When the Devil Is Your Own
The horrifying continuity between 9/11 and 10/7
I was living in Turkey when I saw the devil on the front-page news. A black hood hid its face and its reaper’s cloak spread like wings. From a distance, it looked like a product of demonic mythology, something between monster and man. But when I approached the newspaper stand, I could see this was a photo of a human being. Traces of his body emerged: emaciated limbs, a swath of skin between hood and shroud. He was standing on a wooden box, his fingers hooked to wires, staring at the world with a faceless gaze.
The photo was surrounded by Turkish words I was not skilled enough to translate. It was the spring of 2004 and I didn’t understand a lot of things.
“Was it Al Qaeda?” I asked my husband.
We often asked if something bad was Al Qaeda, a post-9/11 force of habit, like when you are a child and you recite the pledge of allegiance without comprehending the words.
He didn’t know. He only knew it was terrifying. We could not get the image of the hooded man out of our minds. There were no smartphones then and we had no regular internet access. There was no easy way of finding out what happened. There still isn’t, but for different reasons.
We boarded a dolmuş, a Turkish group taxi, and headed home. It would be exciting to say the other passengers eyed us with suspicion, but they did not. They went about their day, like we went about ours, in a busy city in a beautiful country that bordered the one mine was invading. There was nothing remarkable about being an American.
We got off at a stop near a newsstand that sold foreign papers. The same photo was on the cover, but now the articles were in English, and they put the fear of God in me. The hooded man was an Iraqi civilian, not a terrorist. He was tortured by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison. He was one of many victims, and his photo was one of a series showcasing American war crimes. The man’s outstretched arms were not a threat but a plea. He looked like he was being crucified.
It was us, I thought. It was us the whole time. My country took the photo. The unseen force, the men behind the camera: the devil I saw was my own.
* * *
The man’s name is Ali Shallal al-Qaisi. Over a decade later, he described his torture in an interview. In the video, he has silver hair and walks with a cane and decorates his home with plants and keeps the blinds closed. His eyes are no longer hidden but brimming with tears. In 2003, al-Qaisi owned a soccer field in Baghdad. The American military wanted to use it to dump their corpses, and when he protested, they detained him.
* * *
We had moved to Turkey to teach English because we could not take being journalists in New York. My first job out of college was working at the New York Daily News during 9/11 and its aftermath. For two years, I archived photos of firefighter funerals and coded wartime propaganda in HTML and updated the home page with warnings of terrorist attacks that never came to pass. I turned 23 the week before 9/11. I was 24 when I quit my job after the US invaded Iraq. In those two years, my feelings veered from fear and fury to confusion and suspicion, but what never left me was grief. Grief for the thousands of slain Americans. Grief for the America that once was, and grief for the bloodthirsty America being born.
And later, when I was older and wiser, grief at the realization that it was the same country all along.
* * *
On the website formerly known as Twitter, photos function like Rorschach tests of one’s humanity. Shortly before Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s ongoing annihilation of Gaza and brutal displacement of over a million Palestinians, Twitter’s overlords removed headlines, reducing articles to photos without context.
The photos are horrific: dead and wounded children, neighborhoods bombed into oblivion, blood-soaked people fleeing attacks. The natural reaction to any image of suffering is sorrow.
But empathy is being rationed and retracted. When a person viewing the photo discovers that the dead Israeli child they were grieving is actually a dead Palestinian child, the sympathy often vanishes. I imagine in this era of rising antisemitism that it also happens the other way around, though I have not witnessed it myself.
It is the act of deeming any child worthy of death, or unworthy of mourning, that chills me. The cold logic of genocide, retrospectively applied to justify ongoing war crimes. The argument that the correct response to mass murder is to carry it out on an exponentially larger scale. The belief that there is a “rules-based order”, with the unspoken and most important rule being that some countries get to live above it.
I know well the exploitation of mass death for wars of impunity, because my government did it after 9/11, and now they are doing it again on Israel’s behalf. The US government’s unconditional support for the Israeli regime stands in stark contrast to the protests of Israeli citizens, who want Netanyahu gone and blame their government for failing to protect their countrymen. Israelis of conscience are smart to issue condemnations now, since at least one Israeli official has proposed imprisoning any Israeli whose words hurt “morale”. Morale is doublespeak for the party line.
The parallels between 9/11 and 10/7 are unnerving. The massive and suspicious intelligence failures, the corrupt government installed after a questionable election, the horrific civilian death toll, the censorship of the media and sidelining of dissent, and the calls for an expansive regional war as a response to terrorism.
After 9/11, Americans were told that we were in an eternal war against evildoers, and that Israel was our most understanding partner. We were told about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never happened. We were told that anyone who asked for proof on these matters was a bad American. We were told the history of Israel though articles and books and television. We were told about Palestinians, too, but rarely was a Palestinian allowed to discuss their own history in the US media. We were told about Palestinians by representatives of the government killing them.
We were not told that Netanyahu’s response to the 9/11 attacks was to proclaim that they were good for Israel.
We are in a new era now, where Palestinians can document their own doom in real time – or, at least, they could, until the Israeli military cut the power. Deep frustration at not being able to control the narrative about Israeli attacks on unarmed Palestinians in 2014 led to Netanyahu calling Palestinians “the telegenically dead”. Americans were learning too much truth and expressing too much sympathy for dead Palestinian children. Nine years later, we are again struggling to find accurate information, only it is not a paucity of access as it was in 2003, but an overflow of lies. Recycled and AI-generated images, inflammatory rumors repeated by mainstream outlets as fact, garbage accounts pushed to prominence by pay-to-play algorithms.
And worst of all, the feeling of futility that even when US leaders see the atrocity laid plain, they will never change course, never treat both sides as human.
* * *
I lived half my life before 9/11, and half after it. I was a child for most of the first half, though not a particularly credulous one, and an adult struggling to find the facts and do right by them in the second half. There is a difference between guilt and obligation, and obligation matters more. Collective guilt is a weapon; collective obligation can be a gift. The obligation to truth, the obligation to morality, the obligation to never disregard another’s humanity no matter how many people proclaim empathy to be an affront.
The hooded man still haunts me. I know the feeling of looking at a picture, and thinking it is worth a thousand words. And learning later that it is only two, and they are: “Help me.”
Pictured: Ali Shallal al-Qaisi, illegally imprisoned and tortured by members of the US military
I genuinely can’t think of anyone living who has done more, through action and inaction, to endanger the lives of Israelis, Palestinians and the Jewish diaspora than Netanyahu. Israel has tried to rid themselves of him so many times, and every time he cobbles together a coalition to keep him in power that all agree on one thing: Palestinians need to suffer more.
Whether this horrific oppression of the Palestinian people led to the horrific murders of so many Israelis may be debatable, but it is not debatable that policies based in cruelty and suffering did not keep Israelis safe. The biggest lie that authoritarians sell people on, the one far too many believe, is that their cruelty is an unfortunate consequence in their pursuit of security. It never is. It’s always a method they use to secure their own power. No one deserves the death and suffering that the IDF is inflicting on Palestinians, ordered by people too afraid to admit to the murder and suffering of Israelis that they bear responsibility for.
“I turned 23 the week before 9/11. I was 24 when I quit my job after the US invaded Iraq. In those two years, my feelings veered from fear and fury to confusion and suspicion, but what never left me was grief. Grief for the thousands of slain Americans. Grief for the America that once was, and grief for the bloodthirsty America being born.
And later, when I was older and wiser, grief at the realization that it was the same country all along.”
Sarah, I have followed your work long enough to know that you were two going on three in 1982. I was 22, a young Airman—trained by the USAF first as a weather specialist (observer) and later as a weather technician (forecaster), I’ve known since the spring of 79 that humans affect the weather directly and that global warming (climate change) was real and worsening a decade before Mr. Hansen briefed Congress—stationed in Nuremberg Germany when I had a similar revelation. Reagan was President, the Contra’s were somewhat known but the Iran-Contra-Reagan connection was not. Well, not known to the general population. I was discharged a few years later, before the scandal broke.
I spent the remainder of the 80’s trying to figure out how I had been so blind. I protested. I once solicited signatures at an annual street fair while wearing a sandwich board with a picture of victims of Guatemalan death squads. A few signed their names. Most avoided me like the proverbial plague. It was a sad day. Another day of revelation.
A few years later, I protested the first Gulf war. Another day of revelation.
I moved to NYC, Manhattan specifically, in the fall of 92. On February 26th of 93, shortly after 9am, I was roughly a block away from the WTC heading south towards an an appointment when the first attempt to bring the WTC down occurred. I remember the BOOM, the shaking earth, and the startled look on my fellow pedestrians faces that quickly vanished when the light at intersection changed and all was forgotten.
I slowly drifted through the remaining 90’s into a state of despair.
On September 11, 2001, I was back across the country living in Seattle. A few days later, I lost my job and my girlfriend of four years. I was 41. It would be a couple of years before I recovered some stability.
You’ve written about what followed with precision. My life experiences verify every word.
I could go on in detail, and will soon enough, but for now I will end the world’s longest comment with a heartfelt thank you.
So glad you are here with us.