The Contractor by Raymond Davis

Author:Raymond Davis [Davis, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941631850
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.

16.

LAHORE POLICE TRAINING COLLEGE, LAHORE, PAKISTAN

(February 6, 2011—Day 11)

IT WAS SOMETHING OF AN open secret that the Pakistani government used the media to create and shape stories they wished to see spread. My situation offered them the perfect opportunity to publicly rail against everything that bothered them about the increasingly heavy American presence in their country. The Pakistani government fed the media information that was speculative, salacious, and oftentimes untrue, and the Pakistani newspapers and television stations rarely shied away from running the stories. Many of these reports claimed I was a spy, others that I was an assassin. Failing to catch the redundancy, the Nation, an English newspaper in Lahore, described me as an “American Rambo.”

The media didn’t stop there. For whatever reason, Pakistanis love conspiracy theories. Pakistani journalist Mehdi Hasan once asked former cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan why. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he explained. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”

When former Pakistani president General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, all sorts of conspiracy theories arose to explain it, including speculation that the CIA had orchestrated the crash (even though US Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel also died in the crash) or that India—of course!—was somehow involved. Another conspiracy theory commonly embraced in Pakistan was that Osama bin Laden was actually Jewish, while a similarly bizarre one suggested he was a US agent who’d died sometime in the mid-2000s.

So I really shouldn’t have been all that surprised when I was told I’d become the subject of numerous conspiracy theories myself, many of which found their way into the Pakistani media and were treated as fact. They printed all kinds of crazy stories about me. They said that I was part of a Blackwater team who’d come to steal Pakistan’s nuclear warheads and take over the country. They said I had pallets of liquor and hookers delivered to my cell each day. They said I had access to a cell phone and that I frequently talked to President Obama. They said I howled in my cell like some sort of crazy person whenever the call to prayer rang out. They said I was addicted to naswar. They even said I’d used “bone-melting bullets”—whatever that meant—that had been banned since 1898!

One of the most persistent—yet still untrue—conspiracy theories the Pakistani media spread about me was that I’d taken pictures of “sensitive areas,” such as military forts and nuclear facilities. The photographs I’d actually taken were just silly, tourist-type shots of quintessentially Pakistani activities, the type of stuff you just don’t see in America. One of seven people riding a motorcycle, for instance. Or a man walking a snake with a leash around its neck. Things I could tell you about, but you wouldn’t believe unless you actually saw a picture of them.

Punjab law minister Rana Sanaullah tried to use the photographs allegedly found in my camera as evidence against me, portraying them as the handiwork of a spy.

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