A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Boston was one of the clients Alka and Vasudev Patel had cultivated since taking over the Shell station in 1992. He was a regular. All those years ago Alka had figured that if you treated your customers well they would come back.

  ‘Who knows,’ she had told Vasudev, ‘they might even do you a good turn one day.’

  Stroman’s former employer now had all the pieces of the puzzle.

  ‘I’m on the way back to the shop and I’m thinking to myself – and about three miles further on I just say MARK.’ Boston’s eyes narrowed. ‘Shy saw Mark with a gun . . . No! That’s billions to one!’ Boston told himself to forget about it, but he couldn’t. ‘I get to the shop and I tell my wife, “I have this strong feeling. I have no clue why, but I’ve just got a hunch.”’

  Boston called a friend at the District Attorney’s office. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there’s a shooting that the FBI’s investigating, and it’s off a Shell station. I just passed there about an hour and a half ago.’

  He then repeated the story Shy had told him a couple of days earlier: the gun, the mask, the cash demand. Refusing to divulge any names, he suggested that if the Shell station’s CCTV footage showed a well-built guy with a shaved head and arms covered in tattoos they should call him back. Five minutes later the phone rang. He was summoned to the police station, where the tape was played.

  ‘Is this the guy?’ an investigator asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  Boston didn’t even need to watch. ‘I can hear the voice,’ he told him. ‘I know it.’

  ‘Tom,’ said his friend, ‘this isn’t the only one. There’s others.’

  For legal reasons, I can’t tell you about the others. I can’t even tell you how many others there were. The murder of Waqar Hasan, shot in the face with a .380 automatic at Mom’s Grocery at 10819 Elam Road, on 15 September; the partial blinding of Raisuddin Bhuiuian by a .410 shotgun shell from a Cobra double-barrelled pistol at the Buckner Food Mart on 21 September.

  I also can’t tell you about the midnight drives, the attempts to shunt cars driven by Arabs – or people who looked like Arabs – off the road. And I can’t tell you about a plot to fill a Ford Thunderbird with arms, drive it to Richardson Mosque on Abrams Road, and open fire on everyone in the building.

  I can tell you that in each of these cases the victims – or planned victims – were Asian immigrants. And that in none of these crimes was any money stolen. After Waqar Hasan was shot at Mom’s Grocery two thick wads of banknotes under the till were left untouched. And, although Raisuddin Bhuiuian offered the cash register’s contents to his assailant, it was refused. Strange robberies, indeed.

  I can also tell you how the story ends.

  Stroman recognized the 212th Federal Court the moment he was led in. It was the room from his bad LSD trip. Above the front of the court were the TV screens, used to present evidence of the crime. To the left of the courtroom were his friends and family. To the right, relatives of the deceased.

  The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Ballistics had matched the bullet to Stroman’s gun; the shooting was captured on CCTV from two different angles. His attorneys had very little to offer: not only had he admitted his guilt to the police when he was arrested, but he had also demanded an interview with KDFW-TV and confessed to two further shootings on air.

  ‘They drew first blood,’ he told the TV crew. ‘They attacked American soil first. I retaliated against the people that I thought retaliated against me.’

  Stroman proved quick work for a Texas jury. The first stage of the trial lasted just a day and a half. On the morning of 2 April 2002, he was found guilty of murder.

  In the second stage, the punishment phase, Stroman’s attorneys had more to work with: his childhood, his parents, his history of drug abuse. It was still an uphill struggle. The jury needed a good reason to grant clemency, because the prosecution had an excellent reason why it should be denied. Stroman had done bad things. He was a bad man.

  Evidence of his traumatic childhood didn’t cut much ice in court. State prosecutors Greg Davis and Robert Dark discounted it as ‘all that same stuff (‘when all else fails, blame your parents for not giving you enough love’). The defendant wasn’t some sad, abused child, they assured the jury. Stroman was a ‘predator’, ‘as violent as they come’, a man who would ‘just as soon kill you as take a breath’. His life was ‘a roadmap that leads directly to the death house’. He was a ‘cancer on society’, ‘one of the most dangerous individuals you’ll ever see in your life’.

  To back up these claims, the prosecutors presented evidence of repeated run-ins with the law, dating back to charges of aggravated robbery in 1981 – when Stroman was just twelve. There followed a roll-call of shame as his wrongdoings were described to the court. Car crimes in 1983; burglary the same year; possession of an offensive weapon in 1985; entering to rob in 1986. At one point he had even stabbed his own wife in the throat. The common link between these incidents? All took place before he was eighteen years old.

  No, said Davis and Dark. Stroman might have been dealt a bad hand, but he didn’t deserve any sympathy for it.

  ‘He did exactly what he wanted to do,’ stated Davis. And all along the line he had a choice.’

  Stroman’s ‘patriot’ argument was likewise declared worthless. According to the prosecutors, 11 September had offered him an opportunity to settle a few old scores. Sensing, correctly, that the mood in the United States had changed, he had deliberately stepped outside of the law, unilaterally establishing his own set of rules, the ‘Stroman Rules’, then acted on them. Among them was the fact that 9/11 had destroyed the presumption of innocence: all Asians were now to be presumed guilty and punished.

  ‘He has the rules,’ said Davis, ‘which would allow him to become a self-appointed vigilante.’

  This kind of behaviour, the prosecutor told the jury, wouldn’t wash under anyone’s description of the law. It was unacceptable and illegal. It was downright dangerous.

  The defence tried every available angle, from foetal alcohol syndrome to outright patriotism. But they were unwilling to put all their eggs in one basket. No one argument, it seemed, was strong enough to justify the magnitude of the crime. Simply, the attorneys weren’t sure what to argue, because they didn’t truly understand why Stroman had shot Vasudev Patel. Beyond the wall of patriotic mumbo jumbo he was spouting to anyone who would listen, Stroman himself seemed not to know.

  Two medical experts were called. Dr Judy Stonedale argued that Stroman was suffering from Acute Stress Disorder, brought on as a result of 9/11. This might be the reason he had been unable to recall his own motives clearly, or the sequence of events. It might also be the cause of his comment that when he shot Patel ‘it was like someone else was doing it’.

  Dr Mary Connell agreed. Stroman, she said, had been paranoid, suspicious, guarded and agitated – ‘in extreme distress’ – for months prior to 9/11. The attacks, appalling to any normal person, were much more so to someone in his vulnerable state. The eleventh of September was a perfect trigger.

  In an aside, Connell was asked about bereavement. Her answer was revealing. ‘In any grieving process,’ she said, ‘there’s an initial reaction of shock. There’s denial, where the person can hardly believe that this has happened . . . And then there’s a tendency to be angry – and very, very angry.’

  All of the ingredients for Stroman’s crimes were present prior to 9/11. His propensity for guns, for over-reaction, his xenophobia, his hot-headedness, his insular world view and his parochial, inflexible sense of patriotism were already there. They just needed a catalyst to bring them out. Stroman was madder than hell.

  The jury didn’t care. On 4 April 2002, Stroman was sentenced to death. To the consternation of the court, he stood to attention, held up a US flag, saluted the judge and thanked him for the sentence before being led away.

  2

  For Those Who Come across the Seas

  For those who’ve come across the seas

  We’ve
boundless plains to share;

  With courage let us all combine

  To advance Australia fair.

  Australian national anthem

  Karim al Saadi was woken by a surreptitious knock at his Jakarta guesthouse door. Bleary-eyed, the Iraqi schoolteacher checked his watch – 1 a.m. – and slipped open the lock. An agitated stranger was standing outside.

  ‘Abu Badr sent me,’ the man whispered. ‘It’s time.’

  Saadi was used to this kind of clandestine summons. He and his wife Halima were seasoned nomads. Since fleeing their home in 1991, they had traversed a substantial part of Iraqi Kurdistan on foot, before bribing their way into Iran, where for nine years they had eked out a living selling T-shirts on street corners.

  In June 2001, alerted to the fact they were due to be arrested, they had procured false travel documents and skipped the country, flying to Kuala Lumpur. They had successfully navigated the entire length of Malaysia without passports or visas, then secreted themselves into Indonesia, at night, by boat. Since July, they had been hiding out, avoiding the attention of the authorities, and waiting.

  The couple dressed, shouldered their bags and followed the stranger outside. It was time. Abu Badr said so. After a decade of running, the Saadis’ journey was finally coming to an end.

  On the opposite side of Jakarta, a similar scenario was unfolding. Like the Saadis, Rashid Kahtany and his wife Soham had been living illegally in Iran before hot-footing it to Indonesia. Rashid, too, was an Iraqi schoolteacher. Unlike the Saadis, however, Rashid and Soham were travelling with children: their daughters, nine-year-old Tuka and eight-year-old Duha.

  The Kahtanys had also entrusted themselves to Abu Badr’s Indonesian network. Not that it was cheap: Badr had demanded $1,500 per adult (at that price, he laughed, children could travel for free). Kahtany, who didn’t have the money, had offered a deal, handing over his entire life savings and promising to pay the outstanding $1,000 later.

  Badr had agreed. He could afford to: business was good. This one operation would net him somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million dollars. Besides, he figured, there was no shortage of Iraqis willing to part with their cash.

  Although the Kahtany and Saadi families had grown up just 120 miles apart, they had never met. In the early hours of 5 October 2001, however, their stories merged: strangers yet neighbours, brought together 5,000 miles from home, on a fishing boat.

  The moment he arrived at the beach, Saadi had misgivings. The Olong was old and battered – and small: just twenty-five metres long. He asked a friend, an engineer, for his opinion.

  ‘He looked at the engine, and he said it was good,’ recalls Saadi. ‘He said, “It’s OK, the boat’s not bad. But this is a lot of people. A lot.”’

  It was a lot of people. By the time everyone was on board, there wasn’t enough room for them to sit, let alone lie down. Fewer than half the passengers, mostly women and children, fitted under the canopy. The rest were forced to stand or squat on the outer decks and roof.

  ‘This is dangerous,’ Soham Kahtany told her husband as they boarded. Concerned for the safety of her children, she asked other mothers what was going on, and was assured that this was only a ferry to the main trafficking boat, which was too big to come in to the shore. It was a pretty feeble explanation, but it was better than the alternative: that the Olong was a death trap. That didn’t bear thinking about. Of the 223 refugees now on board, 74 were children. One boy, Mustafa, had been born when his mother was traversing Indonesia. He was just twenty-one days old.

  The Iraqis had come a long way. They had spent all their money. They had no documents. They could not retrace their steps. Rashid Kahtany hunched down on the edge of the roofed area, pulled Tuka on to his lap and wrapped his arms around her. Inside, his wife did the same with Duha.

  ‘We didn’t have any experience.’ He shrugs. ‘We didn’t know anything about boats.’

  Boatbuilding was not the only subject of which the family could plead ignorance. None of them could swim.

  Just before first light, the boat’s three-man crew hoisted a tatty Indonesian flag and cast off. The helmsman brought the boat around and set a fixed course of 174 degrees. Almost due south. As the Olong ferried its precious cargo into the heart of the Indian Ocean, the sun began to rise and there was a brief moment of elation. Some of the refugees shook hands. They had almost made it. Next stop: Australia.

  There was a certain irony in the departure date. The fifth of October was the very day that John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister, had chosen to call the 2001 federal election. Meteorologically, the signs were fair. Politically, however, the forecast was dreadful. The Iraqis were sailing into a storm they couldn’t possibly have understood, let alone predicted.

  Illicit traffic is an aspect of globalization that Western governments are unwilling to accept. We’re supposed to be shipping our products, information and democracies to the Third World; they’re not supposed to be sending theirs back over to us. But by the time the Olong set sail, that was exactly what was happening.

  Globalization had rendered borders porous: all kinds of stuff was slipping across. This reverse traffic – ‘globalization from below’ – proved every bit as unstoppable as that from above. How were we supposed to monitor it? Police it? Conventional notions of borders, border protection and national security had come to seem outdated, even rather quaint.

  Australia was not alone in facing the problem of asylum seekers. Everyone wanted to help refugees; what they didn’t want was hordes of economic migrants showing up to claim asylum, then living off social security for the rest of their lives. In Australia in 2001, this was what seemed to be happening – just when there was an election coming. It made the Government look bad. And it wasn’t a terribly popular government to start with. In fact, it was on its uppers.

  At the start of 2001, Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal coalition had been trounced in a series of catastrophic state elections. By March the Liberals’ main rival, Kim Beazley’s Labor Party, was polling a full nine points ahead. Pundits predicted a landslide: Labor needed only a handful of new seats to win office. They were expected to gain sixty. The Liberals, hailed by press reports as ‘simply unelectable’ in 2000, were on the way out.

  This mood prevailed inside the administration, too.

  ‘Parliament House was a bit like a ship itself one senior Liberal insider told me in 2008. ‘The rats were all leaving. Almost nobody believed that Howard was going to win that election.’

  Even the Prime Minister was a doubter, later admitting that in April and May 2001 he was in ‘the depths of political despair’.

  Kim Beazley meanwhile, was supremely confident, telling colleagues they were going to ‘surf into office’. His enthusiasm was infectious.

  ‘It looks as though we can’t lose,’ said his chief of staff. ‘Unless there’s a war.’

  * * *

  As the Olong passed out of sight of land, the refugees scanned the horizon, hoping for a glimpse of Australia. On board the mood was a delicate balance between trepidation and fear: they were nearly there, but this was the most dangerous part of the trip.

  For Ali Alsaai from Najaf the balance swung early on, when his five-year-old daughter Banin was violently sick.

  ‘She started vomiting,’ he recalls. ‘She needed water, but when we gave it to her she just threw up.’ Banin then passed out. At that point her older sister, Hawraa, began to vomit, too. ‘Diarrhoea and vomiting. The children just cried and cried. And there was no doctor on the boat. Then we got scared.’

  When the sun set the situation deteriorated. During the day the air had been warm and the water calm, but after dark the temperature plummeted, the swell grew and the boat began to heave.

  Rashid Kahtany shakes his head. ‘Very bad,’ he says. ‘When the night came, that first night, there were big waves. They washed over the deck.’ Those on the canopy roof congratulated themselves they weren’t ankle-deep in water. Then it began to rai
n and they got soaked, too.

  In the dark, everyone began to suffer from motion sickness. Children cried out for their mothers, who, in turn, cried out for their husbands. But the boat was rolling so heavily that no one could even stand.

  ‘We had one lady,’ says Soham Kahtany. ‘I thought she was going to die. She couldn’t drink anything. She vomited and vomited and vomited. She couldn’t even open her eyes. And it was so cold. Very, very scary.’

  The mood on the boat now swung decisively from apprehension to fear. In the darkness, the refugees began to pray out loud.

  Although the Iraqis felt abandoned, they weren’t. Actually, quite a lot of people were looking out for them – most of them on board a Royal Australian Navy frigate 150 miles to the south-east. HMAS Adelaide and her commanding officer Norman Banks had received intelligence from the mainland that a Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel – ‘SIEV4’ – was out there somewhere. It was their job to find out where. Unfortunately for the refugees, however, Adelaide’s mission was not to help them reach their destination. In fact, it was the exact opposite.

  The first clue the Iraqis received that something was afoot was when they spotted an aeroplane in the early afternoon of the second day. After the horrors of the night before, they crowded on to the upper deck and waved. The crew of the P-3 Orion, Mariner 1, turned back for a second look and at 1.14 p.m. a message was relayed to Adelaide: a teak-hulled SIEV, flying an Indonesian flag, was a hundred miles outside Australian waters, heading south at a speed of 8 knots. Fifty people were visible on the roof. All were wearing lifejackets. Inside Adelaide’s operations room the Olong was designated a Critical Contact of Interest. Five minutes later, the vessel’s identity was confirmed. Adelaide had found her target.

  When Adelaide caught up with SIEV4 three and a half hours later, Banks launched a pair of rigid-hulled, inflatable boats (RHIBs) to open communications with the asylum seekers. The crews of the RHIBs pulled up alongside the Olong and demanded to speak to her skipper. When he failed to appear (he had disguised himself as a woman and was hiding among the families under the boat’s canopy), the sailors ordered the asylum seekers to turn their boat around. They refused. The scene was now set for a second night at sea. It was to be considerably more traumatic than the first.