To Be a Friend Is Fatal (40 page)

Omar took the call in another room, speaking for approximately two minutes. He returned to tell his wife that he needed to step outside but would come home soon.

Her worry mounted as she waited. She called his cell phone several times, but Omar did not pick up.

Shortly after ten o'clock, the local Kirkuk news channel ran a headline in the news ticker along the bottom of the screen announcing that the decapitated body of a young man had been found in her neighborhood.

Omar's wife called his brother in a panic, begging him to go to the police station to see if it might be Omar.

The police confirmed the headless body's identity by the ID card found in Omar's pocket.

At the funeral, Omar's brother received a text message from an unknown number, telling him that he would be next if he didn't flee.

After the funeral, Omar's wife received a warning that her son would be kidnapped if she did not leave Iraq.

Using Omar's email account, his brother wrote to the State Department:

From:
Omar's Brother

To:
The State Department

Date:
Sunday, June 17, 2012. 10:47 a.m.

I am Omar's brother. Because of the numerous and continuing threats against him, he had asked you to expedite or transfer his case to Amman or Turkey.

But because of your delays, he was murdered a week ago at the hands of an unknown group.

From:
The State Department

To: Omar's Brother

Date:
Monday, June 21, 2012. 2:25 p.m.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for your email.

Please provide us with your brother's death certificate.

Kind Regards

Even in death, a requirement for additional information. I found a letter from State to Omar's widow, in which it said, “We would like to send you our sincere condolences for your husband's passing away. We are really sorry for your loss. May his soul rest in peace. Kind regards.”

Omar's brother was having a difficult time obtaining the death certificate from the coroner, but he was under the impression that the State Department would not do anything to help them until he sent over a copy. He finally emailed a scan of Omar's death certificate on July 5. In the section requesting an explanation for the death, the coroner had two options: “1) a sickness or condition that led to death, or 2) other important factors that led to death not owing to any sickness.” The coroner had left this section blank but scrawled “hemorrhaging from the neck due to the tearing of veins and arteries caused by a sharp implement” in the corner.

On July 18 Omar's brother sent State a copy of a death threat he received from a militia called the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiya Order, composed principally of former Ba'athist militants: “You were with the agent Omar, who was a dog, acting as the eyes of the Americans.” Omar's brother was now asking the State Department to evacuate the surviving members of the family from Iraq.

This was the response the family received:

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar's Widow

Date:
Thursday, July 19, 2012. 2:55 p.m.

Dear Ma'am,

Thank your email.

As per our phone conversation, please provide us with the following:

1. Your husband's death certificate

2. different contact info (Official Email address) for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify your husband and verify his employment.

Once we receive this, we will proceed with your case.

Kind Regards.

Such were the “enhanced” procedures that the US government devised in order to assess the potential danger in Iraqis who risked their lives to help us: a mindless and insatiable demand for more information.
I sat on the floor of my kitchen, angrily leafing through the remaining pages, in which the State Department repeatedly requested information it had already received. Omar's supervisor at Parsons was sent the same email from State's Iraqi Employment Verification Unit several times over the summer of 2012: each time it came in, he responded with the same letter on official letterhead. Some period of silence would pass before the same request from State came back.

Each time Omar's widow and brother wrote to the State Department, they received the same auto reply asking for “different contact info” for a supervisor. “Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.”

As I studied Omar's increasingly panicked messages in the weeks and months before his assassination, I couldn't understand why the State Department was having such a problem with his case. If, for some reason, the letter from the Parsons supervisor was insufficient, couldn't it have reached out to one of the many US Army officers whose names and signatures emblazoned each of his many commendation letters?

It took me ninety seconds on Google to locate the official military email address of one of Omar's bosses in the warehouse at Camp Warrior in Kirkuk. I wrote to ask if she remembered Omar and received a response within forty-eight hours:

When I arrived to Kirkuk there were about 10 workers to include Mr. Omar that were already working in the Class I warehouse and they became our continuity. Mr. Omar was very helpful in the changeover between my unit and the outgoing unit. He taught several of my Soldiers how to operate the forklift and helped to familiarize them with the warehouse. This was important and instrumental in our ability to hit the ground running without a break or delay in class I resupply; our Soldiers have got to eat! I am very sorry to hear this, he was a very hard worker and just wanted to provide for his family and be happy.

The List Project is now trying to get Omar's widow, son, and brother's family resettled to America, on a dead man's application. When we informed the State Department that we were taking on the case, the problem of verifying his employment suddenly disappeared.

As of July 2013, Omar's family is still in hiding in Kirkuk. State
informed us that “if a case is not expedited, our estimate has been that it will take approximately two years from first enrollment in the program until the first interview. This is the unfortunate result of the popularity of the program and the security and logistical constraints that affect the capacity of our processing program.

“We have taken advantage of the departure of the military to expand that capacity (moving into a bigger building, hiring more people now that we have room for them), but ramping things up takes time.

“Unfortunately,” the message from the embassy concluded, “patience will still be required.”

But the Lord came down to see the city

and the tower the people were building.

The Lord said,

“If as one people speaking the same language

they have begun to do this,

then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down and confuse their language

so they will not understand each other.”

—Genesis 11:5–7

W
hen I was little, a singsong Sunday school teacher taught me the Old Testament wrath of God. I followed along in my illustrated children's Bible, poring over brightly colored pages of flood and fire and destruction. The men of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon once hatched a plan to build a tower tall enough to climb into heaven and verify the existence of the Lord, who was so threatened by the project that He brought their tower down, first by fire and then by earthquake. Anyone who laid eyes on the ruins went mute. God was exasperated: He had destroyed His creation only a few generations earlier with a great flood, but here they were, still rebellious and ambitious, collaborating with one another on a tower of doubt. So He smashed apart their ability to speak in one language, turning them against one another for eternity.

And
that's
why people speak different languages, cooed the Sunday school teacher.

Only a few chapters later, the Lord was planning new ruin, this time
upon the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But Abraham pleaded with God for their salvation: If He found fifty righteous people there, would He spare the cities? When God accepted, Abraham asked if the cities might be saved for forty-five righteous souls. Down and down he haggled with the Lord, until they settled: if ten righteous souls could be found, the cities would be saved.

The illustration in my Bible of the destruction that ensued terrified my young eyes: a rain of burning sulfur, immolating bodies and burning vegetation, ruin rising from the land like smoke from a furnace. Had the Lord found only nine righteous souls, I wondered?

After the Blackwater mercenaries were burned in Fallujah, I remember reading outraged bloggers calling upon American leaders to lay waste to the city as though it were Sodom or Gomorrah. As I rode through its ruins, there was little I could say to the kids other than to stay away from our Humvee; seven years of Arabic studies, and all I could do was to stare silently at them with the nervous hope that they weren't hiding grenades.

I still wonder whether Abraham might have talked God into sparing the cities to save just one or two righteous souls. The number that they agreed on, ten, reflects a legal maxim that is better known as Blackstone's formulation: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. Maimonides called it the 290th Negative Commandment, saying, “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way.” During the Salem witch trials, Increase Mather declared, “It were better that ten suspected Witches should escape, than one innocent Person be Condemned.”

Benjamin Franklin so fervently believed in the principle that he set the ratio at a hundred to one. The Supreme Court has repeatedly invoked Blackstone to support its interpretation that the due process clause of the Constitution requires prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

That we should not reduce our principles to rubble as we size up evil in the world is a notion as old as the Bible. Shortly after 9/11, though,
legal theorist Alan Dershowitz suggested that America found itself in a new, unprecedented era. To him and many others, the advent of terrorism meant “the calculus may have changed.”

As I cleared the fateful correspondence between Omar and the State Department from my kitchen table, it occurred to me that the calculus of Blackstone has not simply changed, it has been inverted: the US government would rather leave behind one hundred innocent people like Omar to face assassination than to admit one potentially guilty man. An Iraqi interpreter must prove himself innocent beyond all bureaucratic doubt, however reasonable or unreasonable it may be.

I imagine that theorists like Dershowitz would argue that Blackstone's formulation wouldn't apply, since Omar wasn't an American citizen. But Omar was beheaded for aiding the United States. Skeptics might also suggest that his death was an anomaly, but it is painfully evident that many more have been killed. While no comprehensive list exists of slain and injured US-affiliated Iraqis, a partial account was leaked to me in 2008 by a sympathetic employee of Titan, the contractor that employed Hayder and Zina and thousands of interpreters under a $4.6 billion contract with the Defense Department. Over 679 rows, the database—meant to track potential insurance obligations—tracks the fate of hundreds of Iraqi interpreters:

• Death caused by multiple injuries sustained during torture

• Death due to booby-trapped house

• Gunshot wound jaw

• Gun shot wounds to the face and hip

• Shrapnel in the eye and lost a couple of teeth

• Kidnapped and death

• 1 round in Rt Thigh, 1 Round in the upper Rt thigh, 1 Round in the Scrotum

• Shockwave caused collapsed lung

• Extreme damage to the RLQ of abdomen and right thigh with apparent exsanguination (total loss of blood in the body)

• Loss of right leg above the knee and 3 fingers missing on the left hand. Possible loss of remaining leg.

The Titan database records 280 deaths over just the first few years of the war, but tens of thousands of Iraqis worked for other American contractors, so the true number is likely an order of magnitude greater. I have yet to meet an Iraqi interpreter who can't rattle off the names of several slain colleagues. If George Bush or Barack Obama had been willing to exercise leadership, many of them would have been saved, but instead the bureaucracies under each president's control continue to regard these friends as potential enemies. They do this, they say, to protect us against terrorists, who hate us for our values.

In 2007, soon after the founding of the List Project, I flew to Geneva to attend the first UN summit on the Iraqi refugee crisis. After checking into a small hotel in the village of Chambesy, on the outskirts of the city, I logged into my email to find an urgent message from a state.gov address. Its sender was a foreign service officer who said that he needed to meet with me that night. I brushed him off, giving him my phone number but declining a meeting.