This is part of a Wednesday series on Goddess spirituality and political activism.
With the long-overdue closure of Guantanamo still months away, I have been contemplating issues of guilt and innocence, in the form of Rhiannon , the Welsh Goddess of horses, death, and the moon.
Pwyll, a Welsh nobleman, saw Rhiannon riding by one day, and he mounted his own horse and rode after her. She seemed to be cantering at an easy gait, yet no matter how fast Pwyll spurred his horse, he couldn’t catch up. The next day he tried again, with the same results. On the third day, still unable to catch her, Pwyll finally called out for her to wait. Rhiannon stopped and answered wryly, "Gladly, and it would have been better for your horse if you had asked long before this."
She then surprised him with a proposal. Her family had betrothed her to a man she disliked, but she preferred to marry Pwyll. Pwyll readily agreed, and a feast was arranged to celebrate their betrothal.
All did not go smoothly, of course. A man arrived at the feast and asked if Pwyll would grant him a favor. Before Rhiannon could stop him, Pwyll swore on his honor that he would give anything the man wished. Of course it was Gwawl, the man Rhiannon had dumped, and the favor was that he wanted her back. Rhiannon shook her head in disbelief at Pwyll: "Never was there a man who made feebler use of his wits than you have." But in Celtic myth, an oath so sworn cannot be broken. They set a date, one year hence, for Rhiannon to marry Gwawl.
Once again, the wedding was preceded by a banquet. Once again, there was a surprise visitor: an elderly beggar (Pwyll in disguise, of course) asking for a favor. Gwawl, being somewhat sharper than his rival, said he’d have to know what the favor was first. Oh, just a small thing: enough food to fill up his bag. Gwawl happily swore that he would grant the beggar’s request. But no matter how much food they stuffed into the bag, it still wasn’t full.
The beggar explained that it was a magical bag: it wouldn’t be full until a man of noble birth stood in it to push the contents down with both his feet. Egged on by Rhiannon, Gwawl stood in the bag – only to have Pwyll seal him inside. After a few well-placed kicks, Gwawl freed Pwyll for his oath and gave up any claim to Rhiannon.
Still in the bag, Gwawl swore he would be revenged on them both. At which point Rhiannon used her magic to turn Gwawl into a badger, and then threw him into the river, bag and all.
And, since the trimmings for a wedding were already there, Rhiannon and Pwyll were married the next day.
Four years later, Rhiannon gave birth to a son. Exhausted from a difficult labor, she fell into a deep sleep. Her servant women, who were supposed to be watching the baby, also fell asleep, as if lulled by a mysterious spell.
Somehow, during the night, the baby disappeared.
The servant women woke first, and panicked. Surely they would be blamed. To make themselves look better, they came up with a plan: they killed a dog and smeared its blood on Rhiannon’s face. Then they ran to Pwyll, and tearfully told him that Rhiannon had eaten the baby.
Impossible. Not even in the deepest trance, or under the most powerful of magic – not even then could she do such a thing. She begged the maids to tell the truth. But they stuck to their story, and Pwyll – once again making feeble use of his wits – believed them.
Rhiannon’s sentence was unique: for seven years, she was to greet all visitors to the castle by getting on her hands and knees, confessing her crime, and carrying them on her back like a horse.
What happens when guilt and innocence become irrelevant? Rhiannon confessed, over and over, to a crime she hadn’t committed. She knew she was innocent. But how long could she hang on to that knowledge when everyone around her was calling her a child-killing cannibal?
Halfway through her seven-year sentence, a peasant couple arrived on horseback, with a little boy cradled in the woman’s arms. Rhiannon greeted them as always, offering to carry all three of them on her back, "for I have murdered my only child."
The man dismounted. But instead of sitting on Rhiannon’s back, he picked her up and placed her on his horse, then walked beside her to the castle. When Pwyll saw them, he cried out that this was forbidden.
Then he saw the child’s face.
Haltingly, the couple explained what had happened. Three and a half years earlier, they had heard a disturbance in their barn. They came out and saw a demonic creature, gibbering in human voice, but looking exactly like a badger. They drove it away, but as it fled, it dropped a baby boy.
They raised the child as their own, until recently they heard the story of Rhiannon, and realized that this was her missing son.
And Pwyll said, "Oh well, Rhiannon will never have a normal life after this, and she’s probably guilty of something or other by now – might as well just leave her where she is."
No, of course he didn’t. I made that up. Rhiannon was cleared of all charges, her son (now named Pryderi, "anxiety,") was returned, the peasant couple stayed on as his nannies, and Rhiannon and Pwyll were reconciled. Although one has to wonder what their marriage was like afterward.
After reading Five Years of My Life by Murat Kurnaz , I’m starting to think that my ending works better. It’s a book best read with your blood pressure medicine kept nearby. Kurnaz is a Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany. At age 19, he went on a 2-month trip to Pakistan to learn more about Islam. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani police and sent on a five-year odyssey of horror through Guantanamo, despite a stunning lack of evidence that he’d committed terrorism or any other crime.
There are so many infuriating things in this book, it’s hard to know where to start. Murat Kurnaz describes torture in a straightforward, factual way: beatings, near-drowning, sexual humiliation, electric shock, hanging by the wrists. He spent years without knowing what he’d been charged with, aside from vague accusations that he was a "terrorist." But there’s a fact that hasn’t gotten much media attention.
Kurnaz was sold to the U.S. by Pakistani police, for a $3,000 bounty.
Naomi Klein briefly discusses this policy in The Shock Doctrine: the U.S. offered bounties from $3,000 all the way up to $25,000. Normally, when a reward is offered after a crime, it’s paid when the suspect is convicted. But in this case, all someone had to do was turn over a prisoner and identify him as a "terrorist" or an "enemy combatant."
There is no way in hell they didn’t know this would lead to innocent people being abducted and sold.
In Pakistan, $3,000 is the median annual income; in Afghanistan, it’s about four times the median annual income. Here in the U.S., where incomes are a whole lot higher, there are people who would turn in a neighbor for less.
It was completely predictable the some people would use this as an opportunity to settle old scores, eliminate a rival warlord/drug dealer, or simply grab an unlucky stranger for profit. Kurnaz was probably singled out by Pakistani police because he didn’t look Pakistani. Klein quotes a typical pamphlet distributed in Afghanistan: "Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life."
The guards who tormented Kurnaz may well have believed he was a terrorist. But the people at the top who designed this policy knew exactly what they were doing. I would much prefer to believe they were just incompetent, but there are declassified documents showing they knew within months that Kurnaz was innocent. I’d say they knew earlier than that: the first thing they did was fly him to Afghanistan and photograph him there, then claim that he’d been "captured leading Taliban fighters in Afghanistan." And he was repeatedly put through violent interrogations in English, a language he didn’t speak. If you think someone has important information about terrorism, wouldn’t you want to be able to understand his answers? If they could afford to fly him to Afghanistan and then Cuba, surely they could spring for a translator?
The only plausible explanation I can offer is public relations. The Cheney administration sidestepped the question of how to fight terrorism, and instead applied themselves to the question of how to look like they were fighting terrorism. Catching bin Laden proved to be beyond their capabilities, but filling a prison with Scary Brown Men was easy.
There are memos from the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor with a similar theme: a desire to show the public they were "doing something" about the attack, when the actual attackers were across the sea and not so easy to get at. Then, too, the nearest Scary Brown People were an easy target.
I do not want to believe my country would imprison and torture an innocent man for five years. So to some extent I understand the conservative denial, the desire to make excuses for torture because "they’re terrorists." They want to be protected from the people who took 3,000 innocent lives on 9/11. So do I. And while there are many reasons to oppose torture, this one should be enough: with so many torture-induced "confessions" and accusations, it may never be possible to find the guilty among the captured innocents. And no, "Let’s just keep them all locked up just in case they’re guilty," is not an acceptable alternative.
It’s much easier and nicer to believe that Murat Kurnaz went through all this because he was some kind of monster. But he was an innocent man who was somebody’s brother, somebody’s husband, somebody’s son. He now says that he does not blame all Americans for what he endured.
Perhaps Rhiannon forgave Pwyll because he had truly been feeble-witted enough to believe she was guilty. The story doesn’t tell us what happened to the maids. Or why no one noticed the missing dog.
Or how they got the blood off their hands.