The New York Times International - 31.07.2019

T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, JULY 31, 2019| 5

world

been blocked over the past year, the

company said, though its estimate for

the number of active fakes has steadily

risen to about 120 million. It declined to

disclose a figure for Instagram.

“That job is not finished and we are

committed to sharing our progress,”

Facebook said in a statement.

Kim Joiner, a deputy assistant to the

secretary of defense who oversees the

military’s social media accounts, said

her team works with Facebook to re-

move impostors and was pleased with

the company’s response. “I’m abso-

lutely satisfied,” she said.

When shown that searches by The

New York Times for three top American

generals on Facebook and Instagram

had yielded more than 120 imperson-

ators, Ms. Joiner said it was “disturb-

ing.” She said she did not know why the

fakes were not eradicated.

“I mean, the numbers are astound-

ing,” she said.

To her friends and family, Ms. Holland

was known as trusting and impulsive.

Born in Philadelphia, she had spent time

in Arizona and Missouri, working as a

gardener and in an auto shop. She met

her fifth husband, Mark Holland, when

she offered him a ride off the side of the

road.

In 2001, she moved to Delaware to

care for her sick mother. When her

mother died in September 2016, Renee

Holland found herself depressed and

with free time. She noticed her sister

glued to her phone, scrolling through

Facebook. So she bought a smartphone,

too, and created a Facebook profile.

A few weeks later, Ms. Holland got a

Facebook message from a stranger. The

profile showed a man in uniform named

Michael Chris. He told her he disarmed

bombs in Iraq. Ms. Holland said she ini-

tially felt uneasy, but the conversation

flowed. Mr. Chris told her about life at

war. She made him laugh.

“He kept saying, ‘You’re really funny.

And you make it easier for me just to

know that somebody is at home that I

can talk to,’ ” she said. “How cool is this

that I could really make somebody feel

better?”

Over several months, their relation-

ship deepened. Ms. Holland said she felt

motherly. Mr. Chris began calling her

“my wife.”

What Ms. Holland did not know was

that the man in Mr. Chris’s photos was

actually Mr. Anonsen — and that his im-

ages were all over the internet.

Mostly searching variations of his

name, The Times found 65 profiles on

Facebook and Instagram that used pho-

tos of Mr. Anonsen, who left the military

last year and now works on a ship in the

Gulf of Mexico. When The Times re-

ported the fakes to the sites, 24 were re-

moved over more than six months.

Many more accounts have used Mr.

Anonsen’s photos with different names.

One used the name Michael Chris — and

began messaging Ms. Holland in late

2016.

Several months into their online

chats, Mr. Chris asked Ms. Holland for

money. She bought him iTunes gift cards

so, he said, he could buy more minutes

on his cellphone. She sent money for

beer for his birthday. And she paid for

medicine for what he said was a sick

daughter, Annabelle, in California.

In June 2017, she wired $5,000 for Mr.

Chris and a friend to fly to Philadelphia

from Iraq. Mr. Chris promised to pay her

back when he got there. He never ar-

rived. That was when Ms. Holland took

the sleeping pills and vodka. Days later,

she awoke in a hospital bed. “You open

your eyes, and the person you didn’t

want to face the most is sitting next to

you,” she said. “Mark.”

Mark Holland knew about his wife’s

Facebook friend. An Army Airborne vet-

eran himself, with tours in Honduras

and South Korea, he once helped Renee

Holland prepare a care package of

snacks, underwear and foot powder for

Mr. Chris. (The package was returned.)

Now, he said, he realized his wife’s rela-

tionship with this man had gone further

than he understood.

“I had a lot of anger,” Mark Holland,

53, said in an interview last year. “But I

also had a little bit of compassion be-

cause I knew how bad she felt.”

When Renee Holland returned home

from the hospital, her relationship with

her husband and her then 82-year-old

father, whom she was caring for, was

strained. One person kept talking to

her: Mr. Chris.

“He wanted to make it up to me,” she

said. “He was going to sit there, look my

husband in the eye and tell him how

sorry he was and pay him back.”

Mr. Chris swore to her that he had

been delayed by a military operation.

There were soon new photos of Mr.

Chris injured in war, documents show-

ing that he was due big insurance pay-

ments and promises that she would be

reimbursed for more than she had lost.

She just needed to get him home.

Twice more, Ms. Holland sent money

for airfare, partly with credit cards,

without her husband’s knowledge. Mr.

Chris never showed.

The Hollands lost $26,000 to $30,000.

To start afresh, they moved to Fort

Pierce, Fla., last year. But the strains re-

mained. Mark Holland was arrested on

domestic violence charges in August

2018, according to a police report. Renee

Holland dropped the charges.

On Dec. 23, 2018, Mark Holland shot

and killed Renee Holland and her father

at their new home. Mark Holland then

turned the gun on himself.

Facebook, fake soldiers and romance scams

SANDY HUFFAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Daniel Anonsen, far left and above, took

selfies, above, that were used by scam-

mers on fake accounts. One of those

accounts was used to con Renee Holland,

left. Top, Akinola Bolaji, in Nigeria, has

conned people online since he was 15.

“Definitely there is always conscience,”

he said.

ADAM BECKMAN

S CAMS, FROM PAGE 1

Jack Nicas reported from Fort Pierce,

Fla.; Washington D.C.; New York; Se-

attle; San Francisco; Belton, Mo.; and

Lagos and Owerri, Nigeria. Bukky

Omoseni and Mayowa Tijani contributed

reporting from Lagos. Tony Iyare con-

tributed reporting from Owerri. Susan

Beachy contributed research.

By the time the C.I.A. delivered Khalid

Shaikh Mohammed to the military pris-

on at Guantánamo Bay in 2006, it had al-

ready extracted confessions from him

through interrogations that included

waterboarding, rectal abuse, sleep dep-

rivation and other forms of torture.

But none of what Mr. Mohammed said

during his three and a half years in se-

cret C.I.A. prisons could be used in the

military commission trial he would face

on charges that he was the architect of

the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. So

within months of his arrival at Guantá-

namo Bay, the Bush administration had

F.B.I. agents question him and other

Qaeda suspects to obtain fresh, ostensi-

bly lawful confessions. Prosecutors

called the new interrogators “clean

teams.”

Now defense lawyers in the Sept. 11

case, which has been stuck in pretrial

hearings since 2012 and will not go to

trial before next year, are stepping up

their arguments that those teams were

not so clean. They say that they have

growing evidence that the F.B.I. played

some role in the interrogations during

the years when the suspects were in the

secret prisons by feeding questions to

the C.I.A., and that the C.I.A. kept a hand

in the case after the prisoners were sent

to Guantánamo. The result, they con-

tend, is a blurring of lines that undercuts

the assertion that the confessions ex-

tracted after torture could be legally

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

hammed and his four alleged accom-

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

The defense teams cite documents

turned over to them under court order

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

the case when the prisoners were being

held by the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2006.

Then, after President George W. Bush

had them transferred to United States

military custody at Guantánamo, the

C.I.A. continued to control or influence

the detention of Mr. Mohammed and the

other men, the documents suggest.

The extent of the cooperation be-

tween the two agencies is a matter of

dispute, some of it carried out in closed

national security court hearings. But

the intermingling of their work, defense

lawyers say, means that the statements

the suspects gave the F.B.I. should be

ruled inadmissible.

The intensifying battle over the con-

fessions, which prosecutors say are crit-

ical to their case, is just one way that the

legacy of torture continues to shadow

the effort to get justice for the 2,976 peo-

ple killed by the Sept. 11 hijackings. And

it highlights how the military commis-

sion system has struggled to decide

complex legal disputes, leaving the case

unlikely to be decided even by 2021, two

decades after the attacks.

“The clean teams were a fiction from

the very beginning,” said Cheryl Bor-

mann, the lawyer for Walid bin Attash, a

Saudi-born man accused of serving as a

deputy to Mr. Mohammed in the hijack-

ing conspiracy. “There was no separa-

tion. It’s all one big team.”

The first public information about

F.B.I. and C.I.A. collaboration on interro-

gations involving the five alleged Sept.

11 conspirators emerged in a December

2017 pretrial hearing that challenged

whether one of the defendants, Mustafa

al Hawsawi, was subject to trial by a mil-

itary tribunal, rather than by a federal

court. Mr. Hawsawi, a Saudi man who

was captured in Pakistan in March 2003

with Mr. Mohammed, is accused in the

joint capital trial of helping the hijackers

with travel and finances.

Abigail L. Perkins, a retired F.B.I. spe-

cial agent, said at the hearing that she

had reviewed some of Mr. Hawsawi’s

statements to the C.I.A. before she inter-

rogated him in January 2007 as a mem-

ber of a clean team, four months after

his September 2006 transfer to Guantá-

namo. She also said that while Mr. Haw-

sawi was held incommunicado at the

C.I.A. black sites, the F.B.I. fed questions

to C.I.A. interrogators to ask their cap-

tives.

A partially redacted transcript of a na-

tional security hearing held last sum-

mer at Guantánamo also shows that

F.B.I. agents questioned Mr. Hawsawi

during his time at a C.I.A. black site but

hid their affiliation from him. At that

hearing, a prosecutor also disclosed that

information the government had given

defense lawyers to prepare for trial

commingled F.B.I. and C.I.A. informa-

tion that came from the Rendition, De-

tention and Interrogation Program, the

formal name of the black sites, leaving

the impression that it had all come from

the C.I.A.

Prosecutors say the F.B.I. agents who

questioned the terrorism suspects at

Guantánamo in 2007 did so independ-

ently of what happened during the peri-

od when the defendants were tortured.

Even though the United States gov-

ernment “put together the aspects of

law enforcement, intel and military, for

the purpose of gaining information, and

ultimately obtaining a criminal case

against these men in military commis-

sions,” Ed Ryan, one of the prosecutors,

argued in court, the work of the clean

teams is “legally defensible” because of

the magnitude of the government inves-

tigation in the aftermath of the terrorist

attacks.

Whether to accept the prosecution’s

argument will be for the new trial judge,

Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force, to

decide. Last summer, the first trial

judge, Col. James L. Pohl, forbade the

use of the F.B.I. interrogations at Guan-

tánamo Bay, then retired from the Army.

Another prosecutor on the case, Jeffrey

D. Groharing, called the 2007 F.B.I. in-

terrogations “the most critical evidence

in this case” and persuaded an interim

judge, Col. Keith A. Parrella of the Ma-

rines, to reinstate them.

Now the new judge, who took over the

case in June, plans to consider again

whether each of the five defendants’

F.B.I. interrogations should be admissi-

ble. Hearings on the question could start

in September and run until March 2020.

First, however, the judge must decide

the delicate question of how much testi-

mony to take from former black site

workers, including agents and contrac-

tors whose identities the C.I.A. is shield-

ing by invoking a national security privi-

lege. The defendants want the judge to

hold an exhaustive hearing on what

went on in the C.I.A. prison network be-

tween 2002 and 2006 as a basis for decid-

ing whether the clean-team statements

are admissible.

In June, James Harrington, a lawyer

representing one of Mr. Mohammed’s

co-defendants, scolded Colonel Cohen at

the judge’s first hearing for referring to

the F.B.I. interrogations as “cleansing”

statements. “Right now before the court

I believe is an issue of voluntariness

with respect to those statements,” he

said.

Mr. Harrington offered a longstand-

ing defense argument that anything Mr.

Mohammed and the other suspects said

at Guantánamo was essentially “a Pav-

lovian response” drilled into the defend-

ants in their three and four years of tor-

ture at the black sites, where the law-

yers contend that calculated abuse

trained the defendants to later tell the

F.B.I. agents what the C.I.A. had forced

them to say. That was the general de-

fense approach until December 2017,

when defense lawyers started seeing

both classified and unclassified evi-

dence they say demonstrates that the

United States government was engaged

in “one continuous course of conduct to

obtain statements by torture and other

cruel and inhuman, degrading treat-

ment, including incommunicado deten-

tion,” according to James G. Connell III,

a lawyer representing another defend-

ant, Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar

al-Baluchi. In 2017, for example, the law-

yers learned for the first time that the

C.I.A. had a role in how the F.B.I. agents

would conduct clean-team interroga-

tions. The F.B.I. agents were required to

write up their interviews not on a stand-

ard Federal Bureau of Investigation 302

form, the stock in trade of bureau

record-keeping, but as a letterhead

memorandum on a C.I.A. laptop. The

agents were instructed to segregate

claims of torture and other C.I.A. mis-

treatment on a separate memo, mean-

ing they were absent from the F.B.I.’s de-

scriptions of confessions by Mr. Moham-

med and the others at Guantánamo in

2007.

Notes from Mr. Hawsawi’s interroga-

tion helped reveal that he had earlier

been held incommunicado at Guantá-

namo, when the C.I.A. operated a black

site at the military base and hid its pris-

oners from the International Committee

of the Red Cross, in 2003 and 2004.

“Our position is not that the C.I.A. en-

gaged in torture and other cruel, inhu-

man and degrading treatment and then

the F.B.I. did something different,” said

Mr. Connell, who has drawn up a list of

112 pretrial witnesses to try to prove his

point. “Our position is that the United

States, as a whole, had a plan, a scheme

or a program — however you want to de-

scribe it — to obtain statements from

Mr. al-Baluchi by torture and other cru-

el, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

On Friday, lawyers for families of peo-

ple killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, who are

seeking testimony from three of the al-

leged plotters, reported to a federal

judge in New York that Mr. Mohammed

has declined to be deposed by them on

what he does or does not know about

Saudi Arabia’s role in the attacks as long

as his Guantánamo trial is a capital case.

Lawyers argue 9/11 confessions given to F.B.I. are tainted

This article was produced in partnership

with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Report-

ing.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, CUBA

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11

attacks and, right, Mustafa al Hawsawi, captured in March 2003 with Mr. Mohammed.

U.S. DISTRICT COURT, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

РЕ

Лthe case when the prisoners were beingЛthe case when the prisoners were beingИ

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

И

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

the case when the prisoners were beingthe case when the prisoners were beingИ

showing that the F.B.I. was involved inshowing that the F.B.I. was involved inshowing that the F.B.I. was involved inshowing that the F.B.I. was involved inЗЗПП

turned over to them under court orderturned over to them under court orderОО

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

О

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

turned over to them under court orderturned over to them under court orderturned over to them under court orderturned over to them under court orderДДГГ

The defense teams cite documentsThe defense teams cite documentsОО

turned over to them under court order

О

turned over to them under court order

The defense teams cite documentsThe defense teams cite documentsТТО

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

О

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

The defense teams cite documentsThe defense teams cite documentsО

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.ВВИИ

Л

hammed and his four alleged accom-

Л

hammed and his four alleged accom-

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.Л

hammed and his four alleged accom-hammed and his four alleged accom-АА

Г

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

Г

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

hammed and his four alleged accom-hammed and his four alleged accom-Г

Р

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

Р

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

hammed and his four alleged accom-

Р

hammed and his four alleged accom-

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-separated from those given by Mr. Mo-УП

tracted after torture could be legally

П

tracted after torture could be legally

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-separated from those given by Mr. Mo-П

tracted after torture could be legallytracted after torture could be legallyПП

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

П

separated from those given by Mr. Mo-

tracted after torture could be legallytracted after torture could be legallyАА

"What's

The defense teams cite documents

"What's

The defense teams cite documents

turned over to them under court order

"What's

turned over to them under court order

showing that the F.B.I. was involved inshowing that the F.B.I. was involved in"What's

News"

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

News"

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

The defense teams cite documentsThe defense teams cite documentsNews"

VK.COM/WSNWS

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

VK.COM/WSNWS

plices to the F.B.I. at Guantánamo.

The defense teams cite documents

VK.COM/WSNWS

The defense teams cite documents

turned over to them under court order

VK.COM/WSNWS

turned over to them under court order

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

VK.COM/WSNWS

showing that the F.B.I. was involved in

the case when the prisoners were beingthe case when the prisoners were beingVK.COM/WSNWS

held by the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2006.

VK.COM/WSNWS

held by the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2006.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS