To Be a Friend Is Fatal (38 page)

“What am I looking at here, Kirk?”

I spoke as though I were just refreshing his memory, unwilling to contemplate the possibility that he truly didn't know. “That's in the current Defense Authorization requiring you and other agencies to survey the current population of Iraqi employees and to produce a contingency plan.”

“I've never seen this before.” He looked back up at me and asked, “This is the law of the land?”

“Yes. It has been for about fifty days so far. The deadline is about two months away.”

Schwartz turned to his row of backbenchers. They all had L-shaped erect postures. “Guys, did you know about this?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” someone replied. “We are in interagency talks about it.”

Contented, he turned back to me and said, “Yeah, so interagency discussions are under way, Kirk,” and then set the paper on the broken table.

I handed him the latest binder of names on the list. He passed it to a staffer, who thumbed through it and said, “Kirk, we can't expedite five hundred names. Can you give us, say, the fifty most urgent cases in this binder?”

Annoyed, I said that they were all urgent, but I agreed to send them an email within twenty-four hours highlighting the fifty most critical cases in the binder.

In May 2010, the deadline of the Hastings Amendment, the FBI announced the arrest of two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky in a sting operation in which the men apparently tried to purchase missiles to send back to Iraq to use against American forces. A confidential informant, reportedly another Iraqi refugee, tipped off authorities after one of the men bragged about planting bombs back in Iraq. When the FBI looked into their backgrounds, they discovered that these two men had carried out hundreds of attacks against US forces in Iraq, and that their fingerprints were linked to a phone that had been used to detonate an IED and was now stored at the FBI's Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center in Quantico, Virginia. More than seventy thousand defused bombs from Iraq and Afghanistan were warehoused at the center, but analysts were six years behind in extracting intelligence from the IEDs.

These men had come in through the traditional Refugee Admissions Program. They never claimed any affiliation with the United States but somehow made it through the process that so many of my former colleagues were struggling to navigate.

Hearings were scheduled, during which freshman senator Rand Paul of Kentucky crowed, “There's no reason to continue this policy” of granting visas to Iraqi refugees. To the assembled officials from the Departments of State and Homeland Security, Paul continued, “I don't fault you for missing the needle in the haystack. . . . You've got to make the haystack smaller.”

The response was as fierce as it was predictable. I'd lost track of the number of times over the years that the government announced “enhanced” screening measures for Iraqis, but there would be still more enhancement. The following month, the Iraqi refugee program sputtered to a near halt. The traditional Refugee Admissions Program, which had hit a monthly average of roughly 1,500 Iraqis, was back down to numbers not seen since the earliest days of the crisis: 111 in March, 184 in April. The Special Immigrant Visa program remained lifeless: each year, fewer than 20 percent of the 5,000 slots were filled. Iraqis on my list had all but given up.

The Kentucky arrests pushed the debate all the way back to the John Bolton days, when people asked why Iraqis should even receive refuge in the first place. There was a self-defeating and maddening circularity to it all: even though the government had slowed the process of granting visas to a glacial pace over the years, it still screwed up by admitting two men who clearly should have been denied. Its own failure then justified further measures to slow the program. With roughly a half year left in the war, the time frame for receiving a visa had stretched to an average of eighteen months.

The deadline for the Hastings Amendment was only a couple weeks away, but I knew from my meetings with Schwartz and sources inside Iraq that the Obama administration had ignored it entirely. No needs assessment had been conducted, and no contingency plan had been drafted.

I contacted Tim Arango, the Baghdad bureau chief for the
New York Times
. He wrote a front-page story about the disregarded Hastings Amendment, which included a dismissive quote from Secretary Schwartz: “We feel that we are prepared to deal with any variety of contingencies.”

The negative publicity prompted an eleventh-hour report by the Pentagon,
a juvenile effort consisting mostly of guesswork and useless charts that had been copied and pasted from other reports. “Preparation of this report cost the Department of Defense a total of approximately $5,001” was emblazoned across the cover page. In an angry op-ed for the
Washington Post
, I pointed out that by comparison, the Pentagon had spent $15 billion on air-conditioning the previous year.

They had won. Everything I threw at the bureaucrats in the State Department—op-eds, lists, journalists, lawyers, politicians, history, hearings—it was all deflected by a wall of USGspeak. When I thought I had finally contrived a way to force them into action through legislation, they simply ignored it.

On November 4, 2011, I participated alongside other refugee organizations in my last National Security Council meeting with Samantha Power, although I didn't know then that it would be my last. The tenor was quite different from earlier in the administration, when everyone had been so excited to meet her. The numbers were disastrously low, and refugee organizations were no longer impressed by her personal stature. At one point, a veteran refugee advocate asked Power why the United States even had a refugee program if the process was so tortuous and inefficient.

“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.

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 . . .