There is another unquiet American on the block. Raymond Davis, perhaps the world’s most infamous CIA contractor, has decided to set the record straight. About his time of hell — 49 days to be precise — in solitary confinement in a Pakistani jail back in 2011.Good for him. Yet now it is our turn to set about straightening records. Because let’s not pretend: his time in prison smacked of relative privilege: an entire prison wing to himself and meals of chicken curry twice a day. But none of this was good enough. Not for this man whose actions had, in his own words, gone down in seconds and left four dead. While narrating specific accounts of the initial shooting in Lahore to his being ‘rescued’ by Pakistani law enforcement agents who jumped into his car to speed him away from the rapidly forming mob — one thing stands out above and beyond all else. Raymond Davis is an ungrateful man. He believes that white lives matter. Endpoint. No hashtag required. He believes that white lives matter even more when those lives are jeopardised by the swarming brown masses of a recognised war zone. The latter being his preferred manner of describing Pakistan. Which may or may not be the most honest thing he has put on the record.
We believe that Mr Davis’ biggest crime and one for which he was never tried is the immense sense of entitlement borne of a particular kind of white privilege; one that becomes dangerously accentuated across this side of the North-South global divide. How else to explain his sheer ingratitude?
When informed that he had been granted freedom and acquitted of all charges — his first reaction was anger. So miffed was he at the sheer audacity of having had his freedom bought with blood money — initially by the Pakistani state to the cool tune of $2.4 million. For this is a man who staunchly believed he did nothing wrong. And even when he turns his attention to Gen Pasha he shows little genuine gratitude. The then ISI chief, according to Davis, understood the urgency of getting him out of Pakistan’s clutches. Yet the unquiet American sounds like a sulky teenager when he goes on to grumble that like his President and his Prime Minister, the good general “was happy to let me remain in jail until an acceptable solution to this increasingly vexing problem could be found”.
