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The Polish poet Ryszard Kapuściński once wrote that our sense of freedom is but a fleeting respite from inevitable tyranny. "Do not be misled by the fact that you are at liberty and relatively free; that for the moment you are not under lock and key: you have simply been granted a reprieve." We live our lives, to a certain extent, in that caesura of normalcy and bitter contentment; we have a singular ability, when necessary, to ignore, the critical moral cruxes of our times. After all, I have a child to raise, a family to feed, a cat to entertain--not to mention making a name for myself within the circle of "those that matter."
Time spent thinking of those people snatched from the stream of everydayness for rendition to an unknown palace of horrors is time wasted.
Or is it?
I admit to not having finished reading the Senate Torture Report; it is a difficult report to read both for its content and edited content. Yet what is there is sobering to say the least, and I will finish it because doing so is important to me. In my defense, I will note that not a single individual at work, besides my boss, could tell me anything about the Report beyond that it had been released and that this was a very, very bad thing.
But in an effort to learn what I could, I watched Russell Brand's video rant on the eve of the release of the Report and came away shocked by some of the footage of the news clips he played that worked hard to justify our ignominy and destroy the very idea that knowledge is power. I can't help but think that there is something so fundamentally wrong with America that we cannot universally recognize the utter shamefullness of our actions. And yet, we do.
During his segment, Brand flashes a headline from The Guardian announcing, Guantánamo prisoner Shaker Aamer’s lawyer Clive Stafford Smith to sue UK and shortly thereafter poses the rhetorical question: "What can you do?" His answer surprised me in part; "support Reprieve," he says. For those who do not know, Reprieve is a UK-based human rights group that, for over a decade, has fought for human rights around the world and has been a leader (long before it was sexy) in defending prisoners held at Guantánamo and the human misery wrought by the American drone offensive. Reprieve has also been instrumental--although you won't find this in published reports or even its website--in uncovering blacksights scattered around the world: places secreted like the scars we hide from our lovers.
In its own words:
Reprieve is a small organisation of courageous and committed human rights defenders. Founded in 1999 by British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, we provide free legal and investigative support to some of the world’s most vulnerable people: British, European and other nationals facing execution, and those victimised by states’ abusive counter-terror policies – rendition, torture, extrajudicial imprisonment and extrajudicial killing.
We have to take a stand; we have to take responsibility. Not to do so deminishes each of us. Three paragraphs above, I observed that we unthinkingly ignore these painful truths--and I include myself in that category. My lament this early morning is for myself, in all honesty, not for you; with tears in my eyes, I look around this room of my own and am forced to recognize both my moral frailness and the crippling paralysis that seizes me when confronted with the base depravity of humanity.
Time spent thinking of those people snatched for rendition to face unknown horrors is time wasted.
Or is it?
For Clive, founder and Director of Reprieve, whose friendship and support has gotten me through some of the darkest days of my life.
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair. To steal from Marvin Gaye, what's going on?