MindSpinner

I remember a haunting dream I had once. I was on a quest of some sort and found myself a guest in a castle tower. High in the tower, in a ballroom, was a party filled with sounds of laughter, dancing and music, the swish of colored silks. The party went on and on. Only once, when the music paused, I heard groans from somewhere beneath. I slipped away from the party and found my way down narrow stone stairs, and at last to a dungeon. There were no prisoners chained to walls there that I can remember; there was no one to speak. But by torchlight the whole place seemed alive somehow, and the stones looked like parts of bodies, crouched atop another. Wordless moans came softly from all around. Up above, the music could drown them out, but not here. I studied the stones and suddenly knew that they were not stones at all, but people made, by means of some horrid magic, to be the stones that built the foundation of the tower. The people above drowned out the sounds of their agony with their laughter and dancing, with music and the swish of silk.

I dreamed that dream some fifteen years ago. I don’t dream memorable dreams often, but some never leave me. This is one of those. It haunts me more now than it has ever done, and it comes to mind again as I read Bob Herbert’s column this morning in the New York Times. He cites an Amnesty International report on U.S.-engineered “disappearances” whereby victims are transported for imprisonment and interrogation in countries where torture is practiced. He concludes,

The Bush administration will never do the right thing when it comes to rendition. Congress needs to step in and thoroughly investigate this program, which is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down.

AI’s report details the secretive program and offers the stories of some of the victims, including Salah ‘Ali Qaru:

Salah ‘Ali Qaru became one of probably hundreds of people caught up in the secretive and illegal US programme of “rendition”. The CIA has used private aircraft operators and front companies to preserve the secrecy of their rendition flights, but nearly 1,000 flights have been identified as being directly linked to the CIA.

Salah ‘Ali Qaru was then flown from his secret detention site to Yemen, where he was held for more than nine months without charge, before finally being charged with forging documents and released. He has never been charged with any terrorism-related offence.

His life has been destroyed. He has been traumatized by his ordeal. He has a two-year-old daughter he has never seen. His wife is destitute, living in Indonesia not knowing where he was for most of his detention. He doesn’t know if he’ll have the money or permission to return to his wife and child in Indonesia.

More and more, I am feeling that my privileged American life is the party high in the tower, and that its foundations are being shored up by more human suffering than any of us can truly come to know. But we hear the groans, if we bother to listen.

I just want to stop the music and hear. I want to know who suffers unjustly in the name of my freedom (or America’s access to oil, if that’s what Bush’s shennanigans in the Middle East are really all about), and I want the human rights abuses and ill-advised wars to stop. I want to say to my government, “You cannot do this in my name.”