like Al Qaeda, battered by the war in Afghanistan and the efforts of the global intelligence community, have shifted to a franchise model, using the internet to encourage sympathizers to carry out attacks in their name. The main domestic threat, as the FBI sees it, is a lone wolf.
The bureau's answer has been a strategy known variously as "preemption," "prevention," and "disruption"—identifying and neutralizing potential lone wolves before they move toward action. To that end, FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists, but tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity. And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.
Here's how it works: Informants report to their handlers on people who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names are then cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records. FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there's an arrest—and a press conference announcing another foiled plot.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because such sting operations are a fixture in the headlines. Remember the Washington Metro bombing plot? The New York subway plot? The guys who planned to blow up the Sears Tower? The teenager seeking to bomb a Portland Christmas tree lighting? Each of those plots, and dozens more across the nation, was led by an FBI asset.
Over the past year, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined by the Department of Justice. Our investigation found:
• Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them in-centivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see charts on pages 36-37.)
• Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
• With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.)
• In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case.
• Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.
"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says Martin Stolar, a lawyer who represented a man caught in a 2004 sting involving New York's Herald Square subway station. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." In the FBI's defense, supporters argue that the bureau will only pursue a case when the target clearly is willing to participate in violent action. "If you're doing a sting right, you're offering the target multiple chances to back out," says Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI special agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and oversaw the investigation of the Lackawanna Six, an alleged terror cell near Buffalo, New York. "Real people don't say, 'Yeah, let's go bomb that place.' Real people call the cops."
Even so, Ahearn concedes that the up-tick in successful terrorism stings might not be evidence of a growing threat so much as a greater focus by the FBI. "If you concentrate more people on a problem," Ahearn says, "you'll find more problems." Today, the FBI follows up on literally every single call, email, or other terrorism-related tip it receives for fear of missing a clue.
Counterterrorism is the FBI's top priority, consuming the lion's share of its budget—and much of the attention of case agents and a network of some 15,000 informants.
And the emphasis is unlikely to shift anytime soon. Sting operations have "proven to be an essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks," said Attorney General Eric Holder in a December 2010 speech to Muslim lawyers and civil rights activists. President Obama's Department of Justice has announced sting-related prosecutions at an even faster clip than the Bush administration, with 44 new cases since January 2009. With the war on terror an open-ended and nebulous conflict, the FBI doesn't have an exit strategy.
Located deep in a wooded area on a Marine Corps base west of Interstate 95—a setting familiar from Silence of the Lambs—is the sandstone fortress of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. This building, erected under J. Edgar Hoover, is where to this day every FBI special agent is trained.
J. Stephen Tidwell graduated from the academy in 1981 and over the years rose to executive assistant director, one of the 10 highest positions in the FBI; in 2008, he coauthored the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, or DIOG, the manual for what agents and informants can and cannot do.
A former western Texas cop, Tidwell is a barrel-chested man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He's led some of the FBI's highest-profile investigations, including the DC sniper case and the probe of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
On a cloudy spring afternoon, Tidwell, dressed in khakis and a blue sweater, drove me in his black Ford F-350 through Hogan's Alley—a 10-acre Potemkin village with houses, bars, stores, and a hotel. Agents learning the craft role-play stings, busts, and bank robberies here, and inside jokes and pop-culture references litter the place (which itself gets its name from a 19th-century comic strip). At one end of the town is the Biograph Theater, named for the Chicago movie house where FBI agents gunned down John Dillinger in 1934. ("See," Tidwell says. "The FBI has a sense of humor.")
"The problem with these cases is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says one of the lawyers involved.
Inside the academy, a more somber tone prevails. Plaques everywhere honor agents who have been killed on the job. Tidwell takes me to one that commemorates John O'Neill, who became chief of the bureau's then-tiny counterterrorism section in 1995. For years before retiring from the FBI, O'Neill warned of Al Qaeda's increasing threat, to no avail. In late August 2001, he left the bureau to take a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, where he died 19 days later at the hands of the enemy he'd told the FBI it should fear. The agents he had trained would end up reshaping the bureau's counterterrorism operations.
Before 9/11, FBI agents considered chasing terrorists an undesirable career path, and their training did not distinguish between Islamic terror tactics and those employed by groups like the Irish Republican Army. "A bombing case is a bombing case," Dale Watson, who was the FBI's counterterrorism chief on 9/11, said in a December 2004 deposition. The FBI also did not train agents in Arabic or require most of them to learn about radical Islam. "I don't necessarily think you have to know everything about the Ku Klux Klan to investigate a church bombing," Watson said. The FBI had only one Arabic speaker in New York City and fewer than 10 nationwide.
But shortly after 9/11, President George W. Bush called FBI Director Robert Mueller to Camp David. His message: never again. And so Mueller committed to turn the FBI into a counterintelligence organization rivaling Britain's MI5 in its capacity for surveillance and clandestine activity. Federal law enforcement went from a focus on fighting crime to preventing crime; instead of accountants and lawyers cracking crime syndicates, the bureau would focus on Jack Bauer-style operators disrupting terror groups. To help run the counterterrorism section, Mueller drafted Arthur Cummings, a former Navy SEAL who'd investigated the first World Trade Center bombing. Cummings pressed agents to focus not only on their immediate target, but also on the extended web of people linked to the target. "We're looking for the sympathizer who wants to become an operator, and we want to catch them when they step over that line to operator," Cummings says. "Sometimes, that step takes 10 years. Other times, it takes 10 minutes." The FBI's goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators—by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It's a form of deterrence, an adaptation of the "broken windows" theory used to fight urban crime. Advocates insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn't been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can't be answered—as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge—is how many of the bureau's targets would have taken the step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.
So how did the FBI build its informant network? It began by asking where US Muslims lived. Four years after 9/11, the bureau brought in a CIA expert on intelligence- gathering methods named Phil Mudd. His tool of choice was a data-mining system using commercially available information, as well as government data such as immigration records, to pinpoint the demographics of specific ethnic and religious communities—say, Iranians in Beverly Hills or Pakistanis in the DC suburbs.
The FBI officially denies that the program, known as Domain Management, works this way—its purpose, the bureau says, is simply to help allocate resources according to threats. But FBI agents told me that with counterterrorism as the bureau's top priority, agents often look for those threats in Muslim communities—and Domain Management allows them to quickly understand those communities' makeup. One high-ranking former FBI official jokingly referred to it as "Battlefield Management."
Some FBI veterans criticized the program as unproductive and intrusive—one told Mudd during a high-level meeting that he'd pushed the bureau to "the dark side." That tension has its roots in the stark difference between the FBI and the CIA: While the latter is free to operate internationally without regard to constitutional rights, the FBI must respect those rights in domestic investigations, and Mudd's critics saw the idea of targeting Americans based on their ethnicity and religion as a step too far.
Serial informant Shahed Hussain (see timeline below) showed off a missile part as he asked a pizzeria owner in Albany, New York, to hold money for his "terrorist" friends.
Nonetheless, Domain Management quickly became the foundation for the FBI's counterterrorism dragnet. Using the demographic data, field agents were directed to target specific communities to recruit informants. Some agents were assigned to the task full time. And across the bureau, agents' annual performance evaluations are now based in part on their recruiting efforts.
People cooperate with law enforcement for fairly simple reasons: ego, patriotism, money, or coercion. The FBI's recruitment has relied heavily on the latter. One tried-and- true method is to flip someone facing criminal charges. But since 9/11 the FBI has also relied heavily on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with which it has worked closely as part of increased interagency coordination. A typical scenario will play out like this: An FBI agent trying to get someone to cooperate will look for evidence that the person has immigration troubles. If they do, he can ask ICE to begin or expedite deportation proceedings. If the immigrant then chooses to cooperate, the FBI will tell the court that he is a valuable asset, averting deportation.
Sometimes, the target of this kind of push is the one person in a mosque who will know everyone's business—the imam. Two Islamic religious leaders, Foad Farahi in Miami and Sheikh Tarek Saleh in New York City, are currently fighting deportation proceedings that, they claim, began after they refused to become FBI assets. The Muslim American Society Immigrant Justice Center has filed similar complaints on behalf of seven other Muslims with the Department of Homeland Security.
Once someone has signed on as an informant, the first assignment is often a fishing expedition. Informants have said in court testimony that FBI handlers have tasked them with infiltrating mosques without a specific target or "predicate"—the term of art for the reason why someone is investigated. They were, they say, directed to surveil law-abiding Americans with no indication of criminal intent.
"The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Farhana Khera, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates. "That raises serious constitutional issues."
Tidwell himself will soon have to defend these practices in court—he's among those named in a class-action lawsuit over an informant's allegation that the FBI used him to spy on a number of mosques in Southern California.
That informant, Craig Monteilh, is a convicted felon who made his money ripping off cocaine dealers before becoming an asset for the Drug Enforcement Administration and later the FBI. A well-muscled 49-year-old with a shaved scalp, Monteilh has been a particularly versatile snitch: He's pretended to be a white supremacist, a Russian hit man, and a Sicilian drug trafficker. He says when the FBI sent him into mosques (posing as a French-Syrian Muslim), he was told to act as a decoy for any radicals who might seek to convert him—and to look for information to help flip congregants as informants, such as immigration status, extramarital relationships, criminal activities, and drug use. "Blackmail is the ultimate goal," Monteilh says.
Officially, the FBI denies it blackmails informants. "We are prohibited from using threats or coercion," says Kathleen Wright, an FBI spokeswoman. (She acknowledges that the bureau has prevented helpful informants from being deported.)
FBI veterans say reality is different from the official line. "We could go to a source and say, 'We know you're having an affair. If you work with us, we won't tell your wife,'" says a former top FBI counterterrorism official. "Would we actually call the wife if the source doesn't cooperate? Not always. You do get into ethics here—is this the right thing to do?—but legally this isn't a question. If you obtained the information legally, then you can use it however you want."
But eventually, Monteilh's operation imploded in spectacular fashion. In December 2007, police in Irvine, California, charged him with bilking two women out of $157,000 as part of an alleged human growth hormone scam. Monteilh has maintained it was actually part of an FBI investigation, and that agents instructed him to plead guilty to a grand-theft charge and serve eight months so as not to blow his cover. The FBI would "clean up" the charge later, Monteilh says he was told. That didn't happen, and Monteilh has alleged in court filings that the government put him in danger by letting fellow inmates know that he was an informant. (FBI agents told me the bureau wouldn't advise an informant to plead guilty to a state criminal charge; instead, agents would work with local prosecutors to delay or dismiss the charge.)
The class-action suit, filed by the ACLU, alleges that Tidwell, then the bureau's Los Angeles-based assistant director, signed off on Monteilh's operation. And Tidwell says he's eager to defend the bureau in court. "There is not the blanket suspicion of the Muslim community that they think there is," Tidwell says. "We're just looking for the bad guys. Anything the FBI does is going to be interpreted as monitoring Muslims. I would tell [critics]: 'Do you really think I have the time and money to monitor all the mosques and Arab American organizations? We don't. And I don't want to.'"
Shady informants, of course, are as old as the FBI; one saying in the bureau is, "To catch the devil, you have to go to hell." Another is, "The only problem worse than having an informant is not having an informant." Back in the '80s, the FBI made a cottage industry of drug stings—a source of countless Hollywood plots, often involving briefcases full of cocaine and Miami as the backdrop.
It's perhaps fitting, then, that one of the earliest known terrorism stings also unfolded in Miami, though it wasn't launched by the FBI. Instead the protagonist was a Canadian bodyguard and, as a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, newspaper put it in 2002, "a 340-pound man with a fondness for firearms and strippers." He subscribed to Soldier of Fortune and hung around a police supply store on a desolate stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, north of Miami.
Howard Gilbert aspired to be a CIA agent but lacked pertinent experience. So to pad his résumé, he hatched a plan to infiltrate a mosque in the suburb of Pembroke Pines by posing as a Muslim convert named Saif Allah. He told congregants that he was a former Marine and a security expert, and one night in late 2000, he gave a speech about the plight of Palestinians.
"That was truly the night that launched me into the terrorist umbrella of South Florida," Gilbert would later brag to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Nineteen-year-old congregant Imran Mandhai, stirred by the oration, approached Gilbert and asked if he could provide him weapons and training. Gilbert, who had been providing information to the FBI, contacted his handlers and asked for more money to work on the case. (He later claimed that the bureau had paid him $6,000.) But he ultimately couldn't deliver—the target had sensed something fishy about his new friend.
The bureau also brought in Elie Assaad, a seasoned informant originally from Lebanon. He told Mandhai that he was an associate of Osama bin Laden tasked with establishing a training camp in the United States. Gilbert suggested attacking electrical substations in South Florida, and Assaad offered to provide a weapon. FBI agents then arrested Mandhai; he pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced to nearly 14 years in prison. It was a model of what would become the bureau's primary counterterrorism M.O.—identifying a target, offering a plot, and then pouncing.
Gilbert himself didn't get to bask in his glory; he never worked for the FBI again and died in 2004. Assaad, for his part, ran into some trouble when his pregnant wife called 911. She said Assaad had beaten and choked her to the point that she became afraid for her unborn baby; he was arrested, but in the end his wife refused to press charges.
Tarik Shah, a jazz bassist who played Bill Clinton's inauguration, was the target of a three-year FBI operation that revealed little more than a man obsessed with his martial-arts prowess.
The jail stint didn't keep Assaad from working for the FBI on what would turn out to be perhaps the most high-profile terrorism bust of the post-9/11 era. In 2005, the bureau got a tip from an informant about a group of alleged terrorists in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood. The targets were seven men—some African American, others Haitian—who called themselves the "Seas of David" and ascribed to religious beliefs that blended Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The men were martial-arts enthusiasts who operated out of a dilapidated warehouse, where they also taught classes for local kids. The Seas of David's leader was Narseal Batiste, the son of a Louisiana preacher, father of four, and a former Guardian Angel.
In response to the informant's tip, the FBI had him wear a wire during meetings with the men, but he wasn't able to engage them in conversations about terrorist plots. So he introduced the group to Assaad, now playing an Al Qaeda operative. At the informant's request, Batiste took photographs of the FBI office in North Miami Beach and was caught on tape discussing a notion to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. Assaad led Batiste, and later the other men, in swearing an oath to Al Qaeda, though the ceremony (recorded and entered into evidence at trial) bore a certain "Who's on First?" flavor:
FBI officials say they have to flush out terrorist sympathizers—even if it means faking plots. "What would you do?" asks one. "Wait for him to figure it out himself?"
"God's pledge is upon me, and so is his compact," Assaad said as he and Batiste sat in his car. "Repeat after me."
"Okay. Allah's pledge is upon you."
"No, you have to repeat exactly. God's pledge is upon me, and so is his compact. You have to repeat."
"Well, I can't say Allah?" Batiste asked.
"Yeah, but this is an English version because Allah, you can say whatever you want, but—"
"Okay. Of course."
"Okay."
"Allah's pledge is upon me. And so is his compact," Batiste said, adding: "That means his angels, right?"
"Uh, huh. To commit myself," Assaad continued.
"To commit myself."
"Brother."
"Brother," Batiste repeated.
"Uh. That's, uh, what's your, uh, what's your name, brother?"
"Ah, Brother Naz."
"Okay. To commit myself," the informant repeated.
"To commit myself."
"Brother."
"Brother."
"You're not—you have to say your name!" Assaad cried.
"Naz. Naz."
"Uh. To commit myself. I am Brother Naz. You can say, 'To commit myself.'"
"To commit myself, Brother Naz."
Things went smoothly until Assaad got to a reference to being "protective of the secrecy of the oath and to the directive of Al Qaeda."
Here Batiste stopped. "And to…what is the directive of?"
"Directive of Al Qaeda," the informant answered.
"So now let me ask you this part here. That means that Al Qaeda will be over us?"
"No, no, no, no, no," Assaad said. "It's an alliance."
"Oh. Well…" Batiste said, sounding resigned.
"It's an alliance, but it's like a commitment, by, uh, like, we respect your rules. You respect our rules," Assaad explained.
"Uh, huh," Batiste mumbled.
"And to the directive of Al Qaeda," Assaad said, waiting for Batiste to repeat.
"Okay, can I say an alliance?" Batiste asked. "And to the alliance of Al Qaeda?"
"Of the alliance, of the directive—" Assaad said, catching himself. "You know what you can say? And to the directive and the alliance of Al Qaeda."
"Okay, directive and alliance of Al Qaeda," Batiste said.
"Okay," the informant said. "Now officially you have commitment and we have alliance between each other. And welcome, Brother Naz, to Al Qaeda."
Or not. Ultimately, the undercover recordings made by Assaad suggest that Batiste, who had a failing drywall business and had trouble making the rent for the warehouse, was mostly trying to shake down his "terrorist" friend. After first asking the informant for $50,000, Batiste is recorded in conversation after conversation asking how soon he'll have the cash.
"Let me ask you a question," he says in one exchange. "Once I give you an account number, how long do you think it's gonna take to get me something in?"
"So you is scratching my back, [I'm] scratching your back—we're like this," Assaad dodged.
"Right," Batiste said.
The money never materialized. Neither did any specific terrorist plot. Nevertheless, federal prosecutors charged Batiste and his cohorts—whom the media dubbed the Liberty City Seven—with conspiracy to support terrorism, destroy buildings, and levy war against the US government. Perhaps the key piece of evidence was the video of Assaad's Al Qaeda "oath." Assaad was reportedly paid $85,000 for his work on the case; the other informant got $21,000.
James J. Wedick, a former FBI agent, was hired to review the Liberty City case as a consultant for the defense. In his opinion, the informant simply picked low-hanging fruit. "These guys couldn't find their way down the end of the street," Wedick says. "They were homeless types. And, yes, we did show a picture where somebody was taking the oath to Al Qaeda. So what? They didn't care. They only cared about the money. When we put forth a case like that to suggest to the American public that we're protecting them, we're not protecting them. The agents back in the bullpen, they know it's not true."
Indeed, the Department of Justice had a difficult time winning convictions in the Liberty City case. In three separate trials, juries deadlocked on most of the charges, eventually acquitting one of the defendants (charges against another were dropped) and convicting five of crimes that landed them in prison for between 7 to 13 years. When it was all over, Assaad told ABC News' Brian Ross that he had a special sense for terrorists: "God gave me a certain gift."
But he didn't have a gift for sensing trouble. After the Liberty City case, Assaad moved on to Texas and founded a low-rent modeling agency. In March, when police tried to pull him over, he led them in a chase through El Paso (with his female passenger jumping out at one point), hit a cop with his car, and ended up rolling his SUV on the freeway. Reached by phone, Assaad declined to comment. He's saving his story, he says, for a book he's pitching to publishers.
Not all of the more than 500 terrorism prosecutions reviewed in this investigation are so action-movie ready. But many do have an element of mystery. For example, though recorded conversations are often a key element of prosecutions, in many sting cases the FBI didn't record large portions of the investigation, particularly during initial encounters or at key junctures during the sting. When those conversations come up in court, the FBI and prosecutors will instead rely on the account of an informant with a performance bonus on the line.
One of the most egregious examples of a missing recording involves a convoluted tale that begins in the early morning hours of November 1, 2009, with a date-rape allegation on the campus of Oregon State University. Following a Halloween party, 18-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali-born US citizen, went home with another student. The next morning, the woman reported to police that she believed she had been drugged.
Campus police brought Mohamud in for questioning and a polygraph test; FBI agents, who for reasons that have not been disclosed had been keeping an eye on the teen for about a month, were also there. Mohamud claimed that the sex was consensual, and a drug test given to his accuser eventually came back negative.
During the interrogation, OSU police asked Mohamud if a search of his laptop would indicate that he'd researched date-rape drugs. He said it wouldn't and gave them permission to examine his hard drive. Police copied its entire contents and turned the data over to the FBI—which discovered, it later alleged in court documents, that Mohamud had emailed someone in northwest Pakistan talking about jihad.
Soon after his run-in with police, Mohamud began to receive emails from "Bill Smith," a self-described terrorist who encouraged him to "help the brothers." "Bill," an FBI agent, arranged for Mohamud to meet one of his associates in a Portland hotel room. There, Mohamud told the agents that he'd been thinking of jihad since age 15. When asked what he might want to attack, Mohamud suggested the city's Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The agents set Mohamud up with a van that he thought was filled with explosives. On November 26, 2010, Mohamud and one of the agents drove the van to Portland's Pioneer Square, and Mohamud dialed the phone to trigger the explosion. Nothing. He dialed again. Suddenly FBI agents appeared and dragged him away as he kicked and yelled, "Allahu akbar!" Prosecutors charged him with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction; his trial is pending.
"These guys were homeless types," one former FBI official says about the alleged Sears Tower plotters. "And yes, we did show a picture where somebody was taking the oath to Al Qaeda. So what?"
The Portland case has been held up as an example of how FBI stings can make a terrorist where there might have been only an angry loser. "This is a kid who, it can be reasonably inferred, barely had the capacity to put his shoes on in the morning," Wedick says.
But Tidwell, the retired FBI official, says Mohamud was exactly the kind of person the FBI needs to flush out. "That kid was pretty specific about what he wanted to do," he says. "What would you do in response? Wait for him to figure it out himself? If you'll notice, most of these folks [targeted in stings] plead guilty. They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature.'" That's true—though it's also true that defendants and their attorneys know that the odds of succeeding at trial are vanishingly small. Nearly two-thirds of all terrorism prosecutions since 9/11 have ended in guilty pleas, and experts hypothesize that it's difficult for such defendants to get a fair trial. "The plots people are accused of being part of—attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building—are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury," notes David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied these types of cases.
But the Mohamud story wasn't quite over—it would end up changing the course of another case on the opposite side of the country. In Maryland, rookie FBI agent Keith Bender had been working a sting against 21-year-old Antonio Martinez, a recent convert to Islam who'd posted inflammatory comments on Facebook ("The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah"). An FBI informant had befriended Martinez and, in recorded conversations, they talked about attacking a military recruiting station.
After one sting target's trial, a judge warned that the FBI "created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true."
But just as the sting was building to its climax, Martinez saw news reports about the Mohamud case, and how there was an undercover operative involved. He worried: Was he, too, being lured into a sting? He called his supposed terrorist contact: "I'm not falling for no BS," he told him.
Faced with the risk of losing the target, the informant—whose name is not revealed in court records—met with Martinez and pulled him back into the plot. But while the informant had recorded numerous previous meetings with Martinez, no recording was made for this key conversation; in affidavits, the FBI blamed a technical glitch. Two weeks later, on December 8, 2010, Martinez parked what he thought was a car bomb in front of a recruitment center and was arrested when he tried to detonate it.
Frances Townsend, who served as homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, concedes that missing recordings in terrorism stings seem suspicious. But, she says, it's more common than you might think: "I can't tell you how many times I had FBI agents in front of me and I yelled, 'You have hundreds of hours of recordings, but you didn't record this meeting.' Sometimes, I admit, they might not record something intentionally"—for fear, she says, that the target will notice. "But more often than not, it's a technical issue."
Wedick, the former FBI agent, is less forgiving. "With the technology the FBI now has access to—these small devices that no one would ever suspect are recorders or transmitters—there's no excuse not to tape interactions between the informant and the target," he says. "So why in many of these terrorism stings are meetings not recorded? Because it's convenient for the FBI not to record."
So what really happens as an informant works his target, sometimes over a period of years, and eases him over the line? For the answer to that, consider once more the case of James Cromitie, the Walmart stocker with a hatred of Jews. Cromitie was the ringleader in the much-publicized Bronx synagogue bombing plot that went to trial last year. But a closer look at the record reveals that while Cromitie was no one's idea of a nice guy, whatever leadership existed in the plot emanated from his sharply dressed, smooth-talking friend Maqsood, a.k.a. FBI informant Shahed Hussain.
A Pakistani refugee who claimed to be friends with Benazir Bhutto and had a soft spot for fancy cars, Hussain was by then one of the FBI's more successful counterterrorism informants. (See timeline, page 34.) He'd originally come to the bureau's attention when he was busted in a DMV scam that charged test takers $300 to $500 for a license. Having "worked off" those charges, he'd transitioned from indentured informant to paid snitch, earning as much as $100,000 per assignment.
Hussain was assigned to visit a mosque in Newburgh, where he would start conversations with strangers about jihad. "I was finding people who would be harmful, and radicals, and identify them for the FBI," Hussain said during Cromitie's trial. Most of the mosque's congregants were poor, and Hussain, who posed as a wealthy businessman and always arrived in one of his four luxury cars—a Hummer, a Mercedes, two different BMWS—made plenty of friends. But after more than a year working the local Muslim community, he had not identified a single actual target.
Then, one day in June 2008, Cromitie approached Hussain in the parking lot outside the mosque. The two became friends, and Hussain clearly had Cromitie's number. "Allah didn't bring you here to work for Walmart," he told him at one point.
Cromitie, who once claimed he could "con the corn from the cob," had a history of mental instability. He told a psychiatrist that he saw and heard things that weren't there and had twice tried to commit suicide. He told tall tales, most of them entirely untrue—like the one about how his brother stole $126 million worth of stuff from Tiffany.
Exactly what Hussain and Cromitie talked about in the first four months of their relationship isn't known, because the FBI did not record those conversations. Based on later conversations, it's clear that Hussain cultivated Cromitie assiduously. He took the target, all expenses paid by the FBI, to an Islamic conference in Philadelphia to meet Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a prominent African-American Muslim leader. He helped pay Cromitie's rent. He offered to buy him a barbershop. Finally, he asked Cromitie to recruit others and help him bomb synagogues.
On April 7, 2009, at 2:45 p.m., Cromitie and Hussain sat on a couch inside an FBI cover house on Shipp Street in Newburgh. A hidden camera was trained on the living room.
"I don't want anyone to get hurt," Cromitie told the informant.
"Who? I—"
"Think about it before you speak," Cromitie interrupted.
"If there is American soldiers, I don't care," Hussain said, trying a fresh angle.
"Hold up," Cromitie agreed. "If it's American soldiers, I don't even care."
"If it's kids, I care," Hussain said. "If it's women, I care."
"I care. That's what I'm worried about. And I'm going to tell you, I don't care if it's a whole synagogue of men."
Mohamed Osman Mohamud was an 18-year-old wannabe rapper when an FBI agent asked if he'd like to "help the brothers." Eventually the FBI gave him a fake car bomb and a phone to blow it up during a Christmas tree lighting.
"Yep."
"I would take 'em down, I don't even care. 'Cause I know they are the ones."
"We have the equipment to do it."
"See, see, I'm not worried about nothing. Ya know? What I'm worried about is my safety," Cromitie said.
"Oh, yeah, safety comes first."
"I want to get in and I want to get out."
"Trust me," Hussain assured.
At Cromitie's trial, Hussain would admit that he created the—in his word—"impression" that Cromitie would make a lot of money by bombing synagogues.
"I can make you $250,000, but you don't want it, brother," he once told Cromitie when the target seemed hesitant. "What can I tell you?" (Asked about the exchange in court, Hussain said that "$250,000" was simply a code word for the bombing plot—a code word, he admitted, that only he knew.)
But whether for ideology or money, Cromitie did recruit three others, and they did take photographs of Stewart International Airport in Newburgh as well as of synagogues in the Bronx. On May 20, 2009, Hussain drove Cromitie to the Bronx, where Cromitie put what he believed were bombs inside cars he thought had been parked by Hussain's coconspirators. Once all the dummy bombs were placed, Cromitie headed back to the getaway car—Hussain was in the driver's seat—and then a SWAT team surrounded the car.
At trial, Cromitie told the judge: "I am not a violent person. I've never been a terrorist, and I never will be. I got myself into this stupid mess. I know I said a lot of stupid stuff." He was sentenced to 25 years.
For his trouble, the FBI paid Hussain $96,000. Then he moved on to another case, another mosque, somewhere in the United States.
For this project, Mother Jones partnered with the University of California-Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program, headed by Lowell Bergman, where Trevor Aaronson was an investigative fellow. Lauren Ellis and Hamed Aleaziz contributed additional research.
Ian Freeman's campaign of civil disobedience started on the autumn day in 2008 when the Blue Light Gang came for his couch. It was a plaid three-seater, anonymous even by the standards of living- room furniture, except that it occupied prime real estate on the front lawn of his two-story, white-and-green renter in Keene, New Hampshire. His tenants used it for bird-watching. But in this quiet college town near the Vermont border, that put him on the wrong side of a city ordinance that considers such exterior furnishings "rubbish." A neighbor lodged a complaint. Code enforcement—the Blue Light Gang, as Freeman calls them—asked him to get rid of the couch. He refused. A man has to stand for something.
In court, Freeman (whose given surname is Bernard) represented himself and grilled the lone witness, a city code enforcer. He refused to plead guilty—or not guilty, for that matter—and instead asked the city to pay him a $5,000-per-hour appearance fee; otherwise he'd consider it kidnapping. The court was not amused. What started as a fine for littering escalated to a 90-day jail sentence for three counts of contempt plus an additional three days for violating the rubbish rules. (Freeman ultimately served four days.)
In recent years, Keene residents have been cited for violating the city's open-container law (during a city council meeting), for indecent exposure and firearms possession (simultaneously), and for smoking marijuana (inside a police station). These incidents share a common root: They were orchestrated by members of the Free State Project—a plan, hatched in 2001, to get 20,000 libertarian activists to quit their jobs, sell their homes, and relocate to New Hampshire en masse. It is a political movement in the most literal sense.
More than 11,000 people have pledged to move to the Granite State, and some 700 pioneers have already relocated and set to work pursuing their idea of a libertarian paradise. Along with civil-disobedience campaigns, Porcupines (as Free Staters have dubbed themselves, because they're peaceful unless attacked) have promoted schemes to return the state to a precious-metals- based currency (Shire Silver, Liberty Dollars) and set up a hot line for reporting police abuses. Slowly, they have begun to infiltrate the ranks of state and local government; last November, 13 Free Staters won election to the New Hampshire Legislature. As the state gears up for its presidential primary early next year, it is in the midst of a political takeover.
New Hampshire has always held a special place among libertarians, who revere its lax gun laws, its lack of sales tax, and the freedom to crash a motorcycle without a helmet. And there's the catchy state motto: Live Free or Die. But the Free State Project departs from that liberty-loving tradition in one key way: Its members aren't migrating to Manchester and Concord and Keene to live under existing laws; they're coming to remake the state in their image.
The idea has its genesis in a 2001 manifesto in the online journal Libertarian Enterprise by Jason Sorens, a University at Buffalo-SUNY political science professor who at the time was hammering out his dissertation at Yale. "What I propose is a Free State Project, in which freedom-minded people of all stripes…establish residence in a small state and take over the state government," he wrote. If the newcomers played their cards right, Sorens reasoned, they could turn the state into a real-life Libertopia, the kind of autonomous enclave libertarians have been trying to piece together—usually on the high seas, always disastrously—for well over a century. (One such colony, founded in the South Pacific by a Nevada coin dealer, was conquered by Tonga in 1972; an earlier effort on the Haitian coast was destroyed by a hurricane.) They would succeed not by running away from society, but by engaging it head-on.
Later that year, Sorens helped form the Free State Project and held a referendum to determine the location; New Hampshire edged out Wyoming. Proximity to the Boston job market helped, but there was another, less obvious reason: The state's government is uniquely susceptible to the influence of a small but dedicated minority. The largest democratic legislative body in the English-speaking world is the British Parliament; the second largest is Congress; the third biggest, with 400 delegates for 1.3 million people, is the New Hampshire House of Representatives. With a $200-per-term stipend, it's a terrible way to put food on your table, but no other state makes it easier for a determined activist to gain access to the mechanisms of power.
Free State legislators are currently pushing to decriminalize marijuana, permit the video recording of law enforcement officers, legalize the use of deadly force in self-defense, nullify health care reform, slash taxes, deregulate barbershops, and ban vaccinations in public schools. This isn't the corporate-driven cutback crusade of Gov. Scott Walker's Wisconsin; it's closer to a Ron Paul revolution.
Dan and Carol McGuire relocated to New Hampshire from Washington state in 2005. "We decided if the Free State Project failed and we hadn't moved, we couldn't live with ourselves," Carol says. Political novices, they both won seats in the House of Representatives (Carol in 2008, Dan in 2010).
They've taken different approaches to fighting tyranny. Carol's goal for the 2011 session was culling anachronistic laws that have remained on the books through bureaucratic neglect. She succeeded in axing an 1895 statute, the result of lobbying by Big Butter, that requires margarine to be served in triangular containers so that diners don't confuse it with the real thing. Dan had his sights on something of potentially much greater consequence. He and a few allies succeeded in passing a bill to eliminate the New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority, which is planning a high-speed line to Massachusetts. Their argument was simple: Government shouldn't be in the business of building railroads. The state's Democratic governor, John Lynch, vetoed the bill.
The McGuires represent the assimilationists, Free Staters who have embraced the state's existing political framework and used their strength in numbers to exert influence. Then there's Freeman, whose peculiar hybrid of Gandhi and Project Mayhem has drawn national attention to his faction's antics. He is a host of the "Free Talk Live" radio show and a board member of the Civil Disobedience Evolution Fund, an organization dedicated to "helping good people who disobey bad laws." When fellow Keeniacs have been arrested (which is often), Freeman and his friends have held barbecues outside the police station to show their support. That kind of attention-grabbing doesn't sit well with some of his fellow Free Staters. Porcupines, after all, are supposed to bristle up only when provoked.
"I think some of the civil disobedience has been constructive and useful—and much of it has not been," Sorens says. Jenn Coffey, a freshman Republican state representative who moved from Massachusetts in 2005, was equally blunt: "They want the project to be more than it is."
Some activists, like Freeman, would like to see the police and fire departments converted into purely voluntary organizations. If residents want to pay for public services they could, but it should be optional. And if they don't consent to anti-couch ordinances, well, they shouldn't have to abide by them. Others, like the McGuires, believe the problem is too much government, not the existence of government itself. And therein lies the problem with attempting to create a libertarian utopia: No one—least of all libertarians—can agree on what it looks like.
—Tim Murphy
So why isn't Bosco Ntaganda in jail?
BY MAC MCCLELLAND
BOSCO NTAGANDA LOVES A DINNER PARTY. Hell, even a brunch party. And pretty much any time of day is perfect at Le Chalet, Goma's premier restaurant, where the inside is all slate floors and licheche-wood furniture and Latin jazz, and outside tables dot a manicured lawn that slopes down to Lake Kivu. It has what may be the best selection of booze—Blue Label, pastis, whatever you like—in this provincial capital in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The chicken samosas in curry sauce with pineapple are delightful. And Bosco, a man about town who owns the bar Kivu Light and the Bunyole cheesery, is a fixture here, enough that the first time I walk in, someone says casually, "Oh! You just missed Bosco."
That's why one Congolese driver told me he couldn't take me around Goma because he would be killed the moment I left. That's why my Congolese sources stay out of nice restaurants, stay out of the city if they can, and when they have to flee the country, they don't tell their families where they've gone or why. That's why one guy I meet wears a light disguise whenever he goes out ("Oh hey!" an old friend says after initially walking right past him. "I didn't recognize you!"): Because recently, Bosco tried to kill him.
That's not included in the official indictment against Bosco. The warrant the International Criminal Court issued for his arrest on August 22, 2006, charged him only with the war crimes of enlisting, conscripting, and using child soldiers back when he was head of military operations for a rebel militia in the early 2000s. These days, he's technically legit, wearing the uniform of a general in the national Congolese army. In 2009, a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda folded in the Rwandan-backed Congolese militia he headed, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), which frankly was kicking the national army's ass. Both before and since, the ICC and the United Nations and watchdogs like Human Rights Watch have continued to catalog further atrocities he's alleged to have ordered or participated in: 800 civilians massacred in one town in the Ituri district in 2002; 150 civilians massacred in North Kivu province in 2008; ongoing assassinations and disappearances; ongoing conscription of child soldiers, the very crime he was indicted for. Etcetera.
And that's why everyone in this dusty, volcano-fringed capital talks like spies. "It's probably best you keep your voice down everywhere all the time while you're here," an American aid worker says the moment we meet. "They have people working everywhere," a Congolese guy tells me, specifically referring to waiters who eavesdrop at bars, saying that when they do you can't leave because it will look suspicious, so you have to always pretend like you don't suspect them, so they won't in turn suspect you. Ex-CNDP soldiers loyal to Bosco are armed and prevalent, in this town of 500,000 and beyond. Consider: This year, when Bosco was implicated in selling $20 million in gold for $7 million in cash to a shady Texas diamond dealer, a Frenchman, and two Nigerians, the regional military spokesperson said it looked like Bosco was smuggling, but really he was just pretending to smuggle to thwart the smugglers. It's all part of the reason why you've never heard of Bosco, why detailed stories about atrocity-witnessing and near escapes and car chases can't be told for the sake of protecting sources. You wouldn't believe the opening we had to cut from this piece. It was about a guy who wanted to tell his story to the world in hopes it would change the "hell" he lives in. But then he was cornered by a soldier who reminded him that it's awfully easy to get killed around here.
So. Take instead what happened to an American filmmaker, now safe at home. Earlier this year, he took it upon himself to shoot mining operations in Goma's province, North Kivu. Here's the thing about that: In 2010, President Joseph Kabila temporarily banned mining in this province and two others, on account of armed groups controlling the mines; an estimated 80 percent of what is mined in Congo is smuggled out, a lot of it from this area on the border with Rwanda. And indeed, there, running the mine, were officers from the CNDP—sorry, ex-CNDP, since they've technically been integrated into the national army and technically don't operate for their own profit anymore—wearing CNDP uniforms. They were overseeing workers loading coltan (used in consumer electronics) into produce trucks. There, getting it a on camera, the American filmmaker got caught.
He managed to escape, but word spread through the command, back to Goma, when he returned. "Soldiers followed me all over town," he says, until he fled to another country. And they didn't even know he also filmed those women who were raped, and people who were shot by ex-CNDP soldiers now in the national army! His last day in Goma, the filmmaker pushed the furniture in his hotel room up against the door, passing the night barricaded behind it, sleepless, with his eyes wide open and a knife in his hand.
He was lucky. "Even if you have a gun, it doesn't mean you cannot die," one Congolese source told me. "You cannot stop them from killing you."
SOME 4,000 MILES AWAY from North Kivu, the International Criminal Court sits in a tall, drab office block rising up against seemingly ever-cloudy Dutch skies. The building at Maanweg 174, The Hague, was previously occupied by a telephone company. Proceedings against warlords take place in three low rooms built into the former parking garage.
The court is slated to get its new digs in 2015; these are the temporary offices of the fledgling institution, which was established in 2002. That's when the requisite 60 countries ratified the treaty that created it, four years after the 1998 UN Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court—which itself had been years in the making—brought 160 governments together to spend a month fighting out the terms. Not everyone agreed that such a court should exist at all. Leading the haters was the United States, which had grave objections to "an arrangement whereby US armed forces operating overseas could be conceivably prosecuted by the international court." But in a decade that saw a couple of high-profile genocides, justice was an especially pressing ideal. As the head of the US delegation summed it up to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee afterward, the goal was "accountability, namely to help bring the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes to justice," via "creating a permanent court that could be more quickly available for investigations and prosecutions and more cost-efficient in its operation." Supporters wanted to make international justice swifter than the infamously tardy International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and cheaper than the $1.9 billion, still-ongoing International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The warrant the International Criminal Court issued for his arrest charged him with conscripting child soldiers back when he headed a rebel militia. Now Bosco's a general in the Congolese army and has been implicated in everything from massacres to smuggling.
The delegates decided that there would be three roads to prosecution: A case could be referred to the ICC by a member state; crimes could be referred to the court by the UN Security Council; or the Office of the Prosecutor could launch an investigation on its own. (Well, not all the delegates decided that. The United States—along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen—voted against the treaty. The US later signed but did not ratify it.) If an ICC investigation finds war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, and the state in which the crimes occur is unwilling or unable to prosecute the case itself, the "court of last resort" can issue warrants of arrest or summonses to appear.
On this early April day, there are two trials in session—both of Congolese former rebel leaders. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo stands accused of conscripting, enlisting, and using child soldiers in Congo. Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo was arrested for multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity, including rape, torture, and pillaging in the Central African Republic. In the case of Lubanga, today's testimony is too sensitive to be opened to the public—maybe a witness who's in particular danger of retribution. But anyone can observe Bemba's trial. Between the two prosecutors on the right, two defense lawyers on the left, and three judges sitting center, there are a lot of black robes in the room. Observers listen to testimony via a UN-style translation system. Bemba's in a suit under guard in the corner; the witness chair is oriented so he can't look squarely at the person testifying. I know Bemba came to check out his troops, the witness is saying. He knew what his troops were doing. The witness is kind of worked up. The soldiers were raping and looting, he's saying. Bemba must have known what was happening. For his part, Bemba has got his cantaloupe head sunk into burly shoulders. He's looking impassive, sometimes taking notes, licking his fingers to turn the page, flicking his eyes again and again toward the observation gallery just a few feet away, but refusing to meet anyone's gaze.
Upstairs, Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has his sleeves rolled up behind the desk of his expansive office on the 11th floor. In the '80s, he prosecuted mass-murdering military commanders in his native Argentina. In the late '90s, he was the star of an Argentine show very much like Judge Judy. He's grayer now, but still brash and deep-voiced and having an answer for everything. And, for a guy who spends all of his time thinking about war crimes, he has some very happy things to say.
"We are building a new global system," he informs me. He says the idea that so many countries came together to build this court is insane. The fact that they managed to arrest someone is ridiculous. That they had a first trial was "impossible." And now, the world is getting smaller. Technology is bringing us closer. Facebook, goddammit. "Cambodia was ignored. Nothing happened. Darfur was not ignored, but took two years to react. Libya? Ten days. Ten days. Bam. And the Security Council, immediately, without hesitation: 'Refer the case to the ICC.' Now we're normal." He tells me about an Australian fighter pilot who wouldn't drop a bomb in Iraq because he was afraid of someday being prosecuted. He says a legal adviser told NATO commanders to watch the orders they sign so they don't end up retiring on the beach only to be surrounded by cops ready to drag them to The Hague. Nepal, he says, demobilized 3,000 child soldiers because of the ICC.
"The court's existence is important. The message is pretty strong: You cannot commit massive atrocities to remain in power or to gain power," Moreno-Ocampo says. In the case of Bemba, his arrest probably did teach warlords a lesson about whether they can retire or vacay in Europe, as he was snatched by Belgian authorities while comfortably ensconced in Brussels. Although 44 UN member states have still not signed the Rome Statute, the ICC has 700 staff members from 75 countries. The more countries that are on board, the more the world manages to "create one community called humanity," the more effective the court can be. "Everything is changing in the world. We can do it."
Moreno-Ocampo has sunk 10 years of his life into the ICC, separated from his home and his own life and his family. Because "it's the best job in the world." Because "I love this mission, to save the world." Also: "It suits my megalomania."
That makes him well suited to weather scathing criticism, and does the ICC ever have its share. Those who say that issuing arrest warrants for war criminals still in the throes of warmongering—as in the case of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir—complicates the peace process and could even incite more violence. (See "Worst of the Worst," page 58.) Those who complain that the court only goes after Africans, which so far has been true. That the first trial, Lubanga's, has had disastrous flaws, including the prosecution's failing to share key documents with the defense. That as an independent court, accountable to no other body, the ICC operates with impunity.
But the issue that could most undermine the very purpose of the court's existence is its difficulty executing arrest warrants. As a court representative will explain if you sign up for an ICC visitor's tour, "We don't have a police force. So when it comes to enforcing our warrants, we rely on state parties." That means countries that have ratified the treaty, like Congo; all of them are technically obligated to arrest indicted criminals on their soil. Yet out of 26 people for whom warrants and summonses have been issued, 10 of the alleged criminals remain at large. None of the three outstanding warrants against Ugandans have been enforced, even though Uganda is an ICC party—but that's because, the tour guide offers as explanation, the guys are hiding in the no man's land near the border between Congo and the Central African Republic. When Sudanese President Bashir flew from (non-member-party) Sudan to (member-party) Kenya, he should have been arrested; if he goes into international airspace again, the rep asserts, he will be.
I ask Moreno-Ocampo if it's only a matter of time for Bosco Ntaganda, too. "Yeah," he says. "In fact, it is difficult to arrest Bashir, I understand, but it's not difficult to arrest Bosco. There is no excuse not to arrest Bosco. And he's committing massive crimes in the DRC."
THIS IS THE PART OF A PARAGRAPH that would usually contain a description of a room, in a (adjective here) building on (this kind of) a street. But I can't write about any of that. Nor could I bring any Congolese translators along to this interview—the risks to them and the witnesses would have been too great. So I've dragged a 22-year-old Columbia University student and fluent French speaker named Joey from the United States.
Joey and I are at the indescribable place to hear a story. It's about Lt. Colonel Antoine Balibuno, a colleague of Lt. Colonel Innocent Zimurinda, a terrifying Bosco crony who's been sanctioned by the UN for raping "a large number" of women and girls and murdering a lot of refugees and his own child soldiers. In 2009, Balibuno and Zimurinda were together in Masisi, a few hours from Goma, under Bosco's command. But Balibuno and Zimurinda had also been integrated into the national army, deployed to the region officially. Not so lucrative a position, working for the broke army of a failed state. Masisi had a lot of trees. Balibuno told friends that Zimurinda enslaved the locals, making them cut down trees, morning and night, to make boards the ex-CNDP could sell. Balibuno said those who resisted were immediately killed. Balibuno said Zimurinda, a Tutsi, was also killing random Hutus. After a while, Balibuno returned to Goma, claiming he didn't want to be associated with any Bosco-related carnage and corruption in case Bosco took his colonels down with him if he ever did get arrested.
The men telling Joey and me this story are three of Balibuno's friends. Balibuno called one the night of September 14, 2010. "He wasn't talking to me, but the call was still open," the friend remembers. "I heard him yelling, 'Where are you taking me? You told me that we were going to a dancing club. Now we've just passed it. What are we doing here? Now there's a military jeep full of soldiers in front of us, blocking the road. Tell me if you're going to kill me. Tell me if you're going to kill me; we didn't agree on this. I'm not okay with this. I didn't tell you I wanted to go to Bosco's. If you want to kill me, tell me so.' Then the call cut. I called back. It rang; no one picked up. I called back again. It didn't go through."
Balibuno's friends weren't surprised when his body was found outside a restaurant with bullets in the chest, neck, and head. They knew his failure to pledge loyalty to Bosco, his walking away from Zimurinda, was trouble. He'd been claiming for months that Bosco's men were arranging his assassination. Soon, soldiers came looking for Balibuno's friends, too, because they'd given testimony to local military officials. There was evidence to suggest who'd killed him—men who were, in fact, staying with Bosco. But when the military commander of the region sent soldiers to arrest the assassins at Bosco's house, other soldiers loyal to Bosco turned them away.
Balibuno's friends ran. They're now far away from home, separated from their families and out of work. They are desperate. They think their families might be slaughtered. They don't have any money. If they are found today, they tell us, they will die today. They can't talk to the government because the government has turned a blind eye to Bosco since the peace deal. They emailed the ICC to tell them they want to testify because it's impossible to get help from their own government. Lots of people are hiding like this. Lots of people have fled Goma. Please could I give them money so they can pay rent? Actually money for rent will only sustain them in the short term, so please can I find a way to relocate them to another country? Even if I'm just a journalist, maybe I have friends or contacts who can evacuate them. As long as they stay in this country they will have to hide.
"You'll never be able to live freely in Congo?" I ask.
"If they arrested Bosco," one of them replies instantly, "I'd go home."
For now, they're going back to the tiny place they share. We stand up when they stand up, and they immediately tell us to sit back down. Wait for them to leave, they say. Let them leave first, in case there are men outside waiting to kill them. They file out one at a time—without saying a word to each other—each waiting a few minutes after the one before so that if an ambush is there, only the first will be killed and maybe the others can escape.
The last witness out puts this face on before he exits, sort of a deep-breath, head-up, resolved-but-fearful look as he makes his way toward the door. Shortly before, he'd lamented Congo's policy of integrating former warlords into its national army in the interest of everyone getting along. Congo's minister of communications has said that the government prioritizes peace over justice. In addition to reigning over the former CNDP, Bosco is a friend of the Rwandan government, and it's imperative that Rwanda stays an ally, since it went to war with Congo twice in the '90s. "What does that mean?" the witness asks rhetorically. "It means people can die, but Bosco will always stay in power."
For the last few years, with foreign donor money and partners like the American Bar Association, Congo has been working to mitigate its history of impunity by finally trying some war criminals. It currently runs itinerant courts that travel to remote spots to talk to victims of rape and other atrocities. One mobile court official whose name can't be used or likeness described—you see the theme here—has worked on dozens of such cases, and wishes Bosco were one of them. But he knows what impunity looks like better than almost anyone: Sometimes when ex-CNDP soldiers are arrested, a bunch of other soldiers come to the jail with guns and demand them back. "These crimes [Bosco's] done are inexplicably horrible," the official says when I meet him. "If we could, I would arrest him."
This judicial official performs one of the most dangerous jobs in the country from a filthy office with ripped couches. Though any conviction is a real milestone here, some experts argue that the government is going after only smaller fish. If anyone ever does arrest Bosco, the official says, he's ready to assist in the prosecution. They've got some files on him that would give you nightmares. "The ICC listed only a few reasons on the warrant. We could arrest him for many more."
"So why aren't you guys arresting him?" I ask.
"I can't say it directly. As we're working for justice, there are always people working in the opposite direction."
"Are you talking about people in the government, like President Kabila?"
"In the name of peace, I have to keep it a secret."
Being this vocal about justice does not make the judicial official's life easier. He's had plenty of threats on his life. "I left my house," he says. When I tell him he has giant balls to keep coming to work and keep his composure, he says simply, "No one can know that I am ever afraid."
"We want zero tolerance," he says, and Kabila has stated the same. The official says that overall, "What we ask of the world is to help us have the authority of the state, in all corners of the forest." He walks Joey and me out, and we emerge into the blazing sunshine. He squints while he shakes our hands, and though I can feel his palm and fingers warmly, hugely enclosing mine, I have the weird feeling that it's not really happening—a reaction, I suppose, to my understanding that the human currently touching me is pretty likely to be murdered.
BEFORE THE WITNESSES ENDED UP in the place that can't be named, they sought refuge from a very manly sounding acronym: MONUSCO. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a peacekeeping force nearly 25,000 strong, a whole massive international ICC-cooperative army. It's headed by Roger Meece, who's from the United States, which picks up the largest share of its cost—$1.37 billion between July 2010 and June 2011.
Meece was out of town when I was in Congo's capital. But his No. 2, Leila Zerrougui, and her special assistant, Francesca Jannotti Pecci, received me in a cool office in the UN's Kinshasa compound.
"For us," Zerrougui explained, "the most important issue that we have to address—because it's the high-profile issue that attracts interest—is the protection of civilians." (They will not comment on why they only protected Balibuno's friends for a month.) The second, and sometimes competing, priority of the mission is to get rid of rebel groups by supporting the Congolese army's operations against them.
"You cannot imagine the time that we spent to screen the commanders that we work with," Zerrougui says. "You cannot imagine the time that we put in to make sure that we will not work with people that could put the population at risk. It's the government of the DRC who decides to have an agreement, to integrate a former armed group in the national army. We are not an occupying force. We are a force that is in support of the government—that is sovereign, that has its own institution, its army, etc." And though there's not as much improvement in places like Masisi, Zerrougui says, all in all there are big improvements in regional security. She laments that "people are always talking about what is not done."
Guilty! "Are you guys going to try to arrest Bosco again?" I ask.
"What?"
"Are you guys going to try to arrest Bosco again?" The UN force in Congo attempted to apprehend him once, several years ago, before the peace deal, but the commander of the arresting force reportedly lost his nerve.
"If the government would like to arrest Bosco, we are here to support the initiative taken by the government."
"Well, but I mean the government did request that." Years ago, the Congolese government wrote a letter to the UN mission in Congo formally requesting that it arrest Bosco. That was back before he was integrated into the national army, though, Zerrougui says.
But they never formally rescinded the request, I say; so they would have to ask again for MONUSCO to arrest him?
"Why are you expecting MONUSCO to do that?" Zerrougui asks me. "Why are you not asking this question to the government?"
Well, I tried. Nobody in Congo would answer my questions, but eventually I heard from the DRC's ambassador to the US, Faida Mitifu: "We are not protecting anyone who has committed crimes against humanity. But at the same time there are certain priorities one has to make in the name of peace, and in the name of putting an end to the humanitarian crisis, it was a choice between the bad and the worse. So we chose the bad." That might not satisfy Jason Stearns, formerly the coordinator of the UN's Group of Experts on Congo and author of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. "Some people think that arresting Bosco would unravel the peace deal between Congo and Rwanda," he says. "I think that that's not true. You could certainly make a case that arresting him could be stabilizing." He's divisive within the former CNDP. He's become an incredibly powerful mineral smuggler, the cause of much of Congo's conflict. Also: "He's a living insult to international justice, and the fact that he wines and dines next to the largest peacekeeping mission in the world in full sight? And everybody knows where he is, and logistically speaking, he would not be very difficult to arrest."
Foreign diplomats are not, Stearns says, "pushing the envelope" nearly as far as they could—"which is typical of diplomacy in the region." Foreign aid makes up an estimated 50 percent of Congo's budget, so foreign governments have plenty of leverage were they interested in wielding it. But instead, they "don't get too involved, even if by not getting involved serious offenders remain at large, because by getting too involved, that increases your responsibility for whatever happens." True, the conflicts in this huge country are transnational and extraordinarily complicated, and observers fear that the peace is tenuous. Also, there's China, which has a $9 billion mineral deal with Congo—and, just in case, is looking to increase military cooperation with Rwanda. "I sympathize with the UN, to be honest with you," Stearns says, but "they can do more."
Those are the politics. As for the legal issues, I put them to Zerrougui and Jannotti Pecci in Kinshasa. "The people at the International Criminal Court apparently are of the opinion that legally MONUSCO could arrest Bosco," I say.
"That's not true," Jannotti Pecci says. "I mean, it's subject to interpretation."
"We have so many things to do here," Zerrougui says, "that are extremely important for the DRC and for the people of the DRC, and I don't think that we can just decide what is our priority. If the Security Council decides that we have a mandate as a priority to go and arrest Bosco, then we will certainly do it."
"He's a living insult to international justice, and the fact that he wines and dines next to the largest peacekeeping mission in the world in full sight? And everybody knows where he is, and logistically speaking, he would not be very difficult to arrest."
Because of the courts they've been setting up, the trials like the ones the anonymous judicial official has been working on, human rights violators are getting arrested, tried, sentenced. Not all of them—not, say, the officer who's been accused of commanding his troops to rape and machete young girls—but some, and that's a great stride. "I understand that one who's indicted by the ICC should not continue to enjoy impunity," Zerrougui says. But MONUSCO collaborates with a government and an army that has alleged war criminals in it, yeah. If stability weren't important, former Nazis wouldn't have been integrated into the civil service to help govern post-World War II Germany. And think of how long it's been taking America to heal the wounds of our own civil war, which lasted only four years, had only two sides, and ended with a clear victor. "This is the reality we have to work with," Zerrougui says. "And we try to influence in the best way, because it's the only way to ensure that we won't continue in an ongoing conflict situation for years."
BOSCO'S COLONELS don't necessarily seem scary when they've got Tommy Hilfiger polos on and glasses of Chivas and Coke in their hands. When I meet one, Seraphin Mirindi, at the Hotel Mbinza bar, he's reserved, slight, and smiles politely at the appropriate times. Although, when I order the same thing he's having, to be simpatico, he says something that makes me paranoid.
"I think she usually likes her whiskey straight," he tells Joey in French.
And I say it like I'm impressed and delighted that he's got my number when I respond, "Ha ha, how do you know that?" but really I don't know if he means, "Anybody can tell this chick drinks her whiskey straight," or "I know for a fact she drinks her whiskey straight because someone's following her." I don't feel better about it either way when he answers me expressionlessly, "I'm not a prophet."
We're here because Mirindi is in Bosco's inner circle, as a spokesman for ex-CNDP soldiers, and since I didn't run into The General at Le Chalet, I'm requesting an audience. I've brought Joey; Mirindi's brought Lt. Colonel Munyakazi Dieudonné.
Mirindi kicked off our meeting with a spectacularly long-winded and boring history lesson. Among the highlights: the First Congo War in the late '90s, when rebel leader Laurent Kabila overthrew President Mobutu and renamed Zaire the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the soon-to-follow Second Congo War, in which eight African nations and countless rebel groups battled over Congo's vast minerals, and millions were killed; the postwar strength of the CNDP, led by Laurent Nkunda and backed by the Rwandan government; the peace deal between Congo and Rwanda that integrated the CNDP into the national army, had Nkunda turned in by the Rwandans and arrested, and saw Bosco Ntaganda handpicked by the Rwandans to take Nkunda's place as general. "How can we compare what he's accused of and what he's done for his country?" Mirindi asks when I add Bosco's ICC indictment to the story. General Bosco Ntaganda is the peace-glue holding this country together, Mirindi says. He also insists several times that Bosco is 10 feet tall.
"General Bosco is so happy you're here," he tells me. "He's so glad you're interested in Congo, and he really wants to meet with you." He says maybe we can all go out dancing. He'll let me know. Then they give me a very thorough rundown of the financial woes of a Congolese soldier who makes only $55 a month. For that kind of money, it's impossible to be a patriot with the love of your country at heart. For that kind of money, you do whatever you have to do to make more on the side.
When Mirindi comes to our next meeting several days later, I'm not surprised that he arrives without Bosco, who he said might be joining us. Area researchers, experts, and aid workers agree that though the warrant hasn't put the fear of God in Bosco, it has instilled a wariness of foreigners, any of whom could be ICC spies. At our second meeting, Mirindi relays the same strange pleasantries on Bosco's behalf—"He would love to meet you!"—but says he was called away from Goma on business. That may or may not be true; he said that about the other day, too, when I know for a fact Bosco was in town.
He's all over town, actually, with his empty eyes and his cheeks smooth and fat as a baby's. We see his truck, which rolls with a small pack of bodyguard/soldiers in the back, driving down Boulevard Kanyamuhanga in the center of town, but lose him in traffic when we give chase. We frequently pass the location of his hotel. A foreign (read: less likely to be murdered) aid worker volunteers to drive us to his lovely house. It doesn't look like he's there—no convoy parked out front, just a few soldiers milling around outside. And who can say if the motorbike that starts instantly following us is really following us? And who can say if it's a coincidence that when we go to a restaurant to lose our possible tail, there's a truck full of soldiers waiting outside by our car when we come back out? And that they pull out when we do?
Paranoia all around. The next day, a driver almost tosses me off the back of a motorbike while executing a hard skid to turn around because he thinks some soldiers are stalking us. "I gotta get the fuck out of here," Joey tells me that morning at breakfast; he's having nightmares about Mirindi and his men coming to find him. And as for Bosco, people think he's more worried about leaving witnesses around since the ICC indictment. Human Rights Watch strongly believes that he recently disappeared a man who told researchers that Bosco murdered his sister. His men recently threatened some UN peacekeepers; several years ago, his troops allegedly killed one. He switches cell phone numbers constantly. On our last night in town, I decide to give him a call directly, my last resort for acquiring comment. Even though I got the number from a guy who had a meeting with him just days before, a recorded woman's voice politely informs me in French that the number is out of service.
"THEY CAN, YEAH," Chief Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo tells me the next time I see him. We're at the Mercer Hotel in New York, which has funky purple leather chairs. I've just asked him whether MONUSCO can legally arrest Bosco Ntaganda.
"They can," I repeat after him.
"Yeah."
"MONUSCO's position now is that they can't arrest him because the government would have to ask again, and so if they arrested him without the government asking, it would be against the mandate. You're shaking your head."
Silence. The prosecutor scowls. Eventually, he says, "This is new for me. I...I..." He pauses, and there's silence again. "I was thinking the mandate was clear, the request was clear."
"That they should arrest him."
"Mmm-hmm. Because the mandate is they can assist the government in arrest, and the government requested that they arrest him. So."
"But that was a while ago."
"Yeah, but there's no letter saying not to arrest him."
The ICC's official line on Bosco Ntaganda is that Kabila will arrest him eventually, and that the UN and the rest of the international community need to pressure him to do so. So MONUSCO saying they're legally, definitively just not allowed sounds a little buck-passy. When I tell Moreno-Ocampo he seems unhappy—in that he's glaring at me furiously—he says, "I am. Because I think it's a big shame that Bosco hasn't been arrested, and then, I figure we should do better." Moreno-Ocampo repeats often that one of the keys to international justice is consensus among the players, and he considers it his job to create it. "So. Yeah. Because if we are not doing all the things we can do...I have to focus on that. I have to focus on that, and I'm totally pressured to do that. See because..." Rough throaty exhale. "Fuck."
When I ask him if Bosco sashaying around Goma next to that big expensive peacekeeping force is making international justice look bad, he says, "It's easy [to arrest him]! I agree with you! Bosco's just a matter of will."
"It's a matter of will," he repeats. "That's the point. In all these issues, it's a matter of will. If you live in the Kivus, you are full of fear of Bosco—you have fear that you could be killed or raped or looted. It's not life. My clients out there are the people who live in the Kivus. And my way to protect them is to arrest the leaders who are committing the crimes." He says again that they can do better. He says again—five times—that it's only a matter of will. On the recording of this interview, he says many of these things over the sound of his knocking something agitatedly against the table.
It's the base of a champagne glass. It's after 9 p.m., and the Bellinis were ordered a half-hour ago. It's been a long day. I started shadowing Moreno-Ocampo at 8 in the morning, when he was in Chucks and jeans and finalizing the statement he was about to make to the Security Council on the Libya investigation they'd asked him to undertake. It was difficult but important, he told me as he tapped on his MacBook, to get people passionate about law: "When the world is divided, criminals profit."
And he and the ICC staffers in New York were excited about this speech! A situation like Libya, after all, is why the ICC was conceived, why now 116 member nations entrust the institution with the power to prosecute war criminals, to deter aspiring ones, to issue arrest warrants when a guy like Muammar Qaddafi launches a war against civilians. That morning, Moreno-Ocampo told the assembled council that the international community would have to cooperate in making the arrest. A new world of action, a new frontier of never again. He quoted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: "Now we have the ICC, permanent, increasingly powerful, casting a long shadow. There is no going back. In this new age of accountability, those who commit the worst of human crimes will be held responsible."
