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.
They came for Musa. Two FBI agents questioned him in his apartment. “They wanted to know why I didn’t go to the authorities to say that I know him. I said, ‘I was waiting for you to come to me.’ I guess that response kind of got to them.” It probably did. It was a dumb thing to say, too, because it was not exactly true. Like some other immigrants who came to the United States in the Internet era, the Khadzhimuratovs left Chechnya without leaving it: they were constantly, for hours on end, on Skype with Madina’s older sister in Grozny, and while they followed the news, they got it by way of the Caucasus, reading the websites that covered their native region. The Caucasus was not interested in the Boston Marathon bombing—the Caucasus was not exactly impressed by a bomb that killed three people, well below the weekly average for that region—until the suspects were identified as Chechens. By that time, the names of the Tsarnaev brothers were known and Tamerlan was dead. There was nothing to do but wait for the FBI to come with its questions.
When the FBI came again, the agents took Musa to a local office for questioning. It was a typical FBI interrogation room: windowless, lit with a flickering fluorescent light. And it was a typical FBI questioning session—no audio or video equipment was used. The FBI records its interrogations only if the subject is in the Bureau’s custody, but Musa, like most of the Chechens, submitted to the questioning voluntarily and without engaging a lawyer, not only because he knew himself to be innocent but also because he thought that this way his innocence would be all the more obvious.
“It turned out they thought I was the mastermind,” he discovered. “Because I keep guns at home. And also because I’m into sports and so I would have chosen the Boston Marathon as a target. I said, ‘If I’d had anything to do with it, do you really think I would have gone out and bought guns under my own name, or let him come for shooting practice right here, under my nose?’”
Several hours into the interrogation session—by this time Musa had been without food, water, or medication for eight hours, so he was beginning to slip in and out of consciousness—he was hooked up to a polygraph machine.
“Let’s see how you are going to lie now,” he remembered one of the agents saying.