Brave New Worlds
Page 43
One difference—to start with one example—is when we're working a CI, we won't do the chin. That's not Protocol; that's our own rule. My rule, actually. And I enforce it just like any other policy, and I don't make exceptions. When Culpability isn't Indicated on the Profile, the chin becomes an organ.
If we're doing a CI, we'll conduct the interrogation fairly. We'll make the Parameters clear. When the Objective is reached, we'll stabilize and Exit. Ideally, in a CI Session, it's a team process, where we're working with The subject to achieve a common goal. We'll never go into a CI Session blind—ever, that's the rule—and we won't do fishing expeditions.
And that's obviously very different from the program we apply to CCs and Suspecteds. When a Suspected's in the Chair, we'll wring him out. When Ali thinks he's told us everything he knows, that's when the Session begins. Where the problem area starts is when a CI tells us something that alters his designation. This is tricky, because a lot of CIs will confess to things they haven't done. In that case, there's no way to avoid changing the subject's designation and reverting to the CC protocols. But it's something that we wrestle with.
The suite last autumn, a lot of my CI Alis didn't lose a drop of blood. I'm not exaggerating. I say you can tell my guys from their hands, these guys, you can't, because it never got to that point.
Others, it did. And that's tough. When you're dealing with a wife, a husband, and you're saying, where's Ali, where's the husband, the wife, the son, the uncle, that can be tough, because relatives are intransigent. The wives, sometimes, are more intransigent than the target CCs.
And there's where a sense of delicacy, and a sense of balance, can be very helpful. Say you've got Ali's wife in the Chair. Okay: now she knows what Ali's in for. Or Thinks she knows; actually, she has no idea. But she knows Ali's going in the Chair. How bad, then, do you make it? You have to find a place where Mrs. Ali wants to end the Session, where she's ready to give her husband up—but not so far that she knows she won't be able to live with herself if she cooperates. You have to let her leave the Chair with dignity, let her feel she's made a choice that she can live with, morally.
It's delicate. When a Confirmed Combatant's in the chair, there's no Good Cop-Bad Cop; there's no carrot and stick; it's Bad Cop-Worse Cop, and it's stick, razor, drill. CIs, it's different. With Ali's wife, there might be a carrot in there too.
I'll give you an example.
These CIs, most of them, they won't ever be going home. I say most, really it's all. If it's home, it's a prison in Pakistan—but that's not most cases. Most cases, the CI's done with the Chair, he or she is headed to the Low Restraint Unit, presumably for the remainder. One reason we keep them is, we'll be needing them again when their intelligence proves out: when my target Ali is in the Chair. And there's a host of other reasons.
Ali's kid, though, sometimes he can be an exception. If we have Ali's wife in the Chair, if there are no Culpability Markers, we've been willing, in certain cases, to see about orphanages, see if we can keep the child in the US, versus Pakistan, Syria. So that's an example of the carrot. If Ali's wife is ready to give her husband up, here's a chance for Ali, Jr. To enjoy some of the benefits of an American upbringing. And that's worked well for us, in a number of cases.
Why I like the chin. A bunch of reasons.
I like its complexity. It's not a major pain-point, relative to the kneecaps and knuckles—but there are intersecting nerve systems there, which give the chin a different character, a different flavor. And there's something particular about the way the destruction and remaking of the face impacts a subject. We'll mirror Ali almost continuously during chin-work, and I've found, time and again, that a kiss on the chin, when Ali is watching, does more to concentrate his mind than complete powdering of the kneecaps.
What else? I want to be careful here, because I'd never want to make it seem as though some private form of catharsis is ever among my Objectives in a Session—but there is a satisfaction, for me, in the physical transformations that some of our CC subjects undergo. They come in, they've got the Intel hidden; they leave, the Intel's gone, in a sense, and the fact of the extraction is written on their faces; it's physically manifest. The chins heal over—some of them, you can't even see the scars—but the faces, the subdural structures, are changed. It's like we've literally chipped the Intel out of their heads.
I like it, also, because, for me, the chin represents a threshold, a point of commitment. Once we've changed his face, Ali can't see the light of day, whatever happens. That means he won't be available as a witness, we can't trot him out if there are hearings, inquiries. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he's gone. And that's not my rule; it's in the Protocols: nothing that shall bring embarrassment or discredit to the State. In English, that means something like, you broke it, you bought it.
For me, then, the chin is an important moment. Before you go into the chin, you're hamstrung, a little bit. You're always thinking, in the back of your mind, can we make this guy presentable. After the chin's when you can really squeeze him. From that point forward, Ali's value is purely dark. Maybe we can bring him in for leverage in another Session, if we've got a relative or friend in the Chair, but for the most part, he's a source of information for us, and that's it. So we can push him harder, we can go longer. And, a lot of times, we can get more than we thought was there.
And that, of course, goes to another question, which is when is an interrogation over. It's hard to say; it's always hard. In some ways, it's similar to a question that I faced in legal practice. At what point have I reached the end of my research on a particular question?
And the answer is, you can't always know. There's no every-time rule. Because it's so hard to tell, in some cases, what Ali's brain is sitting on.
I had someone on a steady Program, once, for two straight years. We had an Executive Warrant on him, which meant the Protocols were off. 18-hour Sessions, six-hour Rests, he's colostomized, castrated, pinpoint-stabilized, liquid meals, catheter, two full years we ride the guy. 20 months, he gives us nothing. Suddenly, month 21, he's talking about Montreal. And through that piece of intel—the stuff that came out after 20 months—we're able to track down five more guys. And through those five, we get six more. And from those six, we get a lead that helps us stop a gel-attack in Rochester. All because I had a feeling: this guy's got more to tell.
It doesn't always work that way. One Suspected, we took him 50 months, never got a scrap of Usable out of him, not a drop. And so, again, it's that question, of when do you throw in the towel.
For me—and this is just for me—this is how it works. For 49 months, my Ali insisted he was Innocent; he didn't know anyone we named, never heard of Yassir Omar, wasn't a devout Muslim, we got him by mistake. All that time, I'm sure he's bullshitting; I'm sure of it. At 50 months—for what reason I can't say—I flip, and I'm starting to believe him. For me, that's the end. I admit, then, that it's partly intuitive.
So we initiated Exit Protocols. We stabilized Ali, injected him with Nurturer. We eased him down. Then my PFCs got him suited up and took him to his new home, down in Medium Restraint. Far from the sun—but far away, also, from the Chair. After 50 months with me, most Alis will take that trade.
It's better now, for sure. The old way, it was messy, and—just—messy.
I didn't like the messiness. Part of it is just my nature; I'm a tidy person. When I first started at the Unit, before the Chairs were Standard Ops, we were doing Water Parties, Music Parties, Stack-Ups, Fingerscrewing, Group Sessions, Electricity. Wiping Ali's face with menstrual blood. Wiping the Koran. I thought it was fake menstrual blood, I found out after six months, no, it's real, they get it from the Women's Unit. A lot of that kind of stuff.
Now, I will say this: any time you permit a measure of chaos, there are going to be good and bad things that come of it. Sometimes, under the Old Model, we got surprising results—stuff we couldn't have predicted, stuff we couldn't have extracted in the Chair.
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p; On balance, though, I prefer the Chair. At the end of the day, I want to feel that I'm a professional. It's important to me that the boundaries be clear. I'm not a doctor, but—it is professional, what we're doing here. And you lose moral credibility with Ali when you're urinating in his presence, when you're laughing over some funny costume you put him in. It always felt disrespectful to me: disrespectful to Ali, disrespectful to the process.
So, certainly, the New Model's much better.
There are some, I know, who'd assume, just based on my family background, that I must be motivated by a desire for revenge. People will believe what they want. But nothing could be farther from the truth. As soon as I sense that a member of my interrogator corps is motivated by revenge—revenge, or a perverse enjoyment of cruelty—I strike him from my team; he's gone.
It's true—it may be true—that a soldier has to hate his enemy, but we aren't soldiers here, contra The official narrative. Here, strange as it may sound, we have to love our enemy, in a way; we have to understand his pain, empathize with him, his fears and desires. And we have to be curious about him in a way that a trained killer must never be; we have to Thirst, and I use that word quite consciously, to understand the workings of his mind. And we have to credit his humanity. It's a cliché, but true nevertheless: there's no fortress better defended than the human mind. Our technology gets us into that fortress part-ways, but human intuition goes a long way too, and without human intuition and compassion, it's impossible to get to where we need to be. Dr. Ghose calls them the sacred spaces. Sacred spaces of the mind. To reach the sacred spaces, you have to love the mind. You have to want to keep it intact as much as you can even as you methodically break down its defenses. And the subject's mind has got to love you back, peculiar as that sounds; you've got to accustom Ali's brain to your presence inside of it, until your presence there seems as natural as anything else. It's like date rape: you start with force, and then you seduce.
All that being said, I would never deny that my father's death was instrumental. His death set the course for my entire life; that much is obvious.
It's Stalin, I think, who said the death of one guy is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. In that sense, if only in that sense, Dad's death wasn't a tragedy.
I was seven years old on 8/23. Like thousands of kids—tens of thousands, maybe hundreds—I watched my father die in real time, on live TV. Watched the buildings melt, run together—those unearthly swirls of color, the greens and vibrant blues. All that life and death, bleeding together, pooling and spreading, hardening into a marbled brick that, to my eyes, looked just like candy. It was a kind of murder—and who knew such things existed?—that totally erased its victims' individuality. Bodies and birds and plants and rock and metal, all disintegrating and reforming into this elastic, anonymous whole.
When I was younger, you know, I shared in my mother's outrage at this additional taking, the blotting out of identity, which made it impossible for the survivors to bury their dead. As I've grown older, though, I've come to find a poignancy in the way the Gel Attack melted down and mixed the human remains with the remains of the city. On August 23rd, it was impossible, for once, if only briefly, to ignore the ways in which all of us are one, and the ways in which we're one, also, with the physical world. And then too, as I grew up, I started to appreciate the parallels between this epic act of destruction and the equally epic acts of creation that were, and are, my father's legacy.
Dad was an artist. He would never have called himself an artist—he always insisted, a little impishly, I think, that he wasn't one, he called himself an ad-man—but of course he was an artist, and a great one at that.
By the end of his career—the ending that should have been the apex—he was chief communications sculptor at CFG. He'd been at CFG his whole career, and anyone who knows will tell you Dad was personally responsible for most of the firm's growth. And everything he did, he did with no graduate education, no formal artistic training: joined CFG straight out of MIT.
His work, if you believe the job title, was to create "public points of attraction"—uncanny images, shapes, and spaces. In reality, his job was to bring the impossible into physical life, usually with startling beauty.
Examples—I could give you a bunch. One you've heard of—they only took it down last year—was the metamorphic installation on Times Square. My father created that. The only credited designer. Today, there are duplicates in every shopping mall from Juneau to Dubai. At the time of the Times Square unveiling, though—this is eight years before I was born—there was nothing like it anywhere. A miniaturized red-rock formation, hovering fifty feet above the ground. This massive, solid, seemingly organic mini-mountain range, just hovering, as if by magic. Perfect facsimile of plant and animal life. Fully animated, fully responsive deer and mountain lions. Trees and bushes that swayed and rustled with the actual wind on the Square. Pigeons, when they landed on those tiny pines, they'd bend, even snap from the weight. And all those breathtaking details—here's maybe the most amazing thing—were generated with the Imitation of Life engine that Dad had patented, at the age of nineteen, when he was still a college student.
In the first years after that installation went up, back when my parents still lived in New York, Dad used to sneak down to Times Square at lunchtime to watch the faces of the tourists as his mountains changed. Many years later, I stood on Times Square for the same reason: to watch the ways in which strangers were moved by my father's creation. To see Dad's mountains on a monitor is not to see them at all. That's the beauty of his work—of all of it: the immediacy and physicality. The Times Square piece morphed twice a day: first at 12:30 and again at sunset. In the first stage, trickles of red, like a red paint, would run, almost imperceptibly at first, along the slopes of those little mountains—like some gentle volcanic eruption. Then the trickle became a steady flow. And as people stood and gaped, they'd start to understand that it was the mountains themselves that were pouring down their own rock faces—melting from the peaks down. Instead of dripping to the ground, the rockmelt collected on the flat base of the mountain range, collected and hardened and oozed into a new shape, which only at the final moment of the transformation became identifiable as the Nike swoosh. The piece retained that "down" form for only a few seconds before defying gravity and the laws of physics to melt and flow upwards, back into the shape of the mountains. From the wet, claylike mountains, little animals and treelike protrusions would poke out and writhe free, until, in the space of a few seconds, the range was fully animated, fully alive, swarming with tiny birds and elk and covered in those trees that rocked and danced with the wind on the Square.
Events, Dad called his installations. Visual events, auditory events. They were events—and they were also, as his job description had it, public points of attraction—but they were also the fruits of a brave artistic imagination: father's imagination, his dreams, brought into this improbable and tangible life.
I was six when Dad put the finishing touches on his Gobi Apple. He would have finished it years before, if not for all the problems Apple had negotiating for the thousand-year lease of the desert.
The Apple was meant, from the beginning, to be his lasting mark: a replica, in colorshifting SuperLight, of the Apple logo. Four hundred square miles in dimension. More money was spent, if you can believe it, on that Apple than was spent on the entire Egypt War. You can look that up. Father made it with the thickest, most expensive light: hyper-radiant, non-dispersable—a light that, in spite of its soft appearance, pierced though the clouds and was visible from space. In initial testing, his main concern was, would the Apple be able to survive a total continental submergence. And he wouldn't build until he got it how he wanted it. Even if the icecaps melt completely—even in the event, fantastic event, that humans abandon the earth completely for some other home—father's Apple will persist, burning bright as ever from the bottom of the ocean.
My fondest memory of childhood was the trip I took, with
Mom and Dad, to see the Apple in person. The whole way there, Dad was like a little boy—a side of him I never saw before. We first flew over in a glass-bottomed helicopter, at night. And it was like we were gliding over the clouds of heaven. The next night—all night—we wandered a stretch of the desert on camelback, guided by Mongolian goatherds who looked on my father—my small, soft-spoken, gentle father—as my Alis would later look on me: as a kind of God. My own opinion of my Dad wasn't too far off from that. I wouldn't have said God; what I would have said was superhero. I would have told you, if you'd asked, that there was nothing Dad couldn't do. And all of this was a little more than a year before the day when two illiterate fourteen-year-old Syrian boys, armed with Jansport backpacks full of I-9 self-perpetuating gel component, destroyed my father along with much of the city of Boston.
Some have said—cruelly, I think—that Dad, by virtue of working for a global marketing firm, was more responsible than others for the events of 8/23: that CFG's sky banners, in particular, invigorated The extremists—invigorated, the word they use—as if the invasion and occupation of Egypt were of secondary importance. According to the post facto logic of the extremists, the posting of sky banners visible from Mecca was an quote-unquote act of imperialist sacrilege equal to a ground invasion of the holy city—a sacrilege that justified any savagery, any cruelty, that could be dreamt up. By the same tortured logic, America's use of gels and evaporators in Egypt justified the 8/23 terrorists' use of gel weaponry to decimate Boston's civilian population. For the record, my father never worked on sky banners. He did design the first-ever colorstorm—drenched the whole earth in this gorgeous kaleidoscopic light—but that was long after banners had become ubiquitous in the Middle East and Central Asia.