The Brothers (14 page)

When she saw Jahar’s face on television, Lulu texted a friend from high school: “Do you think it’s Jahar?” They texted each other that they were shocked and crying and did not believe that it was Jahar. But then the television was saying that the surviving suspect in the marathon bombing had been positively identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that he was on the loose after the previous night’s shoot-out in Watertown.

Terrorism works by striking at random. It is the understanding that anyone—including you and your loved ones—could become the victim of a terrorist attack that multiplies the fear-and-shock effect far beyond what simple killing and even carnage could engender. And the effect is multiplied exponentially if you learn that your loved ones, or at least your friends and neighbors, could become not only the victims but the terrorists themselves. “It is not Jahar,” said Lulu, willing her reality to split into two. “It may be his body, but it is not Jahar.”

For the next minutes or hours—they could not tell—Lulu and her boyfriend sat in front of their large-screen television, constantly switching between the news in English and in Spanish, which Lulu’s boyfriend understood better. Then Lulu looked up and saw a group of men in SWAT gear entering the house through the back porch. Their boots stomped simultaneously up and down the back stairs. Lulu called the landlord, who lived upstairs. He said that he was all right: he must have left the basement door ajar and law enforcement noticed it during a sweep of the street. The men in SWAT gear stomped through the house and out of it. Lulu and her boyfriend returned to switching between coverage of the hunt for Jahar in English and coverage of the hunt for Jahar in Spanish.

•   •   •

AFTER LEAVING PINE DALE HALL
on Thursday night, Dias, Azamat, and Robel drove to Taco Bell. They ate there and continued to Carriage Drive. Bayan was on the couch, about halfway through
The Pursuit of Happyness
, a 2006 movie about a salesman who becomes homeless. Azamat and Robel, who gravitated to any lit screen in any room, joined her. Dias filled a pipe with the pot he had taken from Jahar’s room, then joined the other three on the couch. They watched the rest of the movie in the fog of the pot and the nagging anxiety about the television picture that had looked so much like Jahar. The boys occasionally looked at the news on their devices—there was something about a cop shot at MIT, but no information on whether Jahar was really Jahar; Azamat made an attempt to do his homework, without moving from the couch. When the movie ended, a bit after midnight, Dias and Bayan retired to Dias’s bedroom. Azamat and Robel turned the television set to the news but soon dozed off.

Azamat woke up around two o’clock and looked at the video of the FBI press conference again. It still looked like Jahar. He watched it one more time. And one more. Then he started watching Fox News on his computer, then CNN. Both seemed to be showing the same thing.

“Where yu looking?” he messaged Dias at 2:26. Over in the bedroom, Dias had also been watching the news.

“I think they caught his brother,” Azamat messaged at 2:28. Tamerlan had been dead nearly an hour, but some news outlets were reporting that the older and bigger suspect was in custody. CNN had already reported that the suspects were believed to be brothers—and both Dias and Azamat had met Tamerlan. Which mattered if the surviving bomber was indeed Jahar.

In the bedroom, Dias and Bayan started discussing the news. He told her that he had taken a backpack from Jahar’s room that contained emptied-out fireworks and a half-full jar of Vaseline, and that he suspected that Jahar had used these in making the bombs. Bayan took this information badly. “It could be evidence,” she said. “I don’t want it in the apartment!” This must not have occurred to Dias—nor did it occur to either of them now that they should take the backpack to the police, who were chasing after someone who appeared to be Jahar: they just realized that they had come too close to a bad sort of trouble. Dias walked out of the bedroom and either informed his friends that he was now going to dispose of the backpack or consulted them on this matter—later this would be much discussed in court. He removed the laptop from the backpack—there was no talk of getting rid of a perfectly good Sony VAIO just because it might belong to America’s most wanted man of the moment—took a half-full black garbage bag out of the kitchen trash can, stuffed the backpack inside, cinched the bag, and walked out of the apartment to toss the backpack with the fireworks and the Vaseline jar into the apartment complex dumpster.

“No more backpack,” he reported to Bayan when he returned.

“Where is it?”

“Far away.”

•   •   •

WHEN AZAMAT
next woke up, Dzhokhar’s name was written on the television screen. A couple of hours earlier, after seeing a picture that was even more clear than all the previous ones—the resolution kept going up—and looked ever more like Jahar, Azamat had Googled “Dzhokhar,” “Dzhakhar,” “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,” “Djahar Tsarnaev,” and other spellings he could imagine for his friend’s name, and perhaps felt reassured by not finding the name linked to the words “Boston bomber.” But now it was, on television, and now Azamat believed it. He smoked pot for what may have been the first time in his life. He woke up Robel, who was now panicking, too. Robel said he had changed his mind about staying the weekend at the Carriage Drive apartment—and that he urgently needed Azamat to drive him to campus to drop off his backpack. He was afraid the police would now come to search the Kazakh students’ apartment and discover Robel was carrying marijuana.

Azamat and Robel came to UMass Dartmouth a little after nine in the morning, just as dozens of police vehicles were pulling up to campus, which was about to be evacuated. Robel still managed to drop his backpack in a friend’s room. Back at Carriage Drive, he frantically texted another friend, asking to be picked up—and within half an hour, he left Azamat, Dias, and Bayan, none of whom had lived in the United States for more than two years, to wait for what seemed to him an inevitable encounter with law enforcement.

The FBI called in the early afternoon, through a friend—probably because the people at 69A Carriage Drive still had no regular telephone service on their “family plan” and the friend knew to text the Kazakhs first so they could Skype back. Azamat dictated the address, and the three teenagers started waiting for the FBI to come. Azamat Skyped his father, the most powerful man among all their parents.

“The FBI are coming here,” said Azamat.

“Why?” asked Amir, his father.

“Because one of the Boston bombers was our friend.”

“The Chechen?” Amir was beside himself. He had always thought Chechens were trouble—and he certainly did not send his son to the United States so he would make friends with one of them. “Did you have anything to do with the bombing?”

“No.”

“All right, in that case we are not getting a lawyer—that will show that you have nothing to hide. Now show me the apartment.”

Azamat lifted his MacBook to give his father a panoramic view of the place. It looked like a dungeon: they had drawn the blinds and were huddling like three scared kids as they waited.

“Open the blinds!” Amir barked. “You need to give the FBI a clear view inside the apartment so they won’t shoot.”

The kids did as they were told and sat down at the dining table to wait again. Azamat’s family was now looking at them through the Skype window in the laptop perched on the table. After a couple of hours the wait grew tedious; it was now nearly five in the afternoon in New Bedford and four in the morning in Kazakhstan. Amir said he did not think the FBI was coming after all, and said good night to his son and his friends.

Just after he signed off, Azamat looked down at his chest and saw more than a dozen red spots—for the number of gun sights trained on him. The apartment was surrounded by several score law enforcement officers in SWAT gear. Since that morning, a large part of Greater Boston had been in virtual lockdown—residents had been asked to “shelter in place,” meaning not to leave their homes—and police and FBI had been searching for Jahar house by house in Watertown. He seemed nowhere to be found, and that elevated the possibility that he was simply at his best buddies’ apartment. The troops had come here prepared to fight him, or perhaps his allies.

The three Kazakh students were ordered out of the apartment, searched—the boys were directed to remove their shirts—and placed in police vehicles.

“This is the biggest thing since nine-eleven,” Robel had said, ill-advisedly, to Azamat at some point on Friday morning. Massachusetts state authorities and media, the FBI, and the police apparently thought something similar—although, if one measured “big” in loss of life, bigger things, meaning bigger acts of sudden violence, had certainly happened, including the Virginia Tech shooting, which took thirty-three lives in 2007, and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, shooting, in which twelve people died during a midnight show at a movie theater. Those, however, fell into the “angry white man” category of crimes, which FBI investigators believe they understand well. (In 2009 there was also the Fort Hood shooting, in which an Army major killed thirteen people on a military base, but because the shooter was a Muslim, the crime was seen as belonging to a different category—and a Senate report called it “the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.”) The Boston Marathon bombing, it seemed immediately apparent to investigators, did not fall into the “angry white man” category, if only because the brothers were two, and not exactly white, by virtue of being Muslim. They therefore approached the crime as an attack in progress, as September 11 had been when that investigation first got under way. Following policy and practice established at least fifteen years before September 11, 2001, investigators focused on the suspects’ networks among aliens, presuming these networks to be both extensive and dangerous—in other words, they pursued a lot of dead ends.

Early Friday morning, a neighbor called Larry Aaronson, screaming into the phone: “They are fucking us!” Aaronson thought he was aware of the facts contained in that statement, however one interpreted the syntax. “You don’t think I’m following the news on Facebook?” he asked.

“You don’t understand,” the neighbor shouted. “They went to Rindge and Latin, they live next door, they are fucking
us
!”

Just then Norfolk Street was starting to fill up—with the FBI and the police, all in SWAT gear, and the media. Chris LaRoche’s husband shook him awake after a friend had called saying, “Your street is on TV.” Chris had seen the suspects’ pictures the previous evening, but he had not recognized the brothers. Now, as he tried to wrap his not-yet-awake mind around the information, someone pounded on the door: “FBI!” The residents were hastily herded up the street and corralled in the garage where condo owners rented parking spaces. They stood there exchanging bits of information and answering questions from reporters who floated up from Norfolk Street every few minutes. Everyone had different impressions of the Tsarnaevs. Someone thought that Tamerlan looked like a good father. Chris had assumed the family had fled conflict in the Balkans, probably Kosovo. Rinat Harel, the art teacher, seemed to be the only one who thought the family was from Chechnya. She caught herself thinking that now, after all these years, she could start using the front entrance to her building again, and immediately felt ashamed. After about an hour, the residents were allowed to leave the garage, but not to return to Norfolk Street. A group went to Dunkin’ Donuts, because it was open. Then Chris and his husband walked to a friend’s house in Porter Square, a couple of miles away. It was eerie: a beautiful sunny morning, and the two of them the only people on the streets in all of Cambridge and Somerville.

•   •   •

ABOUT AN HOUR
after law enforcement raided the Carriage Drive apartment, the shelter-in-place request was withdrawn and tens of thousands of people stepped out for the first time that day, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes scanning familiar landscapes for anything that seemed different. Very soon, a Watertown homeowner reported seeing blood on the side of a boat he had stored in the backyard and what he thought was a body inside the boat itself. Jahar was hiding in the covered boat; he might have been there the eighteen hours that the police had been searching for him. The house-by-house search of the neighborhood had missed this house, along with a number of others. Law enforcement once again assembled a SWAT team to take the prisoner. They tried to smoke him out with tear gas, scare him with gunfire, and coax him with words. Finally, an officer approached the boat and barked at Jahar to get down from it. The terrorist responded with a childish “But it’s going to hurt”: it was a seven-foot drop off the edge of the boat, which sat on a wheeled platform. The officers helped him down indelicately.

HOW MUSA KHADZHIMURATOV FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH AMERICA

T
his is a catastrophe,” the woman told me. “It is a catastrophe for us Chechens.”

She said she knew right away. In fact, she had always known. The woman had been eight years old when the first war in Chechnya began—she had grown up being a target. So when her own eight-year-old daughter here, in suburban Boston, asked if it was true that the bombers were Chechen, the woman said, “No!” and turned off the television: the word
CHECHEN
had been right there on the screen, beneath a picture of the younger brother. Turning off the television did not help any more than turning off bad news has ever helped anyone. The girl soon heard it at school and at the playground, and her best friend was not allowed to come over to play anymore.

The woman would not let me use her name, but she talked to me while she cooked—traditional rough Chechen bread in large square loaves, and cake: the family was expecting a visitor from Chechnya. They had been living in Boston for about seven years at the time of the bombing, and life had been pretty good. They came as refugees—a relatively privileged status that entitles new arrivals to seek both employment and public assistance—because the brother and father of the woman’s husband had both been disappeared by the Russians. Her husband worked in construction, and she was staying home with their three children, two of them born in this country. They had a house in a middle-class neighborhood, next door to another Chechen family. They socialized primarily with other Chechens; this was a traditional house, where the woman would set the table for the men and stay out of the room while they ate and talked. She knew the wives, but since Tamerlan never brought his wife to their house, she knew nothing of the Tsarnaevs except that the older brother sometimes played soccer with her husband and the other men. She had never seen Dzhokhar—until she saw him on television on April 19, 2013.

Two days later, they came for her husband, just as she knew they would. It was the woman’s mother-in-law who called Almut Rochowanski, the New York City lawyer who had started an organization for Chechen refugees: “The FBI has taken my son.” Rochowanski arranged for a lawyer from the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union to step into the FBI’s interviews as the man’s representative, and the FBI soon seemed to lose interest in the man, but for his mother, Rochowanski told me, “It was just repeating what had happened to her other son and husband in Chechnya.”

A short while later, Rochowanski and the ACLU put together a one-page Russian-language memo on how to act when the FBI comes to your door. Most important point: “You don’t have to let them into your home.” Other most important point: “You don’t have to go with them.” But, sighed Rochowanski, “most are too intimidated not to let them in.”

•   •   •

ROCHOWANSKI HAD TRAINED
as a lawyer in her native Austria, then continued her studies at Columbia and ended up spending many years working in and around the North Caucasus, which boasts some of the world’s highest concentrations of uniforms per square kilometer, but she had never spent time dealing directly with law enforcement. “It’s the first time I became intimate with this,” she told me. Up close, it was not pretty. “You don’t want to think that they take a kid in their early twenties and interrogate him for eight hours without giving him a drink of water. Which probably amounts to torture. But then you hear about it and you think, ‘Right, this is how law enforcement works: it breaks people down.’”

Rochowanski is wrong, legally speaking: these coercive interrogation practices used by the FBI in the course of the War on Terror would probably not be considered torture if an international court were to review them. A possible exception, according to legal scholars Philip Heymann and Tom Lue, is the prolonged withholding of medical treatment, which has been a part of the interrogators’ repertoire. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court took up the question of coercive interrogation practices in the case of
Chavez v. Martinez
but was unable to render a majority decision. Six separate opinions resulted. The question of whether it is constitutional for law enforcement to employ such techniques as sleep deprivation, the withholding of treatment, and hooding remained open.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States declared the War on Terror. “Terror, like fear, is an emotion, so declaring war on an emotion is hardly a strategy conducive to success,” snapped terrorism scholar Louise Richardson in a 2006 book. President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy narrowed the focus of the so-called war, but only slightly: “The enemy is terrorism—premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against civilians.” Unlike terror, terrorism is not an emotion but rather a phenomenon, or even an instrument, but that does not make it any easier to fight. And as Heymann has pointed out, declaring war against an enemy who is not a state or a person or a group of people makes it impossible to determine when the war has been won—or lost, or otherwise ended.

President Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published in 2010, retrospectively redefined the War on Terror as “a war on al-Qa’ida and its affiliates” and responded to Heymann’s criticism: “This is not a global war against a tactic—terrorism [
sic
] or a religion—Islam. We are at war with a specific network, al-Qa’ida, and its terrorist affiliates who support efforts to attack the United States, our allies, and partners.” This may have sounded more specific, but the basic political and legal problems of the war, by then nine years old, remained unresolved. What laws govern an American war against something that is not a state or even a circumscribed entity? And considering al-Qaida’s loose structure, how are the generals and soldiers of this war to define the enemy? A lack of clarity persisted on the issue of the objective, or the end point, of the war: When would it be over? When there are no more attacks on U.S. soil? But for over ten years following September 11, there were no attacks that were attributed to al-Qaida. When there are no more attacks on Americans anywhere in the world? When there is no one left who is capable of launching such an attack? The War on Terror—or on terrorism, or on al-Qaida—remained a shapeless and an endless one.

It is in the nature of terrorism to engender an outsize response. “A little bit of terrorism goes a long way,” writes Heymann.

Even small-scale terrorism possesses an almost magical ability to produce fear, anxiety, anger, and a demand for vigorous action in a sizeable portion of a country’s population. A handful of terrorists led Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to declare a state of emergency in Quebec province [after the kidnapping of two government officials in October 1970]. Belgium responded powerfully to a similar concern flowing from an equally small group [following the 1981 bombing that killed three and injured 106 people outside a synagogue in Antwerp]. The Red Army Faction, which preoccupied Germany for more than two decades, rarely had more than a few active members. Even the Provisional IRA at its most active in Northern Ireland involved only hundreds, not thousands, of armed opponents of the British government.

And a nineteen-year-old kid escaping on foot compelled the governor of Massachusetts to put the state’s largest city on virtual lockdown—what seemed like a reasonable safety measure at the time but was also one of the most extraordinary curtailments of liberty experienced by Americans in living memory.

Perhaps it is just too frightening for most people to believe that a small group—or just a pair—of ordinary people using means most of us could have at our disposal and following a plan that spanned barely an afternoon could inflict so much pain and suffering on so many. Behind such great fear, surely there must be an equally great threat.

Using the language of war when talking about terrorism enabled the Bush administration to draw on the practices of war as well. The legal waters were murky, particularly because much of what was being called war was taking place on U.S. soil, and the enemy was ill-defined. Immediately following the September 11 attacks, the president claimed the right to detain anyone, including United States citizens on American soil, indefinitely without charges. And since this was war, the president also wanted detainees who were not U.S. citizens—but who may have been longtime legal residents—tried by military tribunals, which would have extraordinary powers and whose proceedings would be closed to the public. Some of Bush’s more far-reaching measures were rolled back over the following few years, but the practice of targeting noncitizens—“investigative profiling on the basis of immigration status,” in Justice Department terminology—persisted. This happened in part because, unlike such extraordinary measures as the indefinite detention of citizens, the indefinite detention of noncitizens in practice required no change in the law. For the majority of the more than twelve hundred aliens detained in the wake of September 11, visa violations or other immigration-status irregularities could be found to justify detention. For the rest, a novel way of applying an existing statute was introduced: simply by being noncitizens they became, in the eyes of the law, witnesses who might not be available to testify unless detained. An untold number of people were deported after being detained. Testifying before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, in December 2003, Heymann pointed to this cycle—detention, closed hearing, deportation—as one of the greater threats to liberty contained in new antiterrorist policy and practice, calling it “what amounts to a claim of a right to make individuals disappear from American society on executive orders and without the public openness that is necessary for trust in the legitimacy of your government.”

The practice of targeting aliens long predated Bush’s counterterrorism policies, however. In 1986, amid that era’s fears of international terrorism, President Ronald Reagan issued a secret directive establishing the National Program for Combatting Terrorism, which in turn created the Alien Border Control Committee, charged specifically with finding ways to quietly deport suspected members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The best-known case to have resulted from the ABCC’s activities was that of the L.A. Eight, six student-visa holders and two longtime permanent residents who were arrested in 1987 and held in maximum-security cells without ever being charged with a crime. The L.A. Eight tried to sue, but the government turned itself into a moving target, continuously switching what was presented as grounds for detention and deportation: the arsenal of rules and regulations of what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service made that eminently possible.

Bush’s counterterrorism reforms created the vastly powerful Department of Homeland Security, which subsumed the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Aliens remained the target. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, following established policy and practice to focus on noncitizen immigrants from Chechnya seemed the obvious thing to do. Never mind that the brothers themselves were not from Chechnya, that there was no indication—only the assumption—that they were part of a larger network, that Dzhokhar was a United States citizen, and that one of the last things Tamerlan is known to have said is, “I am a Muslim American.”

•   •   •

IF CHECHEN IMMIGRANTS
were the obvious focus for the FBI investigation, then Musa Khadzhimuratov was the obvious first suspect. He had been a fighter in the Chechen insurgency—indeed, he was chief bodyguard to one of its leaders in the 1990s. He owned firearms. He lived in New Hampshire, where Tamerlan had apparently purchased the fireworks used in making the bombs and where he had gone to a shooting range. Tamerlan had visited Musa at his house less than three weeks before the bombing. From Musa’s point of view, he was just as obviously beyond suspicion: he came from an earlier, secular generation of Chechen resisters, as foreign to the proponents of an Islamic state as the Russians themselves; owning guns is the norm for a Chechen man, and since New Hampshire places no restrictions on the purchase or possession of firearms, it should not, Musa figured, make him subject to scrutiny; and most to the point, he was so obviously and profoundly disabled. Though after several years in the United States he could drive a car and lift himself in and out of it, he needed help stowing his wheelchair in the trunk and removing it. More generally, in order simply to live he needed the around-the-clock care of his wife, who helped deal with everything from his persistent petit mal seizures to his procedure for emptying his bowels.

Just a bit less obviously but even more crucially, the Khadzhimuratovs were deeply aware of the precariousness of their good life. They had everything—the credenza, the chandelier, the crystal glasses from which they had never removed the tiny oval paper stickers, the used car—but all of it had been bought on credit, all of it paid off by scrimping enabled by a most powerful desire to build a normal life in peace. They now had friends here, and their kids had friends, and the kids were using Americanized names at their American school—fourteen-year-old Ibragim was calling himself Abraham—but they themselves had been teenagers when the first war in Chechnya began, and they knew how life could change drastically and irrevocably. When they came to the United States, they made the unspoken new-immigrant pledge: though nothing in their lived experience had taught them to put their trust in a state, or in the future, they did—they chose to believe that the United States would shelter them and care for them. The country met them partway. They came bearing refugee “white cards,” entitling them to public assistance, but after a couple of years only Madina and the two kids got their permanent-resident green cards; Musa was rejected for having been part of the insurgency, which, in the post-9/11 era of Russian–American cooperation, made him an accessory to a terrorist organization in the eyes of not only the Russian but also the U.S. government. Musa could continue to live in the United States as a refugee, but unlike the rest of his family, he would never be entitled to apply for citizenship and his status would remain forever temporary, subject to being revoked by the authorities. More important to his everyday life, as a noncitizen he would be entitled to medical help from the state for a maximum of seven years—and that time had just run out when the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon.