by Randy Singer
The articles were confusing and contradictory. Some said that American drones had bombed a car during the evening prayer time on the busy streets of Aden. Innocent civilians, including many small children, had been killed. But the news agency for Saudi Arabia said the missiles had been fired from Saudi planes resulting in precise hits on Saleet Zafar and one of his lieutenants. Both of the men were allegedly plotting a terrorist attack in the port city of Aden.
Paige surveyed the photographs, but they were not helpful. Whoever had fired the missile had created a gaping crater, but there was no way of telling how many people had died. Nor was there any mention of an American among the casualties.
She called Gazala Holloman, but Gazala had not heard a word from Wyatt either. The news of Zafar’s death was a shock to Gazala. “He was a good friend to Cameron,” she said, and Paige could hear the sorrow in her voice. “He was a faithful servant of Allah.”
Paige, Wellington, and Kristen burned up the phone calls and text messages all day Wednesday, trying to piece together what had happened. The real panic set in early Wednesday evening, when they learned that Wyatt had not boarded his scheduled flight to Dulles. They talked about calling the State Department, but they didn’t want to jump the gun. They would have to reveal that Wyatt had planned on meeting with Saleet somewhere in Yemen. What if Wyatt was just delayed in his return? They kept texting and e-mailing him, hoping against hope that he would eventually respond.
After a sleepless night, everyone agreed that Paige should call Congressman Mason. He had been helpful in the initial investigation; maybe he could pull some strings now.
It took him most of Thursday to return Paige’s call. She explained that Wyatt had flown to Dubai and was planning on meeting with Saleet Zafar in Yemen. She told him what little she knew about Zafar’s death and the fact that Wyatt had not returned on his Wednesday-evening flight. Mason said he would look into it right away and get back to her.
Meanwhile, Paige and Wellington checked every flight from Dubai to D.C. and other East Coast cities, telling the airline representatives that they were supposed to pick up Wyatt at the airport. But nobody at the airlines had heard from him.
Congressman Mason had given Paige his cell phone number, and she called him back Thursday evening. The State Department seemed to be stonewalling him. There was a record of Wyatt clearing customs in the UAE when he entered the country but nothing more. Mason promised to call Paige as soon as he heard something.
That same night, Wellington called Wyatt’s son, but he didn’t even know that Wyatt had flown to the Middle East. He asked Wellington to let him know as soon as he heard any news.
By late Thursday night, a sense of foreboding had descended on Paige. She pulled up the photos of the devastating air strike again, just to make sure she hadn’t missed something. On the one hand, it would be just like Wyatt to come bounding back into the country two days late and wonder why everyone had been so worried. But that faint hope faded as Paige dissected the circumstances, trying to stay as objective as possible. This attack had all the markings of an American drone strike. It was a precise hit on a Muslim cleric, something her country had done before. And if they knew that Wyatt Jackson was in the vehicle with Saleet Zafar, the CIA could have annihilated every piece of evidence against them with one strategic missile.
Lawyers learn early in their careers that coincidence is the first cousin to cover-up. Coincidence should never be trusted—closer inquiry almost always revealed the fingerprints of manipulation and deception.
It was too coincidental that a drone strike against Zafar had occurred so soon after he had been scheduled to meet with Wyatt. Too coincidental that Wyatt had not been heard from since. A more plausible explanation was that CIA agents had followed Wyatt and that Zafar had walked into their trap. The only question in Paige’s mind still to be answered was whether Wyatt had been killed along with him.
Paige woke on Friday morning too emotionally drained for a run. She had been up most of the night glued to her computer, searching for any new information on the Aden attack. She had managed only a few hours’ sleep, and even that time had been racked with nightmares.
She drank her coffee and got dressed before the sun came up. She stepped outside and surveyed the parking lot, looking for nondescript sedans that might belong to the FBI. Every day since the grand jury hearing had been a day that Paige spent looking over her shoulder. Today would be no exception.
She stepped back into her condo and tried to force down a bowl of cereal. She had eaten very little in the last two days, worried sick about Wyatt and the FBI and the impending Supreme Court decision.
The pundits had predicted that the Court would act quickly, within just a few days. It was election season, and the chief justice would not want this decision hanging out there during the last few weeks before people went to the polls. Moreover, it was an emergency appeal, and the only question was whether Judge Solberg had adopted the right process or whether she should have dismissed the case on the basis of state secrets. Most experts believed the Court would issue a quick and concise ruling. Even those experts who predicted more lengthy written opinions speculated that two opinions had already been drafted—one supporting Solberg and the other throwing the case out. The only question was which side Justices Torres and Deegan would join. Which opinion would become the majority? Which would be the dissent?
Paige checked the SCOTUS blog that morning as she had done every day that week, but there was no announcement that the decision would be coming down that day. At 8 a.m. she got into her car and drove to Pungo Kennels, where Wyatt had boarded Clients for the week that he was gone. Paige explained to the lady at the desk that Wyatt had been delayed and that she was there to pick up Clients. The woman had Paige sign several documents and, after going to the back, reappeared a few minutes later with Wyatt’s big golden retriever pulling at the leash. Clients jumped up on Paige and started licking her as if Paige had been his lifelong friend.
“Clients is the best dog,” the woman gushed. “He loves everyone.”
Paige thanked the lady and left with Clients. She put him in the backseat, but before she could climb in the driver’s seat, Clients had bounded up front and was riding shotgun, his head swiveling this way and that, excited to have his freedom.
“If you’re going to stay with me for a few days, we’ve got to have an understanding,” Paige said. “No licking. No shedding. And no riding in the front seat.”
Clients leaned toward her as if he understood every word. He put a big yellow paw on Paige’s arm and leaned over to lick her.
“No! What did I say?”
Clients tilted his head as if he didn’t quite understand—a pathetic, endearing look that Paige couldn’t resist.
“Okay,” she said. “You can ride up front. But this licking stuff has to stop.”
Clients wagged his tail and sat straight up, his tongue hanging out. It actually made Paige feel a little better just to have Wyatt’s dog with her.
“We’ll have to stop at the puppy store and get some food,” Paige said as she backed out of the parking spot. “If you’re good, maybe we can get a bone and a toy as well.”
She glanced over at the happy dog riding next to her. She wasn’t exactly a dog person, but she couldn’t leave Clients in the kennel indefinitely.
“Wyatt Jackson, you owe me,” Paige said.
Fifteen minutes later, in the pet store, getting pulled from one aisle to the next by Clients, Paige received a text from Wellington.
SCOTUS blog says one opinion to be issued today.
She stopped and sent a reply. What time?
10 a.m.
Paige looked at her watch. There were no other emergency cases on the Court’s docket to be decided. In less than ninety minutes she would know if her case against Philip Kilpatrick and John Marcano was going to survive or whether it would die at the hands of the nation’s highest court.
90
Clients made himself right at
home. He spent an hour eating, doing his business outside, and sniffing around the small condo. He dragged a few dirty clothes out of the closet and presented them to Paige in her study.
“No!” she scolded. “Bad dog!”
He wagged his tail.
At 9:45 Paige logged on to the SCOTUS blog. Her hands were sweaty, her mouth dry, her heart beating as fast as it had on the day that she argued the case. A few years ago, lawyers in big D.C. firms would find out the results of cases by sending a low-ranking associate to the steps of the Court. The clerk would rush out of court with the results, and the associates would call back to their offices. Reporters would snag copies of the opinion and leaf through it, trying to quickly get the gist of what the Court was saying so they could be first on the air.
But now everybody sat hunched over a computer and watched the live SCOTUS blog titled #waitingforlester. Lester was the clerk of the Court, and the bloggers were sitting in the Court’s press room waiting for him to bring in the latest opinion as the results were simultaneously announced from the bench. And today there was only one opinion it could possibly be.
Commenters on the blog were all speculating about whether such a quick decision was good news for the plaintiff or good news for the defendants. Most believed that it meant a victory for the Anderson family. It would be easy for the Court to issue a short opinion saying that Judge Solberg was handling the dicey issue of state secrets properly and that the Court would issue a full opinion once the case was completed and came back up to the Court a second time. Other commenters were sure that a quick turnaround meant the Court was going to dismiss the entire case. It was obvious, they wrote, that state secrets were involved and that the Court could simply cite its prior precedent under the Reynolds case and dispense with this hot-button issue expeditiously.
Paige wanted to log on under a fake name and argue with the commenters, but what good would that do? Instead, she shot a text to Wellington. Are you nervous?
Terrified!
Wellington had been great, but on days like this he didn’t do much to boost her confidence.
Right at ten o’clock, almost on cue, Clients started pawing at the front door.
“Are you kidding me?” Paige asked.
Clients looked forlornly over his shoulder. He paced back to Paige and then returned to the door again, pawing at it some more.
Paige checked the screen. “You’re going to have to wait,” she said to Clients. This time he moaned as if he were talking to her, telling her that he couldn’t possibly wait. “All right,” she snapped. It wasn’t like sitting in front of the screen was going to change the outcome.
She put Clients on a leash and took him outside, where he wandered around in the grass and the bushes lining the parking lot, sniffing here and there as if he had to find the perfect spot to pee.
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes! Just go!”
Finally he stopped and lifted his left leg. Then he decided that it wasn’t quite the right spot and started walking around some more. It seemed like forever before he finally settled on a spot and peed for all of about two seconds.
“You’d better pray Wyatt makes it home,” Paige said to the stupid dog. She quickly took him back inside and sat down at her computer, scrolling through the comments she had missed. To her relief the opinion had not yet been released. The Court was apparently swearing in some attorneys who had just been admitted to the Supreme Court bar. Clients sat obediently at Paige’s feet, staring at her. He raised a paw and put it on her leg. She remembered how Wyatt had always given Clients treats when he came back in from outside.
“I don’t have anything,” Paige insisted. She immediately felt bad when Clients’s face drooped in sadness. He was already growing on her, and it had been less than two hours.
Back to the screen.
Here’s Lester with today’s opinion. Estate of Anderson v. Kilpatrick et al.
Paige sucked in a breath. This was it!
Fourth Circuit is reversed.
The vote is 5–4.
Justice Augustini dissents joined by three others. Deegan writes separately.
Paige stopped reading, stunned, as if someone had knocked the wind out of her. The screen began to blur and she had to blink away the tears. Five months of work, everything she had risked, and they had lost! The case would be dismissed. It seemed like the world was crashing around her. There was a finality to the Supreme Court that could crush a person’s spirit. There was nowhere to go from here.
The commenters were lighting up the blog, but Paige ignored them and clicked on a link to the opinion. Justice Sikes wrote for the majority. Paige felt sick as she thought about Kristen. She began to read the opinion but then decided there was no use. Who cared if the reasoning was logical or flawed? To whom would she complain? What did it matter?
She looked at the justices who had joined the majority. Chief Justice Leonard and the Beard were no surprise. Paige had never expected them to vote her way. Justice Kathryn Byrd, the quiet eighty-one-year-old conservative, had aligned herself as usual with the other right-wingers on the Court. But it was Evangelina Torres, the former Democratic senator from California, who had swung the opinion. Appointed by Obama, she had justified the drone program and secret CIA wars that he had relied upon so heavily during his two terms.
Paige scrolled down until she came to Augustini’s dissent and started reading there. The former Harvard professor wrote with palpable frustration that mirrored the emotions Paige was feeling at that very moment. At one point, she called the majority opinion “cowardly” for its failure to even question the executive branch about claims of executive privilege.
According to Augustini, the entire CIA drone program was troubling, an end run around the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war. It was a slippery slope from a constitutional republic to a dictatorship, and we were halfway down when the executive branch could command its own army with no oversight from Congress or the courts. At times like these, the novelist said, she felt like she was living in the land of Animal Farm, written by George Orwell in 1945 to mock the events leading from the Russian Revolution to the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union.
Paige felt somewhat vindicated reading Augustini’s arguments, though it did nothing to lessen the impact of the Court’s decision. Her phone was blowing up with calls from reporters and Kristen and Wellington. She ignored all of them and began reading the short separate dissent from Taj Deegan.
Deegan was new to the Court, and Paige knew it took guts for her to write her own dissent. Deegan lamented what this case said about the rule of law. She wrote eloquently about the Court’s motto of “equal justice under law” and how much that meant to the American system of justice.
The lowliest child from the most disadvantaged neighborhood would get the same treatment in this building as the president of the United States. Until now. Today’s decision obligates the president and her advisers to follow the rule of law only when they are operating domestically. But in international affairs, they have a get-out-of-jail-free card called “state secrets,” which allows them to do anything they want without judicial review.
The state secrets doctrine was never intended to be so broad that the courts cannot even inquire into the truth of a case. The safeguards Judge Solberg put in place appropriately ensured that state secrets weren’t revealed while at the same time holding high-ranking officials accountable in the same way as ordinary citizens.
When a plaintiff comes into this Court and claims that the chief executive of our country, aided by her top advisers, knowingly sacrificed the lives of American troops to advance her political agenda, this Court cannot and should not wash its hands of that matter under the pretext of state secrets. In times of war, the executive branch will feed on fear, and the people will willingly sacrifice their constitutional rights in hopes of achieving greater safety. It is this Court’s sworn duty to prevent the executive branch from devouring those rights that so many men and women have died to p
rotect. It brings me shame to see our once-strong Court cower behind the doctrine of state secrets and believe, as Pontius Pilate once did, that history will not judge us harshly.
I may be on the wrong side of today’s opinion, but I am more concerned with being on the right side of history. When today’s opinion ultimately takes its place among the Dred Scotts and Plessy v. Fergusons of our jurisprudence, which it surely will, I will be proud to say that when the votes were taken, I told Chief Justice Leonard that I respectfully dissented.
Paige finished reading and paused to collect her thoughts. She could remember few cases where the justices had shown more emotion than this. She swallowed hard as she thought about Wyatt Jackson and his analogy of the Alamo. Winning hadn’t been the goal here. The debate was now raging just the way Wyatt would have wanted.
She wished he could have read what she’d just read. She wished he could see what was happening on the Internet even now. If he were around, he would probably be on the steps of the Court denouncing the five justices in the majority and calling for Americans to sit up and take notice. He would vow to expose the CIA’s shadow war and the kill list and the lack of transparency by the Hamilton administration.
But he wasn’t here, and for the first time Paige allowed herself to admit what she knew in her heart to be true. Wyatt Jackson wasn’t coming back. He had flown too close to the flame, and the CIA had taken him out.
It made her angry and frustrated and filled with regret all at the same time. Wyatt had literally died fighting for his client. And now, the case had died along with him.
She leaned over and started rubbing Clients’s ears and scratching his back. The dog wagged his tail like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Your master was a brave, brave man,” Paige said, her eyes filling with tears. “I’ll bet they didn’t find any wounds in his back.”