To Be a Friend Is Fatal
Page 29
“We’ve undertaken a number of reforms,” she said, “the first phase of which was completed this spring, but we’re still at it.” I thought back to the number of times over the past five years I had been told that the government was “ramping up” its efforts.
A State Department representative revealed that the backlog for in-country cases—those who had applied at the embassy in Baghdad—was thirty-five thousand names long. Given the current pace of processing, it would take years to clear.
A director of another refugee organization confronted Power with a case that he had just worked on in which a man with a mentally handicapped son and wheelchair-bound mother was denied a visa on security grounds. “How could this make sense?” he asked.
“We’re operating with very highly classified material, and having been in your shoes for most of my career, I know how frustrating that is to hear.” She replied that although she could not go into precise details of what causes a red flag to be raised, “the trend lines are the product of a stark fact: the system we had in place before wasn’t recognizing the threat.”
In a somewhat impolitic tone, I suggested that just because something has the word Intelligence on it doesn’t make it smart. I said that these were the same excuses that the Bush administration used to rationalize its failure to do more to help our Iraqi allies.
She wasn’t pleased. “I take issue with the suggestion that we’re invoking security as a way to explain away the numbers. A huge amount has been achieved. I meet on this issue more than any other. I don’t know what the Bush administration’s explanations were, but we are not single-issue here, and we’re not going to do anything that puts in danger the security of the United States.”
I was being unreasonable, I suppose, for focusing on a single issue. Never mind that we had been invited in to discuss that issue. She addressed my call for the Guam option, saying that the Refugees Bureau at the State Department had developed the capacity to “get someone moved from Baghdad to Amman very quickly,” but those of us working the issue had heard this unfounded claim for years.
I thought about the binder of five hundred names we’d given to Secretary Schwartz at the beginning of the year. In the nine months since we had flagged the fifty most urgent cases for his bureau, not one had been moved to Jordan. Only about ten had been granted visas.
The disregard for the Guam option was made more bitter by the fact that only a week earlier, the administration announced that the US Air Force had ordered scores of wounded Libyan rebels airlifted directly to Boston for medical treatment. Little was known about the rebels, but a C-17 medical evacuation aircraft staffed with doctors and nurses whisked them in. A few days before my last NSC meeting, a Rolling Stone magazine article about the war in Libya quoted a White House official close to Power as saying that she had grown frustrated with “doing rinky-dink do-gooder stuff” like advocating on behalf of Christians in Iraq.
But I perked up as a junior NSC staffer chimed in to announce two major “solutions” that the White House had placed on the table. The first was a “web tool” to help Iraqi interpreters locate former supervisors. The second was a waiver of the “original signature” for the Special Immigrant Visa: Iraqis could now email the application rather than bring it to an Iraqi post office. I stared down at the notes I had just taken and suppressed a laugh. Of the thousands of Iraqis on the list, not a single one had ever complained about having to mail in the application that might save his or her life. And the overwhelming majority had little difficulty finding their US supervisors—in fact, many had been referred by their American bosses.
The problem wasn’t in the application phase, it was the fraught period of waiting after the application was submitted. All they got were form replies from the US government saying, “Your application is pending.”
After the meeting, an NSC staffer approached Marcia Maack, the pro bono coordinator at Mayer Brown who had handled hundreds of List Project cases, and said, “We know the Iraqis on your list have a subjective fear, but there’s no objective basis for them to be afraid after we leave.”
* * *
On December 14, 2011, the president flew to Fort Bragg, home of Hayder’s former unit in the Eighty-Second Airborne, to announce the end of the war in Iraq. He promised to provide adequate benefits to the many wounded warriors: “Part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who fought it. It’s not enough to honor you with words. Words are cheap. We must do it with deeds. You stood up for America; America needs to stand up for you.”
The next day, five years to the day after I first wrote about Yaghdan, the New York Times ran an op-ed in which I excoriated the Obama administration for its failure to protect US-affiliated Iraqis as we withdrew from Iraq: “The sorry truth is that we don’t need them anymore now that we’re leaving, and resettling refugees is not a winning campaign issue. For over a year, I have been calling on members of the Obama administration to make sure the final act of this war is not marred by betrayal. They have not listened, instead adopting a policy of wishful thinking, hoping that everything turns out for the best.
“For the first time in five years,” I wrote, “I’m telling Iraqis who write to me for help that they shouldn’t count on America anymore. Moral timidity and a hapless bureaucracy have wedged our doors tightly shut, and the Iraqis who remained loyal to us are weeks away from learning how little America’s word means.”
In the final month of the war, 153 Iraqis were admitted to America, the lowest since the early months of the Bush administration’s feckless response to the crisis. The List Project received more and more pleas for help, but I could ask my part-time staff to take on only so much.
* * *
A few weeks later, in January 2012, a journalist called to ask about the most recent NSC meeting on Iraqi refugees, and I realized that I was no longer on the White House’s invite list.
23.
Subjective Fear
From: Omar in Kirkuk
To: The State Department
Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011. 12:38 p.m.
Subject: Immigration application
Greetings to those of you working in the immigration office. I ask your help in considering my request. . . . I need a speedy solution to my situation, which is filled with persistent threats. My fear is that they’ll be carried out: people want to kill me because I worked with the U.S. Army. Please help me come to America. Attached are some of the certificates and records of my work. Gratefully . . .
Courtesy of Omar’s family.
Omar’s Certificate of Recognition from the 15th Brigade Support Battalion, US Army.
Courtesy of Omar’s family.
Omar’s Certificate of Appreciation from the 501st Brigade Support Battalion, US Army.
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Sunday, October 9, 2011. 8:29 a.m.
Dear Applicant,
Please be informed that your application is in process but we still need a VALID official email address for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment and a copy of the CONTRACT between your company of employment and the U.S. Government so that we continue processing with your application normally. Please note that we need this to prove that your employment was funded by U.S. Government through an official contract or agreement.
If you could not provide us with required contract number please print and read the attached form carefully and then fill it, sign it, scan it and finally send it back to us, so that we be able to help by trying to contact your former employer for the information.
Please reply directly to this email and do NOT change the subject line.
Thank you.
Shortly after they arrived in my in-box, I spread Omar’s documents and emails out across my kitchen table, trying to arrange them in chronological order. When I ran out of space, I used the chairs, then the floor, and then the walls.
A picture of the man was emerging. Omar had driven a forklift
for the US Army in Forward Operating Base Warrior, where he helped to load and unload shipments of food, vehicle parts, medical equipment, and other materials for our troops. His support letters glowed with praise: “Your dedicated service to the U.S. is appreciated and will not be forgotten,” and “Your commitment, dedication, and efforts to ensuring all missions were accomplished to the highest of standards in support of the American warfighter.”
In one email, I found a scan of his passport, which he obtained a couple months after first applying for refuge in America. He was my brother Derek’s age and kept his hair cropped short for his passport picture. There is a very faint sense of a smile.
But after I located his initial application—submitted six months before the end of the war—and the first response he received from the State Department, I knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Although he had submitted six letters of commendation from Americans in his first email, I wondered why State was asking a forklift operator who did not speak English to locate a copy of the federal contract under which he worked.
I searched through the stack of pages for the next round of correspondence, which occurred two weeks after President Obama announced the end of the Iraq War:
From: Omar
To: The State Department
Date: Saturday, December 31, 2011. 9:46 a.m.
Peace and respect for everyone who works in your office. My brothers, I wonder if there’s any news that you might share with me? What is the latest with my case? With great thanks.
* * *
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Wednesday, January 4, 2012. 3:50 p.m.
Dear Sir/Ma’am,
Thank you for your email.
We have checked your case and found that it’s in processing pending verifying your employment.
Please note that once you are scheduled for an interview he will be contacted.
Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.
Six months had already passed since he applied, and although the State Department had apparently stopped asking for a copy of the federal contract number, it was now requesting contact information for someone who could verify Omar’s employment history. This was despite the fact that his original application included the names of ten American supervisors, seven of which were active soldiers in the US Army.
The State Department wouldn’t do anything with his case until it received yet another email address, for some reason, but Omar was struggling with a deteriorating sense of his security in Kirkuk. He drafted his next letter in bright red, as if to underscore the urgency of his situation:
From: Omar
To: The State Department
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012. 5:23 a.m.
Peace and respect to you all. I’d like to explain some of the critical developments that have happened to me in Kirkuk. I feel that I’m in a very critical situation. My security situation isn’t good, and I’m seeking your guidance.
I fear for my life and the life of my family, and I’m asking for you to help me by transferring my case to a neighboring country. If you were able to transfer my file to Turkey, then my family and I will go to finish the visa process there.
I await your speedy reply, God Willing.
* * *
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2012. 2:38 p.m.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your email.
As per our phone conversation and as you were counseled regarding your wish to transfer your case to turkey, Please be informed that this program (Direct Access) is only run in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. If you were in United Arab Emirates or Lebanon, please check with info@icmcturkey.org
Please note that you have to provide us with different contact info (Official Email address) for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment.
Once we receive this, we will proceed with your case.
Kind Regards,
State soon sent another email to say that even if Omar fled, there were no guarantees that his application would be processed. They also pasted in the same form language, requesting “different contact info” for a supervisor or HR officer who could verify his employment.
A few days later, Omar sent the name of his cousin in America, who was sponsoring his application for resettlement.
The response was becoming distressingly familiar:
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Sunday, March 11, 2012. 10:13 a.m.
Dear Sir/ Ma’am,
Thank you for your email.
Kindly be advised that your case is still missing please note that you have to provide us with different contact info (Official Email address) for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment. (The email address must be an official one—not yahoo, Gmail, MSN, hotmail, etc.)
Once we receive this, we will proceed with your case.
Kindly be informed that we checked your case and found that it is in processing pending verifying your employment documents. Once it is completed we will move forward with your case.
Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.
I wondered who came up with the final line, which was used in nearly every email exchange with Omar. If I had learned anything in five years of engaging with the State Department, it was that patience is not an accelerant within the engines of bureaucracy.
The day after Omar was told to be patient, the Lightning Brigade of the Ansar al-Sunnah Army—a known Al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq—delivered a letter to him.
Courtesy of Omar’s family.
Omar’s death-threat letter from Ansar al-Sunnah.
Omar had already stopped working for the Americans; the war was over and they were gone, but the Ansar al-Sunnah militia was untroubled by such distinctions:
To the atheist agent Omar,
You are warned that if you do not accept the orders of the mujahideen by leaving your work with the American forces, your work as a spy . . . we have warned you many times before, but you did not heed them, nor did you return to the correct path, so we, the army of Ansar al-Sunnah in Iraq, have decided to carry out the punishment of execution if you do not leave your work. . . .
I taped the death threat to my kitchen wall and sifted anxiously through the remaining pages of correspondence. These were the desperate pleas of a hunted man, and I struggled against the direction in which these emails were headed. In one letter, Omar wrote to say that he’d fled to Turkey the day after receiving the threat, hoping to find work and an apartment in which his family could stay while his application was processed. After a few weeks, though, he realized that he would be forbidden from working in Turkey, so he returned to Kirkuk. He began to move his wife and five-year-old son from house to house, hiding from the Ansar al-Sunnah.
In every letter he’d received from the State Department until this point, he’d been asked for the contact information of a “different” American supervisor. In late March, his cousin in America finally located the email address of one of Omar’s first bosses, a materials manager for Parsons, one of the major US reconstruction contractors. Omar excitedly sent the contact info to the State Department.
A few days later, on April 5, the State Department’s Iraqi Employment Verification Unit wrote to the Parsons supervisor, asking him to confirm Omar’s work. His supervisor responded with a confirmation letter exactly twenty-five minutes later.
It seemed, as I read the next exchange, that the impasse had finally been broken:
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Monday, April 9, 2012. 8:09 a.m.
Dear Sir/Ma’am,
Thank you for your email.
We have received the POC below in your email and it has been added to your case file.
You will be contacted in the future for any further updates.
* * *
From: Omar
To: The State Department
Date: Monday, April 9, 2012. 5:45 p.m.
Peace and greetings, my brothers. Now that you have the official email address, I’m wondering whether my file might be transferred to Jordan. Are there any steps left that I need to do?
I need resolution: the time is passing here. I don’t own anything. I don’t work. I’m moving from house to house, from here to there. I beg you to find a solution. Please call me.
* * *
I could hardly believe the State Department’s subsequent reply. Less than ten days after informing Omar that it had received the employment verification letter from his Parsons supervisor, the following poorly written email was sent:
From: The State Department
To: Omar
Date: Tuesday, April 17, 2012. 1:41 p.m.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your for your email.
We have checked your case and found that it’s in processing your employment verification.
Please understand that the process is lengthy and might need a long period of time.
Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.
Since your employment has been verified yet you aren’t advised to transfer your case to Jordan.
Kind Regards
All I could think of was Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long’s 1940 cable, in which he ordered his consuls to “put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” After all, Omar had submitted far more documentation than the State Department requires from refugees of any other country on the planet, but they kept asking him for more. And each time he gave them what they asked for, they asked for something else.