by Nick Flynn
note: The Button Man, my father’s book, will likely remain forever unpublished. Solzhenitsyn, as far as I know, died unaware of either my father or his writings.
note: By 1963 the CIA had created its own torture manual, titled KUBARK. In 2002, the training program to prepare soldiers in the event of capture and torture, known as SERE (for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), was “reverse-engineered” by two APA psychologists (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) and subsequently used on prisoners at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and in CIA “black sites.” The SERE program was based on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them intentionally false, from American prisoners—think The Manchurian Candidate crossed with The Banality of Evil. Think also of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (mentioned earlier), whose false confession led to the justification of the invasion of Iraq. (See also Mark Danner, “The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means,” New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009).
my augean stables
Daniel Johnston, “Like a Monkey in a Zoo” from the album Songs of Pain, 1981.
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 275.
two strong men
question: Would Russian hipsters drink at a bar called CIA?
lisbon
note: As Portugal had no standing military at that time, I wondered who paid these soldiers. Two years later, during the Iran-Contra hearings, Portugal was identified as “Country B,” the conduit for arms to Iran—the soldier I encountered was, quite possibly, part of a paramilitary unit funded by the United States (in other words, funded by me). This is, perhaps, as close as I’ve come to S&M, that is, paying someone to punch me. Or maybe it is merely another instance of sciamachy, wrestling with one’s own shadow. I encountered the same type of nonregulation soldiers running around Costa Rica during the Contra War, and in fact nearly got punched again for taking a picture of one of them.
heroic uses of concrete
Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language.
the navigator
note: Keaton’s character, of course, is not alone on the ship—his love interest also stowed aboard, but it takes awhile for them to meet up.
piero della francesca
note: In a related story, by 2008 we in the U.S. once again broke our own record for the number of our fellow citizens behind bars—more than one in one hundred adults are in jail or prison (if you are black the percentage is one in nine). This is a higher percentage of the population than in any other country in the world.
note: The ACLU obtained documents through the Freedom of Information Act which cite that 90 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were known to be innocent.
note: The phrase Son of God had many meanings in Jesus’ time, one of which was “a son born without a father,” which, by all accounts, Jesus was. Just as the phrase virgin birth could mean simply an unmarried woman giving birth, which, by all accounts, describes Jesus’ mother (see Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus [Penguin, 2005]).
the passion (misnamed)
note: In this (mis) reading, rather than a run-of-the-mill state-sponsored execution, the Crucifixion becomes Jesus’ (or God’s) choice, a sacred sacrifice for the love of man, thereby equating sacrifice, and mortification of the flesh, with love, which always struck me as a dangerous cocktail.
the lion of babylon
“Former Iraqi Detainees Allege Torture,” New York Times, 14 November 2005.
Zoltan Istvan, “In Iraq, Urday Hussein’s Lions Remain Victims of War,” National Geographic Today, 2 October 2003.
note: The Colosseum began as a sacred site, perhaps with astronomical significance (like Stonehenge), yet ended with spectacles that included human sacrifice and dwarf-tossing—it could be argued that America, under Bush, moved into its dwarf-tossing phase.
note: The New York Times, shortly after the attacks of 11 September 2001, reported that the Pentagon had created a department of disinformation, in order to use the media as a tool in the soon-to-be-dubbed War on Terror (see Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, et al.).
a story that could be true
note: The photograph of Ali Shalal Qaissi appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 11 March 2006.
Errol Morris, “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up,” New York Times(.com), 15 August 2007.
note: The Taguba Report documents the U.S. military investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
note: According to the logs from Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman spent a total of eleven days on tier 1A. Morris studied the timelines of the photographs, so it would be of interest to see if every photograph of a detainee on a box corresponds to one of the eleven days Harman was on tier 1A—even so, it would still be possible that Mr. Qaissi was put on a box another night and not photographed, or that the photograph was destroyed.
note: The dead Iraqi over whom Sabrina Harman was photographed giving a thumbs-up sign was named Manadel al-Jamadi. A photograph of al-Jamadi’s ten-year-old son holding the photograph of Harman and his dead feather was published in Newsweek in 2006. Harman refers to al Jamadi simply as “The Iceman,” since his body was packed in ice to prevent it from decomposing. The CIA interrogator considered responsible for al-Jamadi’s death, Mark Swanner, now lives in the suburbs of Virginia.
the fruit of my deeds
note: Thich Nhat Hanh offers this meditation:
Knowing that my deeds are my true belongings,
I breathe in
Knowing that I cannot escape the fruit of my deeds,
I breathe out
Beth B, Breathe In, Breathe Out (film), 2000.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
istanbul redux
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008).
Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review Books, 2004).
note: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 suspended habeus corpus (specifically for Guantánamo detainees—a provision struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), allows evidence extracted by torture (euphemistically termed “coercion” in the bill) to be admitted as evidence (if obtained before May 2005), and allows the president to authorize the CIA, or anyone, to torture if deemed necessary for national security (or, to be precise, the bill authorized the president to “interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions,” which in practice meant the president could, and did, unilaterally authorize interrogation techniques that many people consider torture).
standard operating procedure
Philip Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure (Penguin, 2008), pp. 136–49.
Physicians for Human Rights, Broken Laws, Broken Lives.
note: Graner, a former prison guard, was (perhaps) chosen to be on tier 1A precisely because he enjoyed brutalizing prisoners, so it’s hard to believe that he was worried about an Iraqi’s well-being, or that he was concerned that a cell wasn’t clean enough for the next prisoner, but I could be wrong—we contain multitudes.
note: Anodyne (which translates to capable of relieving pain) is the (odd) word Gourevitch uses to describe the treatment of another man the MPs nicknamed “Shitboy”—both Morris and Gourevitch use these nicknames throughout both the film and the book, even though the Iraqis’ real names are known, or they could have simply given them respectable aliases.
note: Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was stationed at Abu Ghraib at the time the photographs were taken, and was interviewed by Morris for his film, yet his words ended up on the cutting room floor. Provance is “the only uniformed military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib who broke the code of silence surrounding the infamous prisoner abuses. He spoke out during the Army’s internal investigation, at a congressional hearing and in press interviews. Provance was punished and pushed out of the U.S. military, clearing the way for the Pentagon to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a
handful of poorly trained MPs.” Provance feels that Morris’s film “muddies the already opaque waters regarding who was actually responsible for the abuse of prisoners” (Alternative News, 1 May 2008).
wrong ocean
note: Lulu actually sleeps just fine—in our ignorance as new parents we didn’t know infants need regular naps.
giddy-up
note: I took the silhouette down from my grandfather’s wall once and saw someone else’s name penciled on the back—even this shadow had nothing to do with me. Here’s a transcription of one of my grandfather’s deathbed visions:
There’s no beginning, no end. Here is space, a great big thing, like this. What’s on the other side of it? I probably believe somewhat in the holy spirit. Close that door—what’s on the outside of it. And what’s on the outside of that—it just goes on and on and on. I’ve been thinking of this for about 15 years. I come to a pretty good conclusion, then I come to an episode that destroys all conclusions. How can you put a limit on space? You can’t. I’ve been dreaming about people once in a while—they haven’t been chasing each other through the woods with knives—good people. Some facts are going to open up somewhere along the line because space can’t go on forever. What’s on the other side of it—it’s impossible, it can’t be. A dimension that will be exposed one day. There isn’t any other side of it, it can’t be, you turn your back and you look at a blank wall, but it can’t be a blank wall. There’s something on the other side of that. See those flowers?—I’m going to leave them there until tomorrow.
don’t be cruel
Plato, Republic.
Dan Froomkin, “We Tortured and We’d Do It Again,” Washington Post, 6 February 2008.
Philippe Sands, The Torture Team (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
note: The Hamdan case is fundamentally about whether the president can unilaterally set up a court system, without authorization from Congress, to prosecute “war on terror” detainees. The “military commissions” that Bush established (the rest of the world called them kangaroo courts) were set up, in part, to allow the use of evidence that was literally beaten out of the defendants and other detainees. The Supreme Court struck down these military commissions as unconstitutional, but a few months later Congress reinstated them, only slightly altered, with the Military Commissions Act.
note: The Vatican, in May 2008, updated the Seven Deadly Sins—cruelty, for some reason, still doesn’t make the list.
solaris (house of strange fathers)
Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (film).
Larry C. James, Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib (Grand Central Publishing, 2008).
note: James is considered by many to be a torture apologist, in that he advocates for APA psychologists to be present during interrogations.
here comes the sun
note: As I write this a plane crash-lands in the Hudson River, and, miraculously, all 155 passengers and crew survive.
pond
note: Parenthetical lines in the first two sentences are from George Oppen’s poem “Sara in Her Father’s Arms.”
the lord god bird
Dante, Inferno (my own translation).
note: Sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker remain unsubstantiated.
[debts]
Grain upon grain this book is a synthesis of many conversations, with both friends and strangers—poets and lawyers, carpenters and historians, military interrogators and former Iraqi detainees, human rights workers and investigative journalists—each offered daily sustenance, through word or gesture, when the way into these shadows was in no way clear. Some of the many who need to be named include: Bill Clegg, Jill Bialosky, Susan Burke, Daniel Heyman, and Ben Wizner—this book would not exist without your insights, indignation, brilliance, bewilderment, and goodwill. Also, earlier, inchoate versions of this book were wrestled into human form by: Tyler Cabot (Esquire); Joanna Yas and Thomas Beller (Open City), Ben George (The Book of Dads), Niko Hansen, Tim Jung, and Thomas Gunkel (Arche / Atrium), Lee Brackstone (Faber), and Adrienne Davich (along with all the shiny people at Norton)—impossible without you. Finally, behold Lili, who one day, suddenly offered a glimmer of a way out of these woods a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap before I was able.
[bragging rights]
Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (Faber, 2008), as well as two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000) and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Some of the venues in which his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared include the New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include “field poet” and artistic collaborator on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. One semester a year he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn.
(www.nickflynn.org)
[permissions]
epigraph: “Endgame” from Endgame and Act Without Words by Samuel Beckett, Copyright © 1958 by Grove Press, Inc. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
chapter two, [some notes]: William Stafford, excerpt from “A Story That Could Be True” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1977, 1993, 1998 by the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
chapter two: From “Since You’re Gone.” Words and Music by Ric Ocasek, © 1980 Ric Ocasek. Administered worldwide by Lido Music, Inc.
chapter three: Saadi Youssef, excerpt from “America, America” from Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef, translated by Khaled Mattawa. Copyright © 2002 by Saadi Youssef. Translation copyright © 2002 by Khaled Mattawa. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
chapter fifteen: George Oppen, excerpt from “Sara in Her Father’s Arms” from Collected Poems, copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp, with thanks to Linda Oppen.