Consider the “allegory of the cave”. Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. It is only the prisoner who is freed from the cave that comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all. He can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

 

What are the shadows that the people see? They are the lies and deceit that constitute the so-called ‘War on Terror’. All we see is that the US government, its British counterpart, and their allies are the great defenders of freedom and propagators of fundamental rights. All we see is that certain people are our enemies; the worst of the worst.

 

But if I am writing on the shadows, then surely I must see the reality. And this internship at Cageprisoners I have only just begun has been a great source of truth and understanding to the reality.

 

And what can make you understand what the reality is? How can you describe going from only ever seeing a shadow your whole life, to seeing the phenomenon in its true light? Every detail is something new to eye. Imagine the scene of Desert Island; to what would your eyes be drawn: the rich emerald sea, the sparkling gold sand, the palm trees and all others bearing every kind of fruit, or the snow-white gulls gliding through the sky? But there is something missing from this picture; a thing that the eye would be hesitant to gaze upon for fear of the consequences – the sun.

 

Thus in the reality of the ‘war on terror’ we see the propagators of rights violating the very instruments they show to the world. Peoples’ freedoms are taken, sometimes until their death, without even being given a trial. People are forced to ‘confess’ or else they are broken with the most heinous forms of torture and degrading treatment that I feel disgusted to mention. And there is still more my eyes are yet to grasp.

 

So what is this ‘sun’, that which illuminates all other things, that one is hesitant to look to. It lies within the fact that all these things are done to only one type of people. It is summed up in the words of Hedi Boudhiba: “This isn’t justice. This is not a war against terrorists; this is a war against Muslims.” And this is something we don’t want to accept because of what it will mean.

 

Again, this is a war against Muslims. All other abuses can only be seen in this light. People may disagree, and feel that this is only the case with certain Muslims who may even deserve harsh treatment – this is just part of the shadow. Hedi Boudhiba, is a man who was detained, extradited without any credible evidence against him and then cleared and abandoned. He lost 3 years of his life in which he suffered from depression and psychosis and even slashed his own throat in an attempt to commit suicide. He has lost more than just the time for which he was detained. His case was certainly not the worst, but neither is it insignificant. For his case is just one of many where an innocent Muslim has been abused by the process designed to forsake due process.

 

This is the reality.