500 Days (85 page)

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The legal fights challenging the president’s policies on the detention and treatment of suspected terrorists played out over several years. And in the end, with each ruling by the Supreme Court, the administration lost.

The names of the men whose cases changed American policy became known worldwide—Shafiq Rasul, one of the members of the Tipton Three and the first to file a habeas petition; Yaser Esam Hamdi, the American citizen captured in Afghanistan and then held in a navy brig in Norfolk; Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s former driver; and Lakhdar Boumediene, one of the Algerian Six who had been reluctantly turned over by officials in Bosnia-Herzegovina after they were threatened by the United States.

The High Court slowly chipped away at policies that had seemed impervious to attack. The
Rasul
ruling held that American courts had the authority to determine whether foreign nationals detained at Guantanamo were lawfully imprisoned. Under
Hamdi,
the court decided that American citizens had the
right to challenge their designation as enemy combatants before an impartial judge. The
Hamdan
case was the most earth-shattering, declaring that only Congress, and not the president, had the authority to set up military commissions, and found the panels established by Bush ran afoul of both the laws of military justice and the Geneva Conventions.

Congress responded in 2006 with the passage of the Military Commissions Act, which gave the government the authority to try suspected terrorists before the tribunals. The law also included relaxed rules of evidence, allowing the admission of hearsay and information obtained through coercion interrogations, without the defendants’ having any chance to confront their accusers.

The law stood for two years, until the court issued its opinion in the
Boumediene
case, holding that constitutional rights extended to detainees held in Guantanamo. With that foundation to the ruling, the court continued that the prisoners had habeas rights and that the Military Commissions Act was an unconstitutional suspension of those rights.

Almost all of the men whose names are now linked to those decisions were either released without charges or given a minimal sentence. Rasul and the other members of the Tipton Three—Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed—were sent back to England in March 2004 after being detained for seventeen months. They were freed the next day. That was not the end of the story. In 2007, both Ahmed and Rasul agreed to appear on a British television show where they would be given a lie-detector test. Ahmed failed, and admitted that he had visited an Islamist training camp and had been trained to use an AK-47. Rasul refused to go through with the test.

Also in 2004, Hamdi—who had been captured in Afghanistan with Taliban fighters—was sent back to Saudi Arabia, on condition that he renounce his American citizenship. After being held for two and a half years, he also was never charged.

Salim Hamdan was the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried by military commission. In the case, which was heard in 2008, Hamdan was charged with conspiracy and providing support for terrorists. After eight hours of deliberation, the military officers on the jury found Hamdan guilty only on the second count. The prosecution urged the judge to sentence Hamdan to a term of thirty years to life; the defense sought forty-five months. In a rebuke to the administration’s portrayal of Hamdan as a dangerous terrorist, the judge sentenced him to sixty-six months but credited him with the sixty-one months he had already
been held. Hamdan was released after five months. He now lives in Yemen with his family.

The story of the Algerian Six proved to be the most disturbing. They had been arrested in Bosnia under accusations that they were plotting to bomb the American embassy in Sarajevo; that allegation was dropped when their case was finally heard before a review board at Guantanamo. Instead, the administration argued that they should continue to be held on the basis of bizarre allegations: that one of the men taught karate to orphans; that another, during his compulsory military service in Algeria, had worked as a cook; that a third wore a ring similar to those favored by a group connected to Hamas. Only a single claim rose to the level of an actual charge—that one of the men had joined al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the battle at Tora Bora. The claim was false—at the time of the Tora Bora conflict, he was in a Sarajevo prison at the insistence of Bush administration officials.

The men were held for almost seven years and saw the inside of a civilian court only because of the ruling in
Boumediene.
In their filings, the men contended that there was no basis for their detention, and federal judge Richard J. Leon agreed. He tossed out all charges against five of the men, but ruled that the secret intelligence information against the sixth justified his detention.

In dismissing the case against the five, Leon said, “To allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation. The court must and will grant their petitions and order their release.” Their seven-year detention, Leon declared, had been illegal.

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By the summer of 2008, the world was closing in on Dr. Bruce Ivins.

The investigation into the anthrax killings of 2001 had overtaken his life. No longer was he the FBI’s golden boy, the scientific brains behind the inquiry. Instead, he had become the government’s lead—and only—suspect.

A technological breakthrough was the first step in Ivins’s transformation from hero to villain. The new test allowed researchers to detect minor mutations that served as a biological fingerprint for anthrax; samples of the bacteria could all be linked to the original source. Using that technique, the government determined that the anthrax used in the attack had been derived from RMR-1029, a batch developed by and in the possession of Ivins.

While some scientists argued that the test was far from conclusive, other evidence developed by the FBI was even more compelling. Investigators reviewed
Ivins’s unapproved efforts in April 2002 to decontaminate his work area and determined that the spots he had chosen to clean invariably were tainted with anthrax, an anomaly that went far beyond statistical chance—Ivins, the agents concluded, knew where to look.

The government also learned of his bizarre obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, and discovered that a Kappa location was just 175 feet from the mailbox in Princeton where the anthrax letters were mailed—again, an improbable coincidence. Moreover, the bureau determined that in the days leading up to the anthrax mailings, Ivins had uncharacteristically worked nights in the lab, a change in routine that would have given him time to prepare the deadly weapon. They caught him in lie after lie.

Then there was the code. A review of the first mailings revealed an exceedingly complex message hidden within sentences, specifically, in the letters that had been written in boldface—
TTT, AAT,
and
TAT
. Each was an accepted scientific code for the three acids involved in the makeup of DNA, playing a role in the production of phenylalanine, asparagine, and tyrosine; the single-letter designation for each was
F, N,
and
Y
. The first letter of each acid—
PAT
—spelled out the name of one of the women who had been a target of his obsessions. The letter designation—
FNY
—was a slang term for “fuck New York,” a city that was also one of Ivins’s fixations and that he hated with a deep-seated passion.

Detecting ciphers hidden in DNA was not an invention by Ivins; the book
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
dealt in part with hidden messages, including DNA codes. Ivins was fascinated by the book, which had been given to him long before by the microbiologist from Kappa Kappa Gamma whom he had stalked for years. When he realized that he was a suspect, Ivins went out late at night and threw the book into the garbage. The FBI was watching, and agents immediately snapped up the trash as evidence.

Ivins had been exposed by his own deceit and lies. He was forced to testify before a federal grand jury at least twice. Agents had searched his house, his office, and his cars—anyplace where he might have hidden something. Indeed, nothing in the anthrax researcher’s life was private anymore. Everyone he knew—including people he hadn’t spoken with in years—was questioned. Other raids of his garbage turned up more than a dozen pornographic magazines and fourteen pairs of semen-stained panties. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, the bureau demanded that he submit to a DNA test to determine if the semen was his.

But the investigation was about to reach a new stage. The government was
preparing to indict Ivins for committing murder through the use of a weapon of mass destruction. His lawyer notified him that he would soon be arrested.

What little remained of Ivins’s sanity cracked. He had often told his therapists of his desire to kill himself or others, and his homicidal thoughts were escalating. By July, his obsessions focused on Kathryn Price, a law school lecturer who participated in a television reality show called
The Mole.
Under the rules in that program, a group of ten contestants compete in various tests; however, one of them is the mole, secretly responsible for sabotaging the efforts of other participants. On the final day of the program, Price was revealed as the mole, and Ivins flew into a rage about what he perceived as her betrayal.

On July 6, Ivins opened a new Yahoo e-mail account under the name “Stanford Hawker,” a name apparently derived from his fixation on the schools attended by the woman who was now in his crosshairs. Price held degrees from both Stanford Law School and the University of Kansas, where the sports teams were known as the Jayhawks. For the password, he typed a sentence as one word:
killkathrynprice.

When Price admitted to being the mole, one of the contestants should have killed her, Ivins said in diatribes posted on YouTube. “He should have taken the hatchet and brought it down hard and sharply across her neck, severing her carotid artery and jugular vein,” he said. “Then when she hits the ground, he completes the task on the other side of the neck, severing her trachea as well.”

Now that the show was over, Ivins wrote, he could only hope that somebody else would give her the punishment she deserved. “The least someone could do would be to take a sharp ballpoint pen or letter opener and put her eyes out.”

Three days later, Ivins’s fury was boiling over, this time at his colleagues and the FBI. That evening, he attended his regular group therapy session, which was being run by two counselors, including one named Jean Duley. Members of the group were engaged in role-playing, exploring bonds between fathers and sons. As the evening unfolded, Ivins—whose own father had frequently told him that he had been unwanted—grew increasingly agitated.

Duley noticed. “Bruce, is there something you want to discuss?”

Ivins clenched his teeth, shifting his gaze rapidly back and forth across the floor. “There’s nothing,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Come on, Bruce, this is a safe place. We’re here for you. What’s troubling you?”

His head jerked up. “All these damn people! The FBI, the government, the
whole system! They have been doing everything they can to destroy me! They shouldn’t take me on! I’m the wrong guy to take on. I’m not going to let them do this!”

“Bruce,” Duley said, “try to focus.”

“I’m not going to face the death penalty!” he snapped. “I’ll kill myself first!”

Duley leaned in. She needed to explore this suicide threat, to find out whether Ivins was serious.

“Bruce,” she said, “do you have a plan for how you would kill yourself?”

Ivins face locked in a bizarre smile. “Yeah, I’ve got a plan,” he said. “I’ve got a list. I’ve got a bulletproof vest and I’m going to get a Glock handgun from my son. I can’t go get it. The FBI is watching me. But my son can get it. I have a list. My coworkers, the FBI agents, everyone who’s gone after me, everyone who’s betrayed me. They’re all on it. I’m going to get them all.”

No one spoke.

Ivins’s words rushed out as he jumped from topic to topic. “I’ve been walking around the ghetto areas of Frederick at night, looking for someone to try and hurt me. I’d just call out ‘Come on, nigger boy!’ Then I’d stab them in the eye with this sharp pen.”

He removed a pen from his pocket and showed the other members of the group. “This is what I would use,” he said. “Slam it right in the eye.”

Back to the plot for a killing spree. “It could be done,” he said. “I’ve got a bulletproof vest, I can get a gun. It’s a good plan. I’ve really thought it out well. Cleaning it all up could be done. It would all work.”

One of the other group members spoke. “If you’re innocent, then why are you doing what you plan to do?”

Ivins smiled, but said nothing.

“I’m not going to do anything in the next twenty-four hours, because I’m not ready,” he said.

The other members of the group listened to his ravings with fear. Finally, someone told Ivins he was making everyone uncomfortable, and the conversation moved on. After the meeting, Ivins spoke to one of the attendees.

“You’ll see me in the papers,” he said.

To Duley, Ivins’s statements did not sound like fictitious ramblings, so the next morning, she contacted the Frederick Police Department. The authorities obtained an order allowing them to involuntarily commit Ivins to a hospital. He was arrested that day at Fort Detrick and driven to Sheppard Pratt Health System in Baltimore, where he was admitted to the psychiatric unit.

•  •  •  

The FBI was notified of Ivins’s statements at his group therapy session and raided his house again. They discovered hundreds of rounds of ammunition, smokeless handgun power for semiautomatic and automatic weapons, a bulletproof vest, and a shield that could be used for body armor. The plans he described for mass murder, the agents concluded, had been real.

•  •  •  

Ivins was released from Sheppard Pratt on July 24. A family member protested, urging the hospital to keep him in long-term care, but the doctors ignored the objection. He was given an August 11 appointment for a psychiatric follow-up, eighteen days later.