On the first day of rehearsal for the Victory Gardens production of “Homeland Security,” my friend Harvey Grossman, legal director of the ACLU in Illinois, showed up and scared the hell out of all of us.
The play begins with a series of interrogations and follows the ensuing investigation. The play is about trust, or more particularly, the erosion of trust post-9/11 and what that has cost all of us.
Grossman, who has a role in the play as an offstage character along the lines of Godot, is not a scary man. But he is a realistic man, and unfortunately, we live in a scary time.
He talked to the cast about a vague and unpredictable threat from a foe as ruthless as it is difficult to identify. In the face of this threat, he said, it is really not clear what we can do to protect ourselves. The measures we have historically devised to protect ourselves from these kinds of threats–the Palmer Raids in the ’20s, the Japanese internment in the ’40s, the Red Scares of the ’50s, and the current incarnation, the Patriot Act–don’t make anybody feel any safer.
They do however take a healthy bite out of our civil liberties, which Grossman argued destroys the trust that allows a free society to function freely.
Who wouldn’t be scared?
The investigative process–as it can now be practiced in light of the Patriot Act–is at the heart of the play. But fed a steady diet of cop shows, lawyer shows, mystery novels and real-life stories such as “All the President’s Men,” most of us are dangerously naive when it comes to investigation.
We have come to see investigations as irrational, deliberate processes that systematically home in on the truth and pursue lines of evidence to their logical conclusion. We believe that investigations can lead only to good things because, if people are not guilty, then they are unharmed, and if they are guilty then they are ferreted out. And what’s more, they provide information, and the more information we know, the better.
This is sometimes the case, as when a specific, tangible crime is being investigated.
But in cases that are more vague, such as the inchoate threats of today, investigations typically yield huge volumes of infinitely interpretable and inconclusive information that would frustrate a battalion of Sherlock Holmeses.
That is one of the themes at the heart of “Homeland Security”: the complexity involved in understanding these volumes of information.
It’s like dragging a fishing netthrough the ocean. You get all kinds of stuff that was certainly in the ocean in a specific place at a specific time, but you get no sense of the relationships amongany of the things. For that you have to study the creatures and system in which they live. But since you’ve killed everything by pulling it up in the net, it’s too late for that.
The other thing about investigations is that they regularly wreck the lives of the people involved, regardless of whether the people are guilty or not. No one’s life is constructed such that it can’t be poked full of holes and made to seem sordid or suspicious or trivial.
The very process of investigation–gathering facts, putting them in the most unflattering possible light, making the most uncharitable assumptions and connections–is dehumanizing because it destroys the trust that exists among all of us.
Which is not to say we shouldn’t seek the truth through investigation.
We have to, but we need to proceed carefully and wisely.
Ultimately, the investigative process teaches us more about ambiguity and uncertainty than it does about guilt or innocence. Back when I was a reporter at Forbes in the late 1980s, I came across the name “George W. Bush” buried in the footnotes of a 10-year-old securities filing from an obscure and crooked company that had come up in the periphery of an investigation I was doing.
When I first saw it, I gasped, thinking it was Bush the elder, president at the time. After a few minutes I realized it was the son, now the president but then a part-ownerof baseball’sTexas Rangers.
No question it would have made great copy. I desperately wanted to include it in my story, but my editor said I couldn’t unless I could do two very reasonable things: materially connect this fact to the larger story or some other cogent story and find independent confirmation of his involvement.
Off I went.
I tracked down any other connections between W and the other characters in the story and found nothing. I tracked down connections between W and the company and the industry and found nothing. I tracked down connections between W and the other companies I was investigating and found nothing. I checked in with my contact at the FBI’s securities fraud group and with the New York attorney general’s office. And the district attorney’s office. Weeks and weeks of work, hundreds of calls, and nothing. Just the single tantalizing reference in the footnote to the attachment in the obscure public filing.
A couple of days after I had given up on the whole enterprise, my phone rang. It was Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher and future Republican presidential candidate. “I hear you are doing a story about George Bush,” he said. “No,” I said. “I just came across his name in a public filing and was tracking it down as part of my reporting.”
“Let’s just be sure we don’t do anything stupid,” he cautioned.
Later that day, W called.
“I hear you want to speak to me.”
“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about this company. You are listed in the footnotes as a special adviser to the board.”
“I’ve never heard of that company,” he said. I read him the board members. He had never heard of any of them.
“Why is your name in the public filings?”
“I’m from a well-known family, people use my name in all sorts of inappropriate ways, without my knowledge, to their own advantage.”
“So you have no knowledge of any of these people and no idea how your name got on the filing?”
“That’s right,” he said.
A long pause.
“Is there anything else you’d like to ask me about?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and he hung up.
I ordered a second set of the filings because some of the pages were illegible. In the new set, the pages with W’s name on them were strangely absent. I called the document service, and they told me that it was not possible that the document could be different. Each one was printed from the same microfiche. Yet my experience was that they often made mistakes in copying and collating these 500-plus-page tomes.
Had somebody tampered with the document? Or was it just a mistake? Was W actually involved, or was his name just being used to add credibility to a scam? I was talking to him 10 years after the fact; could he even remember what he had been doing back then?
Let’s say he did lend his name to the company, what would that show? If it showed something, why did that matter?
Questions begetting questions. It is the nature of investigation, whether the light shines on a man who will become president or on any of us.
I thought about this when I started writing the interrogations and investigations that make up the core of the play and again when Grossman spoke.
We should expect complexity and ambiguity to increase as we make our first efforts to understand the post-Sept. 11 world.
And we should be appropriately humble and thoughtful and humane in the face of that complexity. Efforts to impose more clarity and logic on a situation than is really there results in less clarity and logic than there was in the first place.
