The Way of the World Page 2

  The official’s been there for decades and was there, on site, during America’s brief springtime of robust human intelligence—the year or so after 9/11—which ended with the military campaign in Iraq, as anti-American sentiment became the currency of global opinion and terrorist recruitment skyrocketed. The United States hasn’t caught a top terrorist of any real value in two years. Even if many Muslims hate al Qaeda, they don’t want to help the United States. If someone were to see something pertinent in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Yemen these days, he’d most likely look the other way. Let America get its comeuppance.

  This state of affairs is untenable—a loss of intelligence capability that will end in disaster—and he thinks about why, about how America went from a country that people wanted to help in its time of need to one they’d just as soon see humbled.

  And each time he goes through this exercise, he comes back to Iraq and the suspicions of so many, in the United States and abroad, that we went to war under false pretenses. He thinks it’s the key reason the United States has lost its moral authority in the world. People—at the agency and around Washington—dismiss it, the whole mess, saying it’s all past tense, let it go. But he knows more than they do—more than all but a dozen people, maybe fewer, inside the U.S. government, with two of them being Bush and Cheney.

  He knows there was a secret mission a few months before the war—a top-drawer intelligence-gathering mission that the United States was involved in—that found out everything we later learned. That there were no weapons. And we knew in plenty of time.

  But what he knows—this troubled public servant—is itself only a glimpse of something much larger, and still submerged.

  It is a violation of American principle and law that lies, quiet and sure, beneath the country’s misfortunes. And, like a demon, it must be exorcised before dawn.

  THE NEXT MORNING, A SUNNY, cloudless Sunday, Candace Gorman’s low heels crunch across the sandy paths of Guantánamo Bay.

  She tries to make conversation with the guard escorting her; he’ll have none of it. He’s a young soldier, tall and blond, and he seems angry at her. He leads her silently to a small second-floor room in the complex and locks her inside.

  The man sitting at a table across the room, his leg chained to the floor, looks quizzically at her. “How do I know you are who they say you are?” he says in serviceable, accented English. “Maybe you’re someone here to trick me.”

  Candace fumbles through her purse and hands him a business card. He shrugs. “Anyone could have printed one of these.”

  All attorneys registered in Illinois have to get a new bar membership card each year, and Candace, a pack rat, has kept them all. She digs through her briefcase for her official ID. She finds it after a minute, and last year’s, too. And the one from the year before. Five minutes later, twenty-six laminated cards are lying on the table. She’s had the briefcase for a quarter century.

  “Welcome, Mrs. Gorman, and thank you for coming here. I have imagined it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. al-Ghizzawi, I am officially your lawyer.” With that exchange of consent, Candace Gorman, a fiftyish civil rights lawyer from Chicago, mom of three teenagers, steps to the edge of a border, a low, long table separating her from a man the U.S. government calls among the “worst of the worst.”

  They settle into this odd, longish room, used for both interrogations and attorney visits, with its small table, two chairs, and cell in the corner—an eight-foot-square cage with a cot, a toilet, and a door, now open. Candace pulls out her file, which contains two notes her client has sent her about his declining health. “How are you feeling? That’s the first thing.”

  Ghizzawi sighs, and begins to list his ailments and their history. His health began to decline in 2004, and he’s been in increasing pain ever since. He’s been vomiting constantly; his stomach is raw. He’s lost about forty pounds. There is pain in his left side, in his back and his right leg—the one chained to the floor beneath his chair. Candace watches him carefully as he speaks. He’s about five feet ten—but he can’t weigh more than 120 pounds. He’s pale, yellowish, and weak.

  She doesn’t want to ask him too many questions to start, thinking about how many have already been thrown at him in interrogations. So she talks about herself and mentions that she works on cases involving civil rights. The term seems unfamiliar to him.

  “In the U.S., we have rights that people have to be treated the same regardless of their religion, their race, or whether they are a man or a woman, and these rights are defended by laws. If a company or the government breaks those laws in regard to someone, I represent them. I file lawsuits in the federal court.”

  He nods, tentatively.

  “And I think your rights are being denied, because you have the right to at least know why you’re being held.” But before that sentence, about rights denied, is halfway spoken, Candace’s mind seems to slip backward, locking onto something she’d buried during the months of principled debate and legal struggle just to get here: this man might actually be a terrorist. Her victims of race, age, or sex discrimination were just working people. Mr. al-Ghizzawi could be Taliban, or even al Qaeda. She pushes the thought from her mind. Beside the point. This is about due process, about letting the law do its work.

  First, she needs to get his story straight, and she does: How he was a baker in Afghanistan who moved with his family, as the bombs fell, to a new town. As a Libyan and a stranger, he was summarily accused of being a terrorist and handed over to U.S. officials in early 2002 in return for a sizable bounty.

  Candace fills one legal pad after another. Ghizzawi becomes more engaged, hour by hour, wanting to know everything about Candace and her family. She says her father, nearly ninety years old, has recently become ill, and they talk about that. “You’re lucky to have a father who has lived such a long, full life,” he says. She smiles—yes, that’s true—and then tries to keep that slippery thought (He could be a terrorist) in her grasp.

  “One morning,” he tells her on the second day they’re together, “I saw a tiny flower, a rose, growing in the sand just beyond the bars of my cell. I thought, I am like that rose. Neither of us belongs here.”

  Candace feels her eyes welling up. Shake it off. “So what are you reading?” she says, changing subjects. There’s a book lying open on his cot. He complained earlier about not being able to get the reading materials he wants, especially scientific or medical books to assess and perhaps diagnose his medical condition.

  He tells her it’s Moby-Dick, an abridged version in both Arabic and English.

  She’s delighted—tells him, “It’s one of the most famous books in the English language”—and they talk about the plot and characters.

  “I know it is a very good book, very famous,” he says. “But I don’t understand, why does Ahab want to kill this whale so very much? It was just a leg. He only lost a leg. It’s not like he lost his arms or his family was killed. He is still able to be a captain. Why so much vengeance to get the whale?”

  “Well, he’s obsessed.”

  Ghizzawi shrugs. “This guy just doesn’t give up. I don’t understand.”

  She looks at him, befuddled. Soon she’ll be leaving; they’ve been talking for nearly three days. And nothing is adding up. Could he be a terrorist and not understand Ahab’s obsession with his target? Or a hard-bitten Taliban fighter who finds common cause with a rose? She snaps to and bites down hard on reasonable suspicion.

  But it’s all moot. Guilty or innocent, this man deserves the due process of law. Period. She tells him, matter-of-factly, that she plans on filing a variety of appeals to get at the evidence arrayed against him. Might take a month, maybe two.

  He watches her talk, his feet, filthy and blistered, shuffling in green foam flip-flops, like the ones kids wear at the beach. From the talk of plans and dates, he knows she’s leaving. “I really need medical help,” he says, softly. “This is what I need the most. I’m afraid. Please, I don’t want to die here.” br />
  The world stops, for an instant, as a man, a Muslim who’s been swept around the world by history’s currents to a jail cell in Cuba, pleads for mercy to a woman from Chicago, a lawyer, a mom, and a Christian, who, suddenly off balance, tries to grab hold of principles formed across millennia—through Hammurabi and Blackstone and Learned Hand—to break her fall. It is faith in the law she turns to. It’s all she can offer really, she thinks, as that Aristotle quote—a law school standard about how “the law is reason, free from passion”—pops into her head.

  This is not personal.

  BUT, OF COURSE, IT IS—as is this intensely personal book. It’s about how people, in America and abroad, are trying to grab hold of what may be one of the most powerful forces on earth—moral energy—which flows, most often and most fully, from the varied and connected chambers of the human heart.

  Dig deeply enough and it becomes clear that the great public institutions, and the law itself, are actually built on the most intimate of human qualities, such as honesty or forgiveness. Each of the characters mentioned thus far is driven—sometimes unwittingly—by very basic human values. Rolf is stumbling forward, sleepless, looking for simple truths to help him burn off fear. Candace is trying to find a place within the law for a powerless Muslim man and to prove, at least to herself, that justice is maybe more about compassion than judgment. George Bush has an important role, too. As people lament America’s diminished moral authority and point to the president’s actions and image as the cause, they are using Bush as a fixed point—something to push against—in charting new paths. That would apply, for instance, to the intelligence official who carries an enormous lie in his churning gut. It is one of the great lies in modern American political history. He wants simply to say we’re sorry, and we’ll learn from our mistakes, as all truly great nations must.

  It’s a sad turn at a time of crisis—as religious fanatics search tirelessly for history-ending weapons—that the conduct of nations and of leaders, both duly elected and self-appointed, is so unimaginative and self-defensive. And that America has lost so much of the moral power that the world now desperately needs it to possess.

  That dispiriting truth is something the characters in this book, like so many others across the planet, have begun, at long last, to see as a starting point.

  It’s a starting point for their journeys, each quite personal, to find a moral compass, and a way forward.

  ACT I

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES

  CHAPTER 1

  Welcome Home

  USMAN KHOSA AWAKES TO THE voices of his roommates in the kitchen. A hazy sun is shining in, giving the exposed brick above his bed an orange hue. He checks his night-table clock—7:15—and slips back into the deep sleep of a young man.

  It is morning in America. Or at least in an apartment near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., where three young, well-educated men start a summer’s day. They are friends, a few years out of Connecticut College, dancing through the anxious glories of first jobs and few obligations. It’s a guy’s world. Linas, a strapping Catholic, American-born, with Midwestern roots, is an economic analyst; David, Jewish and gay, with wavy brown hair and movie-idol looks, is a public relations staffer for an international aid organization. After breakfast, they slip out together, each in a blazer and khakis, Christian and Jew, straight and gay, into the flow of the capital’s professional class.

  Their Muslim roommate hears the front door shut and rises with a sense of well-being. He’d worked late, as usual, and then met some friends for dinner, a night that went late with loud talk and drink. He came south to D.C. from Connecticut just over three years ago, a day after receiving his diploma with its summa cum laude seal, to a waiting desk at an international economic consulting firm, Barnes Richardson, with offices across the street from the U.S. Treasury Department and a block from the White House. He finds the work fascinating because it is: taking sides in bloodless struggles between countries and their major corporations over product dumping and tariffs. Trade wars. It’s the kind of conflict that smart folks thought the world was moving toward in the mercantile 1990s, when the Soviet Union’s fall was to usher in a post-ideological age, a period when aggression would be expressed, say, with tariffs on imported cars and wheat dumping. It was a hopeful notion that issues of progress and grievance, the fortunes of haves and have-nots, would be fought on an economic field where the score could be kept in terms of GDP, per capita income, and infant mortality rates. It wouldn’t turn out that way, as the few who saw the rise of religious extremism foretold.

  And that’s why the boy brushing his teeth this particular morning—July 27, 2006—is not just any young professional on the make. He is, notably, a Muslim from the fault line country of Pakistan—the home, at present, of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Pervez Musharraf and Mullah Omar, fifty-five nuclear weapons and countless angry bands of Islamic radicals. Usman, from this place, of this place, strives with an ardent, white-hot yearning to be accepted into America’s current firmament of fading hopes. Like each fresh wave of newcomers, he presses mightily to make that hope new. Whether he means to or not, he’s testing American ideals at a time of peril.

  It’s a fault of cultural nearsightedness, or worse, that he is not immediately seen as identical to immigrants glorified in oft-told tales of potato famines or Russian pogroms or, back further, a search to worship freely by some Mayflower stowaway. He is, after all, identical to them in every essential way.

  But his journey involves a blue ’78 Toyota Corolla. In Pakistan, a car is a symbol of a man who can move as he wishes, where he wishes. A new one is a rarity, a luxury, and Usman’s father, Tariq, was given the car as a wedding gift from his father, who told Tariq that a married man should have a car, and he should be his “own man, beholden to no one.”

  The Khosas have a deep history in the region that now lies at the geographical heart of modern-day Pakistan, but the family is not among the few dozen elite who long ruled South Asia and cut deals with the British when the empire took over in the 1860s. The shaping hand of the Brits is still keenly felt in the region, particularly in its cutthroat academic tradition. Competition would be too generous a word. It was more emancipation through recitation, a test of classical British learning with a million contestants, a handful of winners, and enormous prizes, all determined by a crucible known as the civil service exam. In the vast country of India, a fraction of the highest scorers would win coveted acceptance into the civil service—the bureaucracy, running their country for the British—which came with grants of significant leverage over their countrymen and subtly stolen rewards. Even after India broke free in 1947, the civil service test remained, grandfathered in by the country’s ruling elite, who could recall the posting of scores—the day, the minute, the sensation—like a family’s second birth, cited often and judiciously from parent to child across eras.

  Usman’s grandfather, a very good student, finished one slot out of the money, so to speak, but carried the fervor of the runner-up into the newly created state of Pakistan. As a young man, he met Muhammad Ali Jinnah and thoroughly internalized the great man’s vision of a Muslim state that would break away from Hindu-dominated India; an Islamic republic with mosque-state separations and protections modeled loosely on Western democracies, where religion would be largely a private matter and rigorous education all but deified. Jinnah’s idea was that this balance would allow the growth of a professional class that would become the country’s cornerstone of progress. Usman’s grandfather embodied that vision. He became a lawyer, involved himself in countless public causes, and began to sell what land the family had built up in the past few centuries to educate his children in the finest regard Pakistan had to offer. Usman’s father, Tariq, was the eldest and the first beneficiary, taking his college degree and that blue Toyota on an array of edgy professional missions and rising through Pakistan’s competitive bureaucracy to become one of the leading law enforcement officials in the country. Like many bureau
crats, he moved between government houses, even had government servants, but acquired little cash, and so the remainder of the family’s land was sold to educate his children at Pakistan’s best schools. This meant that Usman’s sister, two years his senior, starred at Lahore’s finest private academy for girls and won a full scholarship to the London School of Economics. And that Usman, a blazing student at Lahore’s exclusive Aitchison School—built a century before by the British to educate the children of India’s feudal families—was given a full scholarship to Connecticut College. The problem came down to what wasn’t covered: the costly flight from Pakistan to America.

  After twenty-two years of faithful service, the Toyota spoke to Tariq. He’d invested an abundance of attitude and nostalgia in the old blue beast, buffed it regularly, scraped out rust; he could feel the distance traveled, for both car and driver, in the sag of the chassis, the glossy bareness of the upholstery. Everyone knew what the car meant to him, and what it meant when he sold it for his only son’s plane fare to America.

  That’s how the Khosa line—Jinnah’s line, in a way—passed to Connecticut, where Usman studied fiercely, headed the Muslim Students Association, and became a leader in the student government. He met his current roommates as a sophomore presiding over the freshman class’s disputed student government election, in which both Linas and David were candidates. They both ended up winning their races, and all three now see this as rich and ironic, that Usman—hailing from the due process–challenged Pakistan—was the Connecticut College election commissioner who handed out victories. They furthermore think it’s “sitcom-worthy” that a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim are sharing an apartment as the world’s us-versus-them divisions seem to be boiling over. They argue, with fierce good nature, over who should do the dishes or whether Usman should introduce Linas to a nice Muslim girl or find a nice Muslim boy for David. No loss of confidence in the cross-border ideal, not here. In fact, this three-bedroom apartment—galley kitchen, utilities included—is a safe house of sorts, the opposite number to a cell of young religious radicals arguing over the dishes in Wembly or Karachi or Kabul.