The William Tell Overture
by John Kendall Hawkins
"When fighting monsters you must be careful not to become a monster yourself. And beware that when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
When the 9/11 Commission issued its report on the atrocities that took place in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, it was most critical of the failure of the CIA and FBI to communicate efficaciously and expeditiously about available actionable information that might have thwarted the events of that day. The CIA had heard about an al-Qaeda "Planes Operation" involving crashing planes into buildings. They'd been warned that Usama bin Ladin (sic) had threatened to retaliate for US bombings in Afghanistan in 1998, following from Bill Clinton's illegal August 1998 bombing of a innocent Sudanese pharmaceutical company, just 72 hours after he testified before a grand jury investigating the Lewinsky affair. (Raising the prospect, for those with such a causal mind, that 9/11 was precipitated by a blowjob.)
President George W. Bush's daily briefings had included plenty of intel in his daily briefings to bring alarm to the Administration. In the report's chapter, "The System Was Blinking Red," the commissioners tells us that in June 2001:
The intelligence reporting consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a calamitous level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil and that they would consist of possible multiple but not necessarily simultaneous attacks. (p. 257)
And a month later, Intelligence Community (IC) anticipation -- even hysteria -- seemed to reach a fever pitch:
One al Qaeda intelligence report warned that something "very, very, very, very" big was about to happen, and most of Bin Ladin's network was reportedly anticipating the attack. (p.257)
The Report concluded that the FBI had not been given information that they could work with by the CIA, who following terrorists suspects, including two -- Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- who would be on the weaponized airlines later. The Commission also concluded that the tragic events were "preventable."
A later CIA Inspector General (IG) internal report looked into the failures of the agency to respond adequately to threats to the US in the months leading up to 9/11. The IG report was especially critical of CIA director George Tenet, as well as the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC), Cofer Black. Though a declassified version of the August 2005 IG report was reported in the MSM, it's short on detail. A summary URL-cited Wikipedia entry (see note 11) criticizes Black thusly:
According to an internal CIA report on the performance of the agency prior to the 9/11 attacks, Black was criticized for not passing on information to the FBI that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had subsequently entered the United States. In addition, the 9/11 Commission found that while Black testified before Congress's Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to information on the two hijackers, the 9/11 Commission found no such evidence of this.
The insinuation here is that Cofer Black lied -- before Congress -- about feeding the FBI actionable information.
Black went on to be appointed an Ambassador At Large by Bush, giving extraordinary powers, becoming a kind of embassy on two legs wherever he went. He also set up the CIA's rendition program that allowed terrorist suspects to be kidnapped and sent to "black sites." Black famously vowed of al-Qaeda terrorists that "When we're through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs." Black, also "conceived, planned, and led the CIA's role in the war in Afghanistan," according to his bio at OODA, "a business intelligence and crisis response consulting group." Black is also on the board of directors at the controversial Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, performing unknown duties, though worth noting as the war drums beat in Russia.
Rendered terrorist suspects were subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT) that were introduced by private contractors, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, psychologists. In The Card Counter, these psychologists are combined in the persona that is John Gardo. The techniques were essentially "reverse engineered" steps borrowed from a military program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) and included loud music, stress positions, and waterboarding. EIT would feature in the interrogations of suspects held at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, including suspected masterminds Khaled Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who would be waterboarded 183 and 83 times -- until they began writing poetry, according to CIA whistleblower, John Kirikaou. EIT would later be determined to be torture by a Senate Sub-committee.
All of this is a prelude to the plot that unfolds in The Card Counter (2021). Written and directed by Paul Shrader, the film follows the post-prison release journey of William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac), a former Abu Ghraib prison guard convicted of torturing suspects and sent to the military prison Leavenworth to serve his time. Now he's an anonymous and modestly successful small time card counter who travels from casino to casino playing hand after hand, hour after hour. His voice over throughout the film contains his thoughts and meditations; he's free now, but still doing time in his mind. He teaches us how to count cards as we go. How to read another's "tell." He will say to us, "A great player can see right into your soul." He will converge with three characters who will "turn" his journey away from its sedate and stoical existence -- La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), Cork (Tye Sheridan), and Gordo (Willem Dafoe).
Tell lives out of motels, rather than the casino hotels because, he tells La Linda, a business associate, "I don't like to stay at casinos. They know everything about you. Maids and staff and corridor cameras. Not for me." In addition, he turns each of his motel rooms into a kind of version of his Leavenworth cell by getting rid of excess furnishings and draping the desk and chair and table in white cloth. As the screenplay puts it, when he's done with his ritual: "The entire room is wrapped in spectral white like the ghostly furnishings of someone long departed." His first thought shared with us in voice over is: "I had never imagined myself as someone suited to a life of incarceration. As a boy I was afraid of confined spaces." He's a loner, unsentimental, playing out his hands, as it were.
When he sleeps Tell has flashbacks to Abu Ghraib are "nightmarish" and "hallucino," the latter a VR experience that can feature distortions of the visual field, as if on magic mushrooms. In the film, the nightmare Tell has of Abu Ghraib begins with a fisheye distortion within the prison confines. The effect is the creation of a kind of maze. Tell recovers the torturing as through a VR. We are given a taste of the sensory experience:
--the NOISE, the noise, the noise. The cacophony. Guards yelling until their voices go hoarse, MPs yelling in megaphones directly into detainee's ears, metal music, rap music, f*cking Eminem.
--a barking dog
--Tell: "How do I get out of here? My shoe..."
--clicking cameras
--feces, urine
--"my shoe!"
--An MP instructs a naked prisoner to simulate masturbation. Camera flash.
--MP voice: "TIME TO WAKE UP!"
--A female MP restrains a barking German Shepherd. An orange suited prisoner cringes.
--a distant soldier's voice sings: "I wish I was in the land of cotton, Old times there are not forgotten; Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land."
Tell is veritably a tortured soul who cannot find real peace or redemption. But, in his waking life, he is in self-control, as long as he doesn't "tilt."
Beginning in the summer of June 2003 reports of widespread abuse at Abu Ghraib prison began to leak out to human rights agencies and the MSM and grew with frequency and intensity. First, Amnesty International released evidence of abuses; then in November the Associated Press ran a special report; then in January 2004 the International Committee of the Red Cross reported the allegations of torture to the military high command, which investigated but did not release a public report. Then investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a piece for New Yorker in April 2004, "Torture at Abu Ghraib." CBS's 60 Minutes followed with a gripping account with images that opened the abuses up wide.
Although the Bush administration reacted defensively to the MSM interpretation of events, denying most of the reports, not long after there were arrests of low-ranking soldiers and officers, the wheels of justice began to roll. The usual scapegoating followed. Eleven soldiers were convicted of various abuses and conspiracy, but no officers served time after convictions. And, of the lot, Pfc. Lynndie England and Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. were especially regarded as heinous abusers. England liked to sexually humiliate her victims, and Graner was regarded a ringleader, who especially relished his sadism, in one episode actually piling naked detainees on top of each other in a pyramid. Graner was convicted and sentenced to Leavenworth for a 10-year prison term.
It's Graner that the character William Tell (Tillich) could be partially based upon. The prison sentence he receives and the Abu Ghraib role are similar. If so, Tell has a lot to feel nightmarish about. And it's understandable how he has trouble sleeping (tossing and turning). We would see why he prefers to drink alone and eschew the company of others. He can't see how anyone could forgive him. He'll never forgive himself. The cell he is fated to occupy is described as "Spartan." Though literate, he's not a reader; he's a man of action; a soldier. His voice over tells us that Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" is the first book he's read, an impossibility made plausible as metaphor. "Meditations" is, as the title suggests, all about reducing noise, taking control of one's thoughts, being true to self, even living for others. Like Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic.
He is bizarrely by his incarceration fated to the life of mind, to long bouts of supplication and remission of sin. Even his alter name, Tillich, conjures up Paul Tillich, the Christian existentialist philosopher who gave us Systematic Theology and its struggle and considerations regarding the question of precedence and dialectic between essence and existence, settling into a pantheistic de-separation between I and Other that is an ultimate empathy, the very quality that Graner lacked at Abu Ghraib. Tillich goes by the name William Tell, famous for assassinating an Austrian tyrant, which is a welcome thing in any age.
Paul Shrader does a good job placing the viewer in the interior chambers of the card counter's mind. It's a kind of trick of empathy. (It recalls his stoic creation Travis Bickle, the NYC cabbie who takes for a ride through the 'hood he intends to clean up.) Through the magic of suspension we can imagine what it's like to be this reforming monster trying to regain his humanity. We learn how he plays the various games of cards and even roulette, and always wants to tell us that his philosophy is summed up with: "Bet small, lose small" and the converse, he tells us in voice over:
It's a matter of degree. The house doesn't mind players who count cards. They don't even mind players who count cards and win. What they don't like are players who count cards and win big. It's how much you win and how you win it. I keep to modest goals.
The House, the framework of rules, our overseers. Shrader also brings in the parallel metaphor of playing a pinball machine, getting on a roll, lighting up the joint, but backing off before you "tilt" and it's Game Over, all is lost. At Abu Ghraib Tell tilted.
But things happen, "night turns to day/" Just as in playing cards, Tell tells us, "If a player knows the nature of the cards in the shoe he can turn the house advantage to himself. To do this he has to keep track of every card that is played." Being alert in life, too, brings turns. Tell is being watched over by a kind of unlikely guardian angel, La Linda, who owns a stable -- a bunch of top card players who play for high stakes, using other people's money -- who, at first, unsuccessfully tempts into the Big Game (he's fine with small success). But he learns to trust her, and, later, he will love her. Two qualities he threw away in his dark journey down Monster Row. He will say to her later, "You woke me."
Then Cirk asserts himself one day in Tell's life at the "International Security Conference & Exposition WEST EXPO" being held at a hotel he's playing cards in. He introduces himself as the son of a soldier he worked with at Abu Ghraib, Roger Baufort. Cirk, a 20 year old boy suffering arrested development, another casualty of the war on terror.. During a drink together at a bar, Cirk tells Tell of Gordo:
The beauty of the scheme was that Gordo, once he became a private contractor, could not be prosecuted for crimes not on American soil. But my father was not so lucky. He was dishonorably discharged, got addicted to oxycodone--he'd been injured, drank heavily, beat my mother, beat me. My mother left without saying a word. Without a suitcase. That left only me to beat. Until he shot himself. That was four years ago. He was MP 18 XRay. I believe you were MP 96 Bravo.
The mention of private contractors to do military business sounds like what Edward Snowden queries in "Homo Contractus," a chapter of his memoir, Permanent Record.
During the American Revolution, it had made sense for the Continental Congress to hire privateers and mercenaries to protect the independence of what was then barely a functioning republic. But for third-millennium hyperpower America to rely on privatized forces for the national defense struck me as strange and vaguely sinister. (page 87)
In any case, it all ends suddenly when Cirk's father shoots himself and his mother disappears. Cirk's father turns out to be a fellow military interrogator at Abu Ghraib who also tilted.
The conference features a speaker, John Gordo, who is presenting: "Recent Developments in Interrogation and Truthfulness." Gordo's hawking the latest in facial recognition technology that he claims will replace polygraph tests as a "truth" detector. It's the same Gordo who taught him EIT, who turned him early when Tell cringed at the treatment of suspects, who answered Tell's query, "But what if they don't know anything?" with: "That's what they all say" and presses him to keep the punishment going. At the conference, Gordo is foisting the gizmo on law enforcement, his truth-seeking going from Iraqi suspects to fellow Americans -- now all suspect after 9/11 and needing constant surveillance to weed out the bad seeds. Cirk tells Tell that "A handful of soldiers --"bad apples" -- were punished. Those really responsible are still walking around, giving lectures at conventions, getting honorary degrees." Like Gordo. The real bad seed.
When he asks, Cirk tells Tell he's stalking Gordo and intends to kill him in revenge for what happened to his family. He shows Tell a Google Earth zoom-in of Gordo's house. While Tell is understanding, he tries to dissuade the kid, unable to express the unspeakable evil Gordo represents and how Cirk wouldn't stand a chance in a confrontation -- the psychopathic Gordo would be able to read him. Cork is a turn and Tell is woke a second time -- he sees a shot at redemption. La Linda's offer money to play high stakes cards provides a means to assist Cirk start over, clear his debts, reunite with his mom. But Cirk is determined to seek revenge, despite Tells admonition to watch the tilt.
In the growing Platonic turned erotic love between La Linda and Tell there is a scintillating scene following her talking him into taking a night off from cards to explore a "wonderland." They have an exchange:
She said to me, "Did you ever see a city all lit up at night?"
I said, "Yeah I've seen a whole city on fire."
"Not like that," she said.
She brings him to a botanical garden that night,
a dense grove of theatrically lit labeled orchids and exotic plants. They are silhouetted by an illuminated globe at the end of the grove. Electronic music insinuates its way into the soundtrack"They enter a tunnel of multicolored mutating lights. They are enveloped in visual morphing enchantment.
This represents the polar opposite of Tell's nightmare world. And for a moment one recalls The Tempest. Caliban. Ariel. The attainment of grace. And when they make love, Tell thinks to us:
The feeling of being forgiven by another and forgiving oneself are so much alike there's no point in trying to keep them distinct.
It could be right out of Marcus Aurelius. He is saved. For now.
One other aspect that Shrader pastes into The Card Counter for not-quite comic relief is the recurring appearance of Mr. USA, a 30-ish Ukrainian immigrant "replete with nativist hubris. He wears an American flag shirt, blue pants and a 'USA' baseball cap." Right out of the MAGA catalog. He moves around with two "lackeys" from casino to casino like Tell. The lackeys frequently shout USA! USA! USA! Obnoxia as a virtue. It recalls the fervor of the 1980 Winter Olympics victory at Lake Placid when the Americans beat the Russians in ice hockey for the gold medal and the crowd went berserk with cheap patriotism and flag wraps calhoun. Lake Placid could also designate the beginning of the Reagan era, the trickle down economics, the rise of the Me generation. Hearing the guy from Ukraine, a nation-state notorious for its corruption, has a disturbing resonant quality. Tell looks at the "asswipe" and thinks to us:
The man never saw a day of service. I'd like to run that red, white and blue flag straight through his mouth and out his a**hole.
To hear such rah rah now tells of age -- it's old, it's self-parody, and in the context of a Way of Life exposed as fraud in the tortures at Abu Ghraib -- it's almost a taunt.
I won't spoil the film's final scene where two men try to reverse-engineer each other. However, the unseen scene (you hear it) did conjure up for me the description of ancient boxers that Thom Jones includes in his extraordinary Nam story, "The Pugilist at Rest." He goes:
The sort of boxing Theogenes practiced was not like modern-day boxing with those kindergarten Queensberry Rules. The two contestants were not permitted the freedom of a ring. Instead, they were strapped to flat stones, facing each other nose-to-nose. When the signal was given, they would begin hammering each other with fists encased in heavy leather thongs. It was a fight to the death. Fourteen hundred and twenty-five times Theogenes was strapped to the stone and fourteen hundred and twenty-five times he emerged a victor. (17-18)
This is war. The war to end all wars. The war that will end all of us. Sitting there beating the snot out of each other for what may be little more than entertainment. Our species suggests that inclination, as Freud knew so well and expressed in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents.
As I write this, Russia seems keened to invade Ukraine -- unless, of course, Vlad Putin is merely applying gain-of-function techniques on the West to see what they'll do when he feints. We know one thing: There are many Gordos out there keen to extract Truth, even if it's not there, by force. It might be good to know what men like Cofer Black -- see Homo Contractus above -- are up to these days. Remember that he fucked up the intel before 9/11, and that he was the architect of the CIA's plan and strategy for Afghanistan -- another flub. He's been on the board of Ukraine gas giant Burisma since shortly after Trump's Inauguration, his Blackwater buddies a text message away from deployment. In his memoirs, Hunter Biden, another former Burisma board member, said that his presence on the board was "a big f*ck You to Putin." Hunter was an alcoholic wimp, compared to Cofer, who brings flies walking across eyeballs to the table. Where is Cofer today? We should want to know.
The Card Counter features an excellent soundtrack from Robert Levon Been that delivers the mood and dark emotional struggle Tell is going through.
Shrader does an excellent job suggesting that Tell's moral collapse is not unlike our culture's current vacuity. It's reminiscent of Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure and Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side. It also has something of Taxi Driver in it, which he wrote the screenplay for. It's not a great film, but it is a worthy film, and one relevant to our current times, and the continued fall-out of our collective moral center since the towers fell.
Highly recommended.
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