'I was in Abu Ghraib prison too, but you're a star and I'm a nobody, like an extra in a film.'
Adnan tells of his treatment at Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein's Baath torturers, while Khaled walks him through the brutality he enjoyed at the hands of sadistic Yanks, as described above. (For a moment, I can relate to Adnan's enthusiasm for hooking up with Khaled. I'd been a commando extra in Raid on Entebbe and got to meet Charles Bronson, star of The Mechanic, in a two-take scene where he explained the mission's importance to Israel, and it was like meeting Moshe Dayan and the thrill of mowing lawns. Lots of golf courses in Palestine. Know what I mean?) End parenthesis.
Adnan and Khaled continue exchanging brutal remembrances of things past. Back in the day, Adnan tells Khaled:
The 49 days I spent in that cell awaiting execution was the harshest and most terrifying time in my life. The room was like a grave and we were crammed into it - communists, Islamists and Kurds. You can imagine what it's like to be waiting for death in a miserable cell like that. We took turns to sleep, with some of us standing while the others lay on the ground because the room was so small. We shat in a bucket and the food was atrocious. Whenever someone was executed they would bring someone else to the cell.
Soon they blood-buddy up and become larrikins addicted to cocaine and alcohol, talking of lighter topics -- performing a skittish Hamlet while waiting for execution (Adnan was Ophelia); the book Papillon, the film with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen; "I played some Nick Cave from my laptop, and he looked uncomfortable"; they "put his head between loudspeakers and [would] play heavy metal" -- and, afterward, a fit of laughter about their human-all-too-human condition.
Khaled recalls the song "Babylon" by Dave Gray, a nothing-special song that begins, "Friday night, I'm going nowhere /All the lights are changing green to red..." To Adnan's confusion Khaled explains that the song was played one time between the heavy metal-sonic bombardments and it changed him somehow. And since his release from Abu Ghraib he's been on a mission to find Dave Gray, whom he finally contacts -- telling him he's the guy at Abu Ghraib under a hood on a chair connected to electrodes.
Dave's a bit taken back. Khaled goes,
'I liked your song.'
'Thanks, sorry, you know"'
'No need to be sorry. I'll never forget your song. I should be thanking you.'
'Oh man, thanks, you know.'
Jeesh, Abu is probably rolling over in his shallow Ghraib at this conversation.
Blasim's Adnan has a healthy handle on the absurdity of Empire involved, summing up it all up with, "The barbarity and hypocrisy of the world hasn't changed since ancient times. It's only the slogans and the justifications that have changed." But for the intellectualized perspective, he brings in muscle-man Chris Hedges for the Afterword, "The Invisible Government," which is an overview of America's Depp State and its history of torture and the subversion of governments that won't kowtow to da bully. The CIA's Sydney Gottlieb features in the dark programmatics of henched democracies. (See my review of Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.) The editors remind us that, though the book is called The American Way, the means, methods and modes presented in the book apply to any empire.
In Afghanistan (2001-21) the editors bring us into the new world of military reliance on contractors and prefabricated order to not only rebuild a nation "we've" attacked (Be the Chaos. Be the Solution.Ã ? ), but to keep it stable with the introduction of contract killers to keep the piece -- an old American Clintwood West fave, with tiny men and lots of no-accountability.
"Surkhi" by Fariba Nawa presents the reader with an Afghanistan over-run with Afghan-Americans from Queens (refugees from the Taliban takeover) who've come back Home to save her by flaunting their Western corruption (material, emotional) and to fall in love with other like-cultured paramours. Raha and Sekander, American "feminist" and old-world conservative male, having had a look-see of each other back "home," have returned as contractors to help fix a broken Afghanistan.
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