Crash in Slow Motion

Sentencing Charles Taylor and Chucky: Visualizing Non-Apologies

Johnny — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:24:21 +0000

Chucky Taylor and his father had very little in common. The son was an uneducated, petty criminal from Orlando, Florida. The father was an educated ex-government official and political agitator from Arthington, Liberia. One now practices Islam; the other has taken up Judaism. Everything that Chucky got in life was handed to him; Taylor, on the other hand, was an opportunist who played each situation to his advantage.

Yet, Charles Taylor’s sentencing hearing yesterday reminded me of how, despite their disparate origins, father and son found themselves on parallel paths towards reckoning for crimes committed in West Africa.

Both men have been convicted of crimes related to their positions of power. And both have stood before the court of their conviction to ask for mercy. Yet, both men, declined to apologize for their crimes. In the end, both father and son offered a non-apology–expressing sympathy for the suffering of others, while pointing out that that they too had suffered.

Taylor’s sentencing transcript is publicly available; while Chucky Taylor’s is available on PACER.

It should surprise no one that the Taylor’s see themselves as victims, not just of the prosecution, but within the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. I pulled out two sections where father and son traffic the same material. The first comes from Charles Taylor’s sentencing:

…and the second from Chucky Taylor’s sentencing:

The similarities in these two statements provide a window into something that I caught a glimpse of in Liberia. Taylor sympathizers had a well-practiced, but fundamentally juvenile, logic when it came to accountability. In essence, the argument went: “yes, we did bad things, but bad things were done to us, too, so can we call it a draw?”

As gauche as this may be, I generated Wordle’s from the entire text of both Charles Taylor’s and Chucky Taylor’s sentencing statements.Yes, this is completely superficial, but I think there’s some utility in reducing the statements to the words used within them.

Charles Taylor’s statement from the hearing on May 16, 2012:

And, Chucky Taylor’s statement, from his January 9, 2009 sentencing:

The language father and son used provide an interesting point of comparison. But, undoubtedly, the most emphatic point of comparison will be a number–as in the number of years sentenced to prison.

For Chucky that number was 97. For Charles Taylor it remains to be seen.

Liberia: Oil Business Meets Politics Business

Johnny — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:40:02 +0000

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The seeds of corruption in the early days of Liberia’s oil rush have finally blossomed into a political mess for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

This week Liberia’s House of Representatives asked President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to renegotiate the nation’s existing oil contracts, throwing down an interesting gauntlet–one that Chevron executives foresaw before they committed to millions in investment in Liberia’s oil sector and one that the president assured the Houston-based oil conglomerate she could handle if it came to pass.

But as that moment looms on the horizon, it remains to be seen who will win the showdown on what may ultimately be Liberia’s most precious resource.

Chevron hoped to avoid this. So much so, they initially appeared to hope to do what House is now asking–throw out the shady oil contracts they were being asked to buy in on and start from scratch.

Even then, President Sirleaf did not want to do so. She told the U.S. ambassador as much on May 4, 2010:

(Source State Dept. cable here.)

Chevron, for its part, raised their concerns about the shadiness of the existing contracts in one of their first meetings with President Sirleaf:

(Source cable here.)

President Sirleaf was steadfast on not renegotiating when she later met with U.S. officials:

(Source cable here.)

And even as Chevron negotiated with the government of Liberia, President Sirleaf knew that the agreements did not adhere to the law:

(Source cable here.)

I covered all of this in the piece I wrote for Foreign Policy/Propublica some months back. Now the issue has become something of political football, exacerbated by the appointment of President Sirleaf’s son, Robert, to the chairmanship of National Oil Company of Liberia. The Liberian legislature appears to have split on how to handle the existing contracts–which may play to the President’s advantage in the near term, but in the long term may scare off potential investors–American or otherwise–seeking to cut deals in increasingly politicized environment like Liberia.

Clarifying: Charles Taylor Did Not Work for DIA or CIA (At Least Based on the Evidence)

Johnny — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:54:12 +0000

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I held my tongue on this piece in the Boston Globe last week. The story, for those just getting this now, alleged that DIA and CIA ran Charles Taylor as a source.

As it turns out, the evidence just isn’t there to prove that.

The basis for the story was a FOIA denial and the statements from former intelligence officials. I read the piece looking for the connective tissue between the “may” and “probably” statements in the story. I even did something I’m generally hesitant to do: reached out to the author on Twitter. None of this got me to a place where I felt comfortable with the story.

A few days later, Charles Taylor, through his counsel Courtenay Griffiths, renounced the story.

Then the Globe pulled back/retracted/announced that it overreached in publishing the piece.

My least favorite genre of nonfiction is journalists taking down their colleagues. So I won’t go into details about the problems with the story. But, unfortunately, the story bounced around the web. And it’s still sitting out there, thankfully with the retraction without the retraction appended to it.

My book–stay tuned for summer 2013–will answer a bunch of the questions raised in the piece. But even further, in the spirit of freedom of information, I’ve donated the thousands of pages of State Department cables released to me concerning Taylor and his son to the National Security Archive. The documents provide a very powerful record of Taylor’s rise from bureaucrat, to revolutionary, to warlord and finally president. I’ll let everyone know when they’re made public.

Taylor’s relationship with U.S. officials was long and complex, but was he a spy?

In the thousands of pages of documents I’ve reviewed, hundreds of hours of interviews I’ve conducted in the U.S. and Liberia, nothing I’ve seen or heard suggests that.

Was he a “source”? Well, what does that mean?

Lost in this is the political geography of Monrovia. There are two centers of political power there: the Executive Mansion and the U.S. Embassy. They’re about a five minute drive from one another. The Defense Attache at the Embassy is an employee of DIA–the attache and their underlings are responsible for being connected and fluent with those in power in the country they’re posted to. In Taylor’s Liberia–which I’ll date to 1992, even though he was elected in 1997–the core political players were limited to a few dozen people, stretched out over a city considerably smaller than Brooklyn, who generally ate at that the same restaurants, frequented the same nightclubs and took their meetings at the same hotels. So did Charles Taylor, in the course of his 14-year political career, discuss information with the Defense Attache or another DIA employee that warranted inclusion in a cable? I know he did. Does that make him a source? Yes, I guess so. Does that mean he “worked” for the United States? Not in my book.

So what about the 48 hits on the Globe’s FOIA request? Well, since we don’t have the documents, we don’t know what they indicate. It could be cables of Taylor dishing intelligence directly to a DIA officer. It could be one of Taylor’s enemies dishing intelligence on Taylor. It could a post-mortem on a US vs. Liberia match played on the tennis court at Whiteflower. It could be anything. In either case, DIA didn’t release the documents, so we can’t make any assertions based on the denial.

What’s aggravating about all of this is that as a student of Liberian history this controversy overlooks the chief complaint U.S. policy makers had with Charles Taylor. It wasn’t that he was a warlord, or that he was involved in regional instability, or that he failed to provide for his people: it was that Charles Taylor didn’t work with the U.S. He didn’t take directions from Mamba Point or Washington. Taylor had his own agenda. He couldn’t be relied upon to act in anyone’s interest other than his own. For diplomats–and intelligence officers–in the business of pursuing American interests this was maddening.

How did Taylor’s working relationship with the Americans turn out? Well, this piece I did for Foreign Policy makes it pretty clear that it didn’t work out at all.

Elaborating on: Liberia, Crisis and Christmas

Johnny — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 04:01:08 +0000

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Thoughts are with friends and colleagues in Monrovia. Rioting, the arrest of opposition officials, checkpoints–none of this bodes well for a good holiday, much less the coming year. It’s a bit frustrating being at such a far remove, while the country teeters so closely to the edge of unwinding a lot of the progress made in the past few years.

Christmas Eve brings to mind the events of of December 24, 1989 when Charles Taylor launched his career as a warlord with an assault on Gbutuo in Nimba County, Liberia. While Americans tend to see Taylor as an independent phenomena–the sort of African villain easily rendered in Western media–he emerged from a crisis: Liberia’s rigged 1985 elections and the thwarted coup attempt by Thomas Quiwonkpa. He was able to garner support because of the injustices and abuses of the Doe Administration, many of which were neatly framed by the events following that stolen election.

There’s no clear corollary here. I’ve yet to see any scrutable evidence that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf did not win her second term in November. But, the strand that unifies these moments–and the suspicion among LURD that Taylor would delay the 2003 elections–is the same.

For as far as Liberia has come, it still appears to be unable to transfer power peaceably. At the core of this, I’d speculate, is fear, fear among the elites that any disturbance at the top of society will disrupt the flow of power and money that supports their livelihoods, fear among the dispossessed that their only hope for the future requires jettisoning the existing power structure, and fear within the civil society to speak truthfully to power at either end of this spectrum.

It’s tough to tackle this fear. Particularly, when you’re not really trying hard to. I’d like to think the Truth and Reconciliation process could’ve allowed for Liberia to move the dial on its political pathologies, but I think the events of the past few months–and days–makes it clear: that process failed. There has been no reconciliation. In large part because there wasn’t enough truth in it.

Why is that? A common argument I hear is that Liberia wasn’t ready for the process–the society is too fragile, the wounds too raw. A variation on that argument says corruption can’t be tackled because the society isn’t ready, that people know no other way of life.

I don’t think I’m in a position to assess the validity of those arguments. Nor do I really need to. The angry crowds in Monrovia have already made clear what they think of them.

Bookends: Iraq

Johnny — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:52:36 +0000

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So it’s over.

My experience in Iraq was brief and, at this point, impressionistic. I reported on the salient elements. But, what’s left beyond that is just a few filled notebooks, hours of audio recordings and memories. The notebooks and recordings are tucked away in a closet. The memories come back easily enough.

One stands out: the Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Air Base in late-November 2004, late evening. The ER was relatively quiet until the thump of Blackhawks could be heard in the sky outside of the tent. A photographer and I followed the sound out to the landing zone, grid of concrete squares bounded by blast walls. A pair of helicopters appeared first as lights descending from the sky. One settled in front of the long covered walkway leading into the hospital. Orderlies waited with gurnees. Out of the dark hold of the Blackhawk, the crew chief appeared. He was carrying a child wrapped in a foil blanket. He moved quickly past us towards the ER.

In the harsh, bright light of the ER, it became clear: the child was a little girl, perhaps four-years-old. Her small naked body was stuck with IVs and a catheter. Her black her, dirty and matted with moisture. Her face: a black void.

A surgeon immediately began assessing her injuries. She was stable, he quickly determined. Her injury was several hours, if not nearly a day, old. I looked around the ER and saw only American and Australian faces. In the middle of her own country, this little girl had arrived at the hospital completely alone.

The surgeon explained what had happened: She was from Fallujah and had been left in an open field, where an American patrol came upon her. The U.S. Marines and Army had spent the prior week attacking the city and clearing it house-by-house. Somewhere in the midst of this fighting, a large piece of shrapnel had hit this girl in the center of her face. It was travelling slowly enough that the impact and injury didn’t kill her. The question on everyone’s mind was whether the explosive that caused such horrifying damage was American or the enemy’s. The question seemed beside the point, but I understood why people wanted to know. We all wanted to make sense of this.

The surgeon fought to save this girl, to rebuild her face and find her family. He succeeded in all of these things. He represented the best of America. But, what happened to this girl and the reasons used to justify it, represent the worst.

It was a stupid fucking war and I’m glad it’s over.

Elaborating on: The Arbabsiar Case in New York’s Southern District

Johnny — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:36:03 +0000

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Thanks to TIME for letting me report on some connected strands of the narcoterrorism debate in light of last week’s announcement by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder of an alleged plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

The story is here.

Context: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Nobel and the U.S. State Department View

Johnny — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:41:46 +0000

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Nobel Prizes are admittedly blunt instruments.

When President Obama received his Nobel the accused terrorists held without charge in Guantanamo Bay likely didn’t applaud the committee’s decision. Similarly, today’s announcement that Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf received the award for her “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work” did little to alter to reality on the ground in Liberia that, at least in the view of the U.S. State Department, the country remains a very difficult place to be a young girl or women. This is not for lack of effort on the part of the Liberian government, as State makes clear.

Here are some of the snapshots of the U.S. State Department’s 2010 report on Human Rights in Liberia, a document the Sirleaf administration is routinely nonplussed to see publicized.

There’s definitely positive news:

But, also negative:

This isn’t to pile on President Johnson Sirleaf. She should be applauded for many reasons.

But Liberia is a complicated place, in the midst of a crucial election. President Sirleaf has been uniquely adept at telling her story to Western audiences which is a crucial element of governing a nation so reliant on donors. Ultimately, though, her primary audience is the Liberian electorate. On October 11th they will decide whether she deserves the nation’s ultimate prize: the Executive Mansion.

Broken news: Pulling Punches in Victor Bout’s Pretrial Motions

Johnny — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:07:12 +0000

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An update to the previous post: Judge Scheindlin filed a significantly amended version of the order granting Bout’s motion to suppress. She didn’t reverse her finding that Bout’s statements were coerced. But it’s pretty clear that she did pull her punches on the DEA agents, albeit after they were thrown (and landed).

Reuters captures some of the judge’s changes, but I ran a quick comparison of the two orders. (You can download Scheindlin’s 8/24/11 order and the 8/25 order.)

Some highlights:

In the “Findings of Fact” the judge cut:

I do not credit the testimony of the agents that they were unaware that Bout had requested an attorney and had asked to speak to a representative of the Russian Embassy, or ~~that the Thai police had denied these requests.~~

And:

I find that the agents’ representation to Bout on this point was false and find that it is likely they knew that they would have been permitted to see Bout the next day if they had made that request of the Thai police.

And also:

I also find that the agents were not credible when they (1) denied insinuating that Bout might return to the United States with them immediately if he “cooperated” with them and waived extradition, and when they (2) denied telling Bout that he would face “disease, hunger, heat and rape” in Thai jails where he would be “abandoned” if he did not cooperate with the Americans.

In the “Legal Standard” the judge removed the language:

~~version of the interview more credible than the version advanced by the agents.~~

And the citation:

~~A statement may also be suppressed based on trickery or deception if the defendant shows that “the misrepresentations materially induced [him] to make incriminating statements.”~~

The phrases:

~~statements made to a paid FBI informant after the informant offered protection from rough treatment in jail in exchange for a confession).~~

~~United States v. Mitchell~~~~, 966 F.2d 92, 100 (2d Cir. 1992).~~

And also:

~~violation of Miranda,~~60 ~~the~~

And:

~~I find that this deceptive~~

And more:

~~response by the agents materially induced Bout to make statements.~~

While inserting:

(5) He was informed that this was his last chance to speak with the Americans, after which he would be abandoned in a Thai jail where he would face admittedly not “particular[ly] pleasant”61 conditions including, according to Bout, “heat, hunger, disease, and rape.”62 Under either Bout’s or the agents’ accounts of the agents’ description of the conditions in Thai jails, I find that it constituted a credible threat of violence that coerced Bout to make statements. This is because, whether or not it was an “impossibility”63 for Bout to return to the United States with the agents, and whether or not the agents discussed the possibility of expedited extradition with Bout during the interview, the totality of the circumstances led Bout to believe that speaking with the agents was the only way he might escape being abandoned to the rough conditions of a Thai jail.64

To apparently replace these deletions:

~~(5) He was informed that if he did not speak with the Americans then, he would be abandoned in a Thai jail where he would face admittedly not “particular[ly] pleasant”~~

And:

~~conditions including, according to Bout, “heat, hunger, disease, and rape.”~~65 ~~When coupled with the agents’ deceptive suggestion that if Bout “cooperated” with them he could “come back to the United States with them”~~66 ~~(rather than be “abandoned” in a Thai jail), I find that this credible threat of violence also materially induced Bout to make statements.~~67

And tweaking the summary to read:

Here, by contrast, ~~the agents told~~ Bout ~~that~~believed he would be abandoned to the rough conditions in the Thai jails unless he cooperated with the Americans and returned to the United States with the agents.

So why document these changes? For one, several defense attorneys I spoke with today representing other targets of the DEA’s Special Operations Division were stunned by the amended order. By removing the language impugning the DEA agents involved, the judge took away a potentially valuable piece of ammunition should other of the agents face cross examination in future trials. This is a very real possibility. Second, it’s a rare opportunity to see how a federal judge revises her own work. But, even more importantly, while the recent order represents the official finding of the court, the original order peels back the curtain on how the judge views the conduct of the DEA in this case.

One question remains: what prompted Judge Scheindlin’s swift revision? Anyone with any insight can always reach me here.

Broken news: Victor Bout judge withdraws order to suppress statements

Johnny — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:15:15 +0000

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A bit of a developing story in New York’s Southern District.

Yesterday, Judge Shira A. Schiendlin called into question the credibility of DEA agents involved in the arrest of Bout. She ordered the suppression of statements made by Victor Bout following his arrest in Thailand.

The order immediately reverberated through the community of defense attorneys representing narcoterrorism and related 959/960a cases.

The thumbnail view is that his statements to DEA agents (Louis Milione and Robert Zachariasiewicz) were not voluntary and that the agents misrepresented themselves to Bout. The agents in Bout’s case are involved in other cases in the Southern District; the judge’s finding left a significant opening for defenders to call into question the agent’s credibility based on Judge Schiendlin’s finding.

Here are two snapshots from the order:

Today, she withdrew that order. I’m trying to ascertain why and what this means; please stay tuned for that.

Broken news: TIME on DEA’s Special Operations Division

Johnny — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:18:58 +0000

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TIME obliged me with the chance to cover one of the most fascinating areas of federal law enforcement: the fight against narcoterrorism. The story is here.

I tried to cut a balanced view on an issue that draws out articulate and starkly opposed opinions. If you’ve got an opinion and/or experience with this, please do chime in. I’ll be covering this more, as these cases mature, in what is IMHO the most exciting federal district in the U.S.: the Southern District of New York. So if that doesn’t give you enough reason to steer clear from cocktail party chit-chat with me, than you may actually like the piece.