30 - Washington, D.C.
President Quaid was not happy and showed it as the Attorney General and two assistant attorneys general walked tentatively into the Oval Office. Quaid gestured for them to sit. He remained standing, glowering, hands on his hips as he looked down at Attorney General McQueeney. She was exhausted. Awake all night through the arrests, she'd flown to Washington at dawn when summonsed by the President for a 9:00 a.m. meeting.
“Dammit, Queen. God-fuckin-shit-dammit.”
McQueeney had never seen the President like this. The man appeared ready to foam at the mouth, out of control. She would not have been more surprised had he flopped onto the floor and flapped his arms and legs.
Instead, he paced, quickly, then stopped, turned and looked at her.
“How the hell did those agents let themselves get killed like that? Aren’t they trained better than to walk through a door at 2:00 in the morning, without even carrying their weapons? Whose fucked up idea was it that the agents wouldn’t carry weapons? I want that guy’s head.”
“Well, that guy was me,” McQueeney said. “And as you know, Mr. President, I offered you my head, and my job, before this operation even started. I wanted nothing to do with it. You gave me no choice, sir.”
“You know better than that,” President Quaid barked. “When I give you a job to do, your job is to do it, and do it right.
“Right now I’ve got two dead FBI agents to add to the body count from the dead Coasties. This is starting to look like a brand new Boston Massacre up there, and we’re the ones getting massacred. My problem right now is the muttering I’m hearing about who is doing the killings. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like what I’m hearing.”
“The bigger problem we’ve got, Sir, is that we took more than 3,000 people into custody last night and we have no way to handle them.” The Attorney General was exhausted. She could not get the image of the two dead FBI agents from her mind. She’d insisted on visiting the scene herself. She’d called the widows herself, both widows. Facing down the President of the United States was painless compared with those two telephone calls.
“This whole thing was put together in such a rush, and in so much secrecy, that we didn’t have time to think through the details, Sir, details such as are we going to hold all these people on bail or release them? The Boston people we can take care of, they won’t go anywhere if we let them out on bail. But all those people off the boats, they have nobody here, nothing to their names. They can’t afford to hire lawyers and there aren’t enough lawyers in Boston to appoint to represent them all, not who know what they are doing in a case like this.
“So, what are we going to do with these people? They’re families mostly, husbands, wives, children. Do we separate the husbands and wives in detention, or do we leave them together? If we separate them, what happens to their children? The Massachusetts Department of Social Services head just laughed when I asked her if she could take custody of 900 kids tomorrow. What are we going to do with these people? If we book them and release them, you know we’ll never see these people again.”
“We don’t release the Israelis, Queen,” the President said. “What kind of fool would I look like going to all that trouble - we lost two FBI agents last night - going through all that trouble to round these people up, only to let them loose the next day. They’d disappear on us for sure. I’d look like a horse’s ass for sure, now wouldn’t I?
“Queen, you are going to hold on to those people, grandparents, parents, children and Chihuahuas, until we find some place to put them. Do you understand that?”
McQueeney felt as if she’d been handed a basket of somebody else’s dirty laundry.
“Sir, Mr. President, with all due respect, how are we going to charge these people? I certainly appreciate that there are dead Coast Guardsmen or Guardswomen or whatever. The District Attorney in Boston is holding a guy from the ships in the county jail. They got him because he swam to the wrong shore and into the hands of the Boston cops. The DA’s charged the guy with ten counts of first degree murder.
“There is nothing that makes him any different from the other 3,000 people we rounded up. If the state charges him with conspiracy to murder, then they all are murderers. If we let everybody else go, then I’m going to be faced with one angry District Attorney, whose murder case will go down the tubes.
“But please, sir, don’t ask me to charge 3,000 people with murder and expect those charges to stick. That just isn’t going to happen.”
The two assistant attorneys general who’d accompanied their boss to the Oval Office watched silently, their heads turning in unison from one speaker to the other, like front row spectators at the Olympic ping pong finals.
“Nobody gets turned loose, Queen,” President Quaid said sternly, standing directly in front of the seated Attorney General, his legs spread apart, his hands on his hips. His initial frenzy had subsided almost to a monotone.
McQueeney was undeterred. She was not going to take sole responsibility for what she viewed as the most massive violation of civil rights since Guantanamo.
“We’re holding these people at a basketball stadium at Boston University, and we have that only because the stadium was built on the location of a former National Guard armory and somebody inserted some bizarre language into the purchase agreement that the government can preempt any other use of the stadium in a time of national emergency. So we’re holding 3,000 people in a basketball stadium for today.
“But that won’t last long. The TV crews are having a field day there, interviewing Jewish grandmothers who came off that ship, spent a few days in Suburban-land visiting shopping malls, and now find themselves crammed into a domed stadium wondering if they are going to be shipped off to Syrian concentration camps. It’s going to make great copy. Remember Katrina and the Superdome? Think Jewish instead of Black. That’s tonight’s news, Sir.”
Before President Quaid could reply, not that he knew what he would say, the telephone on his desk rang. He walked to the desk and picked up the receiver.
“Good, send him in,” he said into the telephone, placing it gently in its cradle, relieved that he could change the topic. He turned to the Attorney General.
“Grant Farrell is here. I woke him up this morning with the news of the round-up last night and I asked him to spend the morning speaking with folks on the Hill. I want to hear what he has to say.”
Following a knock on the Oval Office door, Grant Farrell, Democratic minority leader of the Senate, entered. He did not look pleased.
“Mr. President, Madam Attorney General,” he said, knowing to ignore the two assistant attorneys general who accompanied McQueeney.
“So, how are folks taking the latest news, Grant,” the President asked.
“Not well, sir, not well at all. Each and every Senator I spoke with this morning, and I got to people on both sides of the aisle, Mr. President, the first thing every single person said was about the two dead agents, not about what a good job we did rounding people up, not about what a difficult decision this must have been, not even, as I would have expected, some song and dance about civil rights after we dragged a thousand citizens from their beds and hauled them off. No sir, it was all about the dead agents.
“Let me tell you what Senator Jackwell said, you know, Jake Jackwell, Wisconsin, as screamer of a liberal as we’ve got on board. Well, Jake dragged me off to the side of the Senators’ locker room this morning when I was only half way into my workout gear and said, here’s as good a quote as I can give you, sir, and these are his words, not mine.
“He said the score seems to be Jews 12, America 0. Then he asked me, when do we start to even things up?”
The President, staring at his feet, listening, raised his head on that.
“Jake Jackwell did not say that, did he, Grant?”
“Those are as close as I can get to his words, sir. Losing those FBI agents last night has people awfully angry. It’s as if we’re being gunned down by foreigners who came to our country armed and ready for a fight, and all we’re doing is threatening to give them speeding tickets. People are angry, Mr. President. There are two more dead bodies to be buried. That makes two heavy media events we’ve got to get through. What are you going to do, Mr. President?”
Before President Quaid could answer, Attorney General McQueeney spoke.
“That’s not fair, Senator, nor is it accurate. Those FBI agents were shot by a U.S. citizen, by a man who thought he was defending his home from what to him could have looked like a break-in in the middle of the night. There were no armed foreigners involved in that shooting. At least get your facts right.”
This time, President Quaid interrupted before the Senator could reply.
“Stop thinking like a lawyer, Queen. You’re letting the facts get in the way. I’m afraid, Queen, that Jake Jackwell is closer to the general public than we are on this one. He doesn’t see any difference between the foreign citizens on those two boats and the U.S. citizens who got them off the boats, at least not when it comes to taking shots at U.S. agents.”
“With all due respect, sir,” McQueeney retorted. “He’s wrong then.”
“No he’s not wrong, Queen,” the President answered, making no effort to conceal his impatience with the Attorney General. “That guy, whatever his name is, who killed the agents is going to be viewed as much as a foreign agent as the people from the boats. Those new deaths make even the U.S. citizens involved seem like, like, come on, somebody give me some sort of legal term to use, like ...”
“Enemy combatants, sir. That’s what they all are, enemy combatants, if I may, sir.” The speaker was one of the two assistant attorneys general who had, until that moment, not said a word, sitting quietly on the sofa flanking the Attorney General like bookends. He turned to look at his boss, trying to gauge whether he’d spoken out of place. She glared at him, understanding in a heartbeat where he was heading, legally, and not liking the direction one bit.
“Enemy combatant? Does that have some specific legal meaning?” President Quaid asked, unclear whether he was asking the assistant or McQueeney.
The assistant responded.
“Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning, Mr. President,” he said, seeming to gain confidence with each word. “The Al Qaida detainees at Guantanamo Bay were classified as enemy combatants. That shoe bomber who tried to blow up a flight from London to Boston was called an enemy combatant. Back then, even some U.S. citizens were labeled enemy combatants. It didn’t matter where they came from, citizen or not. They all got the same label: enemy combatant.”
He looked at the Attorney General, seeking approval to continue. She sat motionless, exhausted, ignoring him, ignoring the President. The assistant continued.
“Legally, Mr. President, you have the power to label anybody an enemy combatant and ...” He hesitated, appreciating that he was crawling out onto a legal limb and that his boss, who was obviously not pleased with the direction he was heading, held the saw in her hands to cut him off.
President Quaid stared at the man, however, with obvious interest. He gestured impatiently for the man to continue.
“And no court in the land has jurisdiction to hear any challenge to that designation by you, sir, no judge has the power to hear or decide any case brought by an enemy combatant, thanks to our wise Congress,” the man said.
“How can that be?” Quaid asked. He liked the sound of the term, “enemy combatant.” It blurred any distinction between the foreigners from the ships and the people on shore who set them loose.
“Mr. President, the defense appropriation act of 2005, among a whole host of other actions, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear any legal proceeding, including an application for a writ of habeas corpus, brought by or on behalf of any enemy combatant detained by this country at the navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“A few years later later, after some clever lawyers were able to file their habeas petitions within hours of their clients being taken into custody in Afghanistan, before they actually arrived at Hotel Gitmo, Congress extended that stripping of court jurisdiction to all cases brought by all persons declared by the President to be enemy combatants.
“An enemy combatant, once you put that label on him, whether he is an Afghani bomb thrower or a Cleveland Boy Scout, lives outside the laws of the United States of America. He has no rights, or more accurately, he has all the rights every one of the 330 million Americans has, but he has nowhere to go to enforce any violations of those rights. Congress shut the courthouse doors to everybody who you, Mr. President, declare to be an enemy combatant.”
The assistant attorney general, having gone this far without having his plug pulled by his boss, sensed the intoxication that came from proximity to the highest level of power on the planet. The President of the United States was listening to his legal advice.
He turned in his seat, turning his back to the Attorney General, swiveling his entire body to face President Quaid.
“You call these people enemy combatants and you can stick hot bamboo under their fingernails and there is not a thing they, or any lawyer on their behalf, can do about it.”
The President glanced at the Attorney General, waiting for her to contradict what the assistant just said. McQueeney’s exhaustion, physical, mental and emotional, was apparent. It had been a long, long night for her, eased by less than an hour’s sleep she’d caught on the jet to D.C., followed by an increasingly unpleasant day. She sat slumped on the sofa, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing.
“OK,” President Quaid said. “I’ve got the picture. Queen, I hear what you are saying. Young man, thank you for your legal insight. Grant, let’s talk later this afternoon. Keep speaking with people, then give me a call.
“Me, I have some serious thinking to do. For now, Queen, keep those people fed and comfortable. See what you can come up with for them. And try to keep the news media away from them. I’ll talk with you first thing tomorrow morning. Good bye, folks. Thank you all for stopping in.”
When they left the Oval Office, President Quaid sat at his desk and picked up the phone.
“Margaret,” he said, speaking to his office manager. “Have you been able to reach the First Lady yet? When is she due back in Washington? Put her through to me as soon as you find her, will you.”
He hung up the phone and sat back in his rocking chair, the chair on loan from the Kennedy library, the same chair, in fact, that eased John Kennedy’s chronically aching back during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I like the sound of that term, enemy combatant, he thought. That’s what these all people are, aren’t they, enemies, enemies of the United States? Friends wouldn’t be killing sailors and FBI agents, would they?
Then he recalled the image the Attorney General warned him about, television coverage of the Jewish grandmother being expelled from the United States and handed over to angry Palestinians. Can I really call her an enemy, he wondered. And if I do, what kind of person does that make me?
Catherine, my love. Don’t abandon me now, of all times. I need you more than ever right now, here with me, Quaid thought.
And Catherine, maybe you ought to bring that bright son of a bitch Bobby Brown back here, too.