To Be a Friend Is Fatal (31 page)

After a wealthy donor read about my efforts, I was able to leave behind the mattress in the Brighton basement. In addition to writing a sizeable check to the List Project, the donor opened up a free apartment for me on Central Park South in New York. The blinds had their own remote controls. The door to the refrigerator was clear glass: you could see emerald San Pellegrino bottles inside without opening the door. I would no longer need to steal Wi-Fi.

And although I had never imagined running a nonprofit, I was excited to hire Iraqis like Tona and Amina and Basma, brilliant Iraqi women who had worked with me back in Baghdad. The law firms provided them with free office space, and they became the List Project's front line, handling the torrent of applicants to the list, assigning cases to lawyers, and sitting in on phone calls between the lawyers and refugees, translating words and cultural cues.

Armed with my own organization, I was growing increasingly confident. Until now, it had been a lonely fight on behalf of a few Iraqi friends against a bureaucracy. The articles I'd written had helped to force its hand, but that wasn't enough. With the arrival of the law firms, though, I had brilliant lawyers to battle the bureaucracy case by case. I was sure that the US government would never be able to withstand the shrewd persistence of the List Project's attorneys. Inquiries were coming in from other firms around the country, and I was already in talks with Marcia Maack, the pro bono coordinator at Mayer Brown, to bring them on as our third firm.

The first attorney at Holland and Knight to respond to a firm-wide appeal for help with my list was a litigation attorney in Miami named Dana Choi. Before becoming a lawyer, Dana had worked in a then-classified
US Navy program training dolphins to attack potential saboteurs swimming near our naval fleet. When I laughed, incredulous, she forwarded me a series of articles about the use of dolphins for national security, dating all the way back to Tuffy the bottlenose dolphin in 1965. Dana used to dive off the coast of Florida in the dead of night, floating in blackness until the navy trainers sicced their dolphins to rain bottlenose blows upon her. Now she specialized in white-collar crime.

Dana seemed an unlikely candidate for refugee work, but as it turns out, lawyers like her are perfect for it. They know how to work with emotional clients. They know how to quickly absorb complicated regulations. Because they haven't spent a career in the realm of refugee advocacy, they aren't jaded and don't stand to lose anything professionally if they push the US government.

While Tona and Amina prioritized and assigned cases to our growing group of attorneys, the firms had produced a broad-ranging questionnaire that approximated the questions most frequently asked by Department of Homeland Security officials when they conducted the final interviews of refugee applicants. Each Iraqi on the list had to answer a confidential list of questions, some 150 in total, so that we could gather basic chronological data and supplemental evidence and anticipate problematic areas such as the “material support bar”: a post-9/11 contrivance that ended up banning Iraqis who had paid ransom to free their kidnapped children, since this was viewed by the US government as providing aid to terrorist organizations.

The extensive set of questions might have seemed like drudge work to those on the list, but the resulting chronologies were invaluable. If an Iraqi was unable to state the exact date of the event that caused him or her to flee, for example, his or her petition might be viewed with less credibility by the American adjudicator. Those who quickly and consistently supplied precise details over several interviews would be viewed more favorably.

When Dana asked for her first case from the List Project, she was assigned Zina's file. Soon the refugees whose names I'd spent months collecting began to receive phone calls from attorneys at the nation's highest-rated law firms.

For all of the apparent progress, not everyone was optimistic. By mid-July 2007, only a month after the launch of the List Project, Yaghdan had nearly given up. Over the course of the previous six months, he had gone through several UNHCR interviews, at which he was asked the same set of questions over and over and then told to wait for another interview. He was losing faith in the process and in my ability to help. From my perspective, each new interview was a coup bringing him one step closer to resettlement, but had grown to see them as little more than bureaucratic theatrics. By the time the US Embassy in Damascus called to request that he come in for an interview with the Department of Homeland Security, his nerves were frayed. He wrote to me and said, “I am done with this. It doesn't make sense to do these interviews anymore. Haifa and I are tired.”

Although not a single Iraqi on the list had made it to America yet, I pleaded for his trust. He was the entire reason that the List Project had come into existence, and now he was on the brink of giving up: it was hard to imagine a more crushing defeat. I begged him to go to the interview, which I knew was one of the final steps in the process. After a few days of silence, he wrote back to say that he would go. I breathed a sigh of relief. Chris Nugent at Holland and Knight called him immediately to prepare him.

“Homeboy” Hayder was also in a state of anxiety. The $21,000 he won in a settlement from AIG in 2005 had seemed like a lot of money, but six months had passed, and there was still no sign of movement with his application for refugee status in America. Amman was prohibitively expensive, and his wife, Dina, had already sold off her jewelry. There was no plan other than to wait for the US government to help.

When he first applied, in 2004, Hayder's family and friends were shocked that he was not granted a visa immediately. As the months of waiting became years, their disbelief hardened into derision. “You said they were going to protect you. Look at what you did for them, and now they dumped you!” Hayder's instinct was to defend the United States, but they would cut him off as soon as he would start. “You want to defend them? Those idiots?!”

Each day turned on him like a vise, 2005 bleeding into 2006, and then 2007. The family moved to smaller and smaller apartments, each shabbier than the last, each neighborhood rougher. As an Iraqi, he was not permitted to work in Jordan. He asked his relatives for money, each “loan” another puncture through which his pride drained. Ali was getting older, growing up as an illegal immigrant, unable to go to school. Hayder's relationship with Dina was strained. He needed therapy for his leg—his prosthetic needed constant adjustments that he could no longer afford—and for his mind, which tormented him with nightmares.

Hayder kept calling the embassy, but its answers were noncommittal. The staff's tone reminded him of the unsatisfying answers he got whenever he had asked US soldiers in Baghdad when the electricity might come back: “Please be patient. Your application is being processed.”

In time Dina's frustration turned to fury. More than four hundred thousand other Iraqi refugees had fled to Jordan by the middle of 2007. She saw only folly in his hope for a visa to America. They argued constantly. One night she told him she had given up: “We need to go back and face our destiny inside Iraq!” Hayder repeated what he always said to her, asking for just a little more time, and she erupted. “I don't give a shit anymore! Fuck America! All these lies. You're in the desert, Hayder, running after a mirage! We're not going to America.” Ali cried at the sound of his parents fighting.

In late 2007 Hayder got an email from Ronald Dwight, the former advisor to Paul Bremer who had tried to help him after he lost his leg. “There's an American guy defending you inside the US,” Dwight told him. “This guy is shouting through a big trumpet, and people are starting to listen to him, and you need to get your name on his list.” At the end of his note, Dwight gave Hayder my email address, and a note soon appeared in my in-box:

From: Hayder

Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 9:56 PM

To: The List Project

Subject: seeking help

Hello Sir,

I would like to introduce my self. my name is Hayder. I'm an Iraqi Citizen living in Jordan-Amman I used to work with the US forces Back in Iraq 2003 during my work I got ambushed on the night of 6th August 2003 with my unit the 82nd Airborne C/C 325 and a cause of the ambush I was shot & injured my injuries cased to amputate my right leg & a bullet to my left leg I can't feel my foot. I had a very hard life after the accident because I had PTSD & it has effected on my life hardly I'm trying all my best to pass it but it isn't easy

Today I live in Jordan with my beautiful son & wife without no home or work or any kind of income most of all I don't have a feeling that I have a homeland because I can't go back to live in Iraq because of threats I have received of getting killed because I served in the American Army & afraid that my wife or kid gets kidnapped & many be killed later on. I've been Registered in the UNHCR Amman

many Iraqis have run away from Iraq searching for safe places to live but please I don't deserve all what I've through and I heard many people have already left to USA

Once you create something, you have to feed it. Before long, instead of contacting Iraqis, I was calling donors. In the beginning, I didn't have any employees to help me with fund-raising, so I did my best to keep up in writing thank-you notes, donor updates, and returning phone calls from small donors myself. I assembled a small advisory board, chaired by a brilliant problem solver named Julie Schlosser, who worked patiently to iron out my rougher edges, edit grant proposals, and map out budgets.

Behind this flurry of activity lay a fundamental tension: I did not want the List Project to exist a day longer than necessary. It seemed to me that too many organizations, founded to confront one problem, eventually outlive the original problem and go searching for new problems. Before long, they're devoting a sizeable amount of funds they raise to activities that raise more funds. As stimulating as the work was, I wasn't looking for a career in refugee work or prognosticating on Iraq. In letters to donors, I predicted that the List Project would likely conclude its mission by the end of 2008. I wanted to get the list to safety and move on with my life.

One by one, the names came, and out they went to the lawyers, the machine humming like a drill into the steel wall of a State Department safe. I was certain it could work and that visas were in there—a massive hunch that vibrated between certainty and delusion, redirecting my life with an intensity rivaling that December night in the Dominican Republic. Here was Iraq again, but rather than repressing a sense of failure, I felt that this effort might actually succeed.

I kept the machine oiled, traveling the country to give speeches, recruiting students and law firms and anyone who might join the cause. I felt healthier and collapsed into a deep sleep at the end of each day. Among the many benefits of having a staff was that I could start to shield myself from the daily carnage coming into my in-box: I no longer had to see dead or wounded bodies.

This all felt like momentum, but the numbers couldn't lie. Assistant Secretary of State Sauerbrey was doing a poor job. The month after I delivered the first list, eight Iraqis were admitted. In April, when she said, “We could resettle up to twenty-five thousand Iraqi refugees this year,”
one
Iraqi was admitted. In May, one Iraqi. For all the ink and outrage spilled since my op-ed over a half year earlier, only fifty-three Iraqi refugees had been granted visas, and none from the list, which now approached five hundred names. While members of the Bush administration, such as Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, made lofty statements about US-affiliated Iraqis, the White House and President Bush remained silent.

After the embarrassing ABC piece, when Sauerbrey claimed to have no knowledge of my list, her days as a recess appointee of the Bush administration were numbered. In the fall of 2007, the White House did not reappoint her, so Ellen retired to Maryland, where she later started a short-lived blog about the Tea Party.

Of the promised 7,000 visas in fiscal year 2007, only 1,608 had been issued, predominantly to Iraqis that had fled long before the war in Iraq had even started and whose cases were therefore already “queued up.” In the face of withering criticism, the White House appointed two “czars” at the Departments of State and Homeland Security to lead “interagency efforts” to improve the process. (The media had already
forgotten about Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky's interagency task force, announced only six months earlier with the same mandate in the same USGspeak.) In fiscal year 2008, 12,000 visas were promised.

As 2007 drew to a close, despite the efforts of the List Project's attorneys, Hayder, Dina, and little Ali had been languishing for nearly four years in Amman. In Cairo, Zina and Tara were beginning their second year of waiting. They had all advanced through interviews but had no way to know if they were at the beginning, middle, or end of the labyrinthine process. Only Yaghdan seemed close, but the message of this lethargic program was unmistakably clear: the US government did not actually wish to help US-affiliated Iraqis in any swift manner. Each time we believed that our drill had punctured through the State Department's safe, it issued a new policy requiring a new sheet of paper to be signed or a new interview to be scheduled.

I looked at the growth curve of the size of the list versus the rate of admissions and figured that I would need another sixty years to get the rest of the Iraqis to safety. Unless the president or Congress was brought into the debate, the List Project was doomed. I couldn't afford to waste time debating low-level officials in the Refugees Bureau; I needed to aim for their bosses and their bosses' boss.