by Richard Farr
For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The world is too much with us”: unlike Wordsworth, but like you perhaps, I read the latest every day about Gaza, the Ukraine, South Sudan, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and another poll reminding me that tens of millions of my fellow citizens think a poisonous thug with a criminal record will make America great again. Sometimes you just have to switch off and leave the world behind. Even if you’d feel guilty being reminded that you haven’t been paying attention to Syria, Venezuela, the Rohingya, the Uyghurs, the women of Afghanistan, the children working in cobalt mines in the DRC, or the disturbing fact that people are actually out there buying Boris Johnson’s memoirs.
I was thinking about this reality-fatigue recently while struggling to finish a different book. Look on the bright side: I’m not going to bore you with an account of the experience, which I have fairly often, of picking up a novel that has been declared “plangent” and “luminous” (or, that champion among meaningless back cover standbys, “fiercely original”) and feeling embarrassed that I don’t get what the fuss is about. No, I’m going to address something more important than that: the experience of trying to read an excellent book, and feeling embarrassed that I barely had the moral fortitude to work through its contents.
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs. You have to get a long way in before you uncover the source of the title, but it’s worth the wait. The subject is 9/11, tangentially. But really the subject is our crimes, our brutalities, our layer cake of madnesses and delusions in the wake of 9/11. The battalion upon red-smeared gray battalion of ugly details we either chose not to learn, or chose to forget, or chose to swallow our government’s lies about. All that — and it’s about the uses and abuses, especially in the Land of Liberty, of virtually limitless surveillance.
Not to be outdone by her own title, Kerry Howley has invented in this book what as far as I can see is an entirely original style of writing in the genre of investigative journalism. We think we know what this kind of thing is supposed to sound like, and it’s not supposed to sound like someone responding to a bad hangover by having a panic attack and then swallowing a handful of amphetamines. But Howley’s sometimes hallucinatory style is a revelation: finally, here’s a voice that suits and perfectly illuminates the material.
A key early character is John Lindh, an impressionable young loner who turned into a fervent religious idealist. He might have become any number of doorstep all-American evangelists. Instead, he went to Yemen to learn classical Arabic and, still 17, ended up being a bit of a useless nuisance to the Taliban. Then the bad stuff happened, of which being trapped in a basement full of water and corpses and gasoline was only the beginning, because
when he got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was much much more convenient to certain people, from Hillary Clinton on down, to redescribe him as a terrorist. He was a useful person to fear and hate. There would be lots more.
Later — skipping over many pages of what was done to him by the most self-righteous, skepticism-free hard nuts on our payroll:
There was, according to the state, “a timeline of terror.” Lindh was an “Al Qaeda–trained terrorist who conspired with the Taliban to kill his fellow citizens.” He had trained with Al Qaeda, had “met with Bin Laden,” and, after September 11, had elected to stay at his post, “shoulder to shoulder” with America’s enemies….
[Rudy Giuliani] didn’t have “all the facts” but added, “I believe the death penalty is the appropriate remedy to consider.” Hillary Clinton called him a “traitor.”
Hillary Clinton pops up over and over in these pages and it rarely looks good. But the people at the center of the story are the ones, like Lindh, who it’s been so irresistibly useful to make us fear and hate. Chelsea Manning. Edward Snowden. Julian Assange — who Howley shows her skill by managing to portray simultaneously as insufferable and worth listening to.
The most important of these figures, or perhaps just the most irresistible to a writer because she’s someone no novelist could invent, is Reality Winner. “Her real name, let’s move past it now,” Howley admonishes tersely. She’s right: Winner seems to have gone through life with the equivalent of an unignorable birthmark, so that no one — not her employers, not the many people who treated her cruelly and uncomprehendingly and unjustly, not the many more who bayed and cheered from the sidelines — noticed the troubled, talented, thoughtful, brave, quirky actual person behind it.
The summer before Reality’s senior year, she called an army recruiting office and said, “Hi, I’d like to be a linguist for Middle Eastern and North African languages.” The recruiter laughed, but when she drove to Corpus Christi, took the military’s language aptitude test, and got twice the score of anyone else in the room, they offered to obtain a waiver so she could sign up immediately.
Like Chelsea Manning, once she was in the military Winner found herself doing long shifts in a concrete bunker reviewing drone footage. From a detailed account of what that work was like, two sentences will perhaps suffice:
People to whom she listened were killed, and when a drone kills someone, it lingers. Drone operators watch families retrieve limbs from exploded bodies.
Reality was good at the work and received many commendations for helping her “pilots.” But something inside her was breaking, and there was one thing in particular that was hidden and begged to be known. When she leaked it, and was caught, things went less badly for her than for Lindh perhaps, but that was a low bar. And what happened to her illuminates how bad things have become for all of us in a panoptic, aggressively self-defensive state:
We can access the document Reality leaked, now available on The Intercept’s website. The lawyers [defending her] could not access it, because they had security clearance, and to access improperly shared material would be a violation of clearance. They could not discuss the case on the phone, unless it was on a secured line, but they did not have secure lines. They could not email about the case unless they had secured email, which they did not have, though the government did.
And thus to her key subject:
Surveillance capitalism doesn’t manage a system of jails. It will not kidnap you from your country of origin, strap you down, and pour water down your throat until you break your ribs trying to free yourself. It will not collect the story of your life as an idiosyncratic, veteran and frame you, in court, as a Taliban sympathizer. And yet all of the information is potentially available to a state that does have the capacity to do all that…
There will never be a state from which there is no good reason to hide. The radical transparency we have accepted, step-by-step, these past years, is a bet we have made: that we and the people with the guns and cages will stay on good terms…
At least there’s a little dark humor available in the secret state occasionally threatening and damaging us through incompetence rather than too much competence; they call it “blowback” in the trade:
It is not clear exactly when the NSA developed a powerful hacking tool called EternalBlue. We only know that by April 2017 it had lost control of it. A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, thought by some to be backed by the Russian government, offered it up to the open internet. Various other groups of hackers… then used EternalBlue to paralyze the city of Baltimore, German railroads, the British health-care system, among other entities.
We should not pass over the subject of breaking your own ribs without mentioning one other major character in Howley’s narrative. He had it worse by far than Winner and Lindh, and what happened to him has to stand in for many others who were subjected to shameful, appalling, decades-prolonged abuse: the Saudi-born Palestinian Abu Zubaydah.
Abu Zubaydah was in Thailand, but he could have been anywhere. He remembers waking up and finding himself chained to a steel bed, behind bars.
[T]he CIA had made a mistake. Abu Zubaydah was not Osama bin Laden’s deputy. He was not even a member of Al Qaeda. He was… never privy to the information for which he was being repeatedly slammed against the wall.
Zubaydah was not subjected to the experience of drowning one time, as [CIA veteran John] Kiriakou had said, but eighty-three times over seventeen days.
That “seventeen days” is worth keeping in mind for a minute. I’ll spare you the rest, though really no American should be spared from the rest and some of our politicians should be forced to kneel in the hot gravel and recite it aloud, in every detail, from a wire cage at Guantánamo. For it is there — eighteen years after the more than four years in CIA secret prisons, that Zubaydah is still being held.
The left does not escape Howley’s censure. The Intercept’s radical incompetence (pun!) probably cost Reality Winner her freedom; her account of it is detailed and unforgiving:
They would have understood that this document, if real, involved profound risk to its human source and that—given the NSA’s internal surveillance—there may have been no way at all to publish a story on it without endangering that source…
The central mystery here… is why no one asked for [The Intercept’s own] security team’s assistance. The team was not aware that Reality’s document existed until after it was published.
[F]urther statements from The Intercept, none of which would lay out the sequence of events that led to Reality’s arrest, took on the self-important vacuity of the secret state the publication had been designed to penetrate. Here was a statement about not stating, expressed in deflective syntax reminiscent of the NSA itself.
There’s a thread connecting Howley’s stories: how successful the terrorists were. They terrified us literally out of our wits: out of our wisdom, our good judgment, our best values. Although they had not the slightest hope of invading our countries, they invaded and colonized our souls. That’s what makes Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs such bitter, horrible reading; that and the fact that the writing is so well judged: weird and unexpected and sometimes madly funny in exactly the right ways. I take my hat off — but I had to force myself to get through it, and Howley knows why:
Most of us are good at not looking. Some people are very, very bad at it, which is perhaps a kind of evolutionary variance you’d want to have around. People who feel they must confront the nature of reality, whom we call “whistleblowers” or “traitors,” tend to feel that the rest of us should do the same, which makes those people annoying, because not looking is a skill, and after a while you too might lose the ability to not look.
“Not looking”: ah yes, that’s what I’ve been practicing so assiduously of late. Fearing that I might lose the knack.
***
Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs (Knopf, 2023).
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