THE COUNTRY'S GONE BAD

"The country's gone bad," Old Alex said in a kind of despairing urgency. "I'm sorry you see it like this. I can't believe how quickly it's happened. The drift towards a totalitarian state."

He looked at degraded scenes.

"The culture is collapsing. I really believe that."

These were in an ancient tongue. These were prevailing forces. 

"We've been sent," he insisted, continuing a theme he had held since childhood.

There would be a different force. 

Nobody, no ordinary human, as they were constructed on this planet, could save the situation.

A declamatory tone.

Hawk Eye.  We are watching. We mean you no harm.

But high up they were plotting: How do you extinguish an intelligence like this? 

He would be happier in a group.

The swarm. 

Isolated from that extraordinary hive, caught on a mission they had foolishly, or bravely volunteered for, in the sense there was any choice, they were hunted as a threat to power. 

Sorry about this, one of the Watchers on the Watch transmitted. They remained perplexed. 

Thrashing in invisible chains, a giant roaring, it was becoming increasingly impossible to maintain the perimeter, the chasms of fire that ringed the site, protected from the sky by thousands of rapidly sliding screens. They created a blur as they shifted in and out of protective focus. They could not hold.

There would be no barrier. They came, they left, they were on heightened alert. 

The country was well primed for a coming slaughter. 

There were people who could barely wait. 

God born in fire. The purification. While all around, the society was in an extant period of putrification. The ground was well prepared. The peasants, as the overlords thought of them, were offering up their souls and knew not. But their souls had rotted inside their own flesh. They had no spirit left; husks for the sweeping.

"Like cats."

Like little  tame animals. 

He looked at rotting teeth and listened to ribald jokes. 

"I wouldn't f*** her with your dick," never failed to solicit a laugh.

Year in, year out. 

    He, too, has been changed in his turn,  
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. W.B. Yeats.

In the wider world the alarm spread. They were not waiting, nor hiding, not inching slowly, nor flowing across stones, they were galloping into destiny   

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html

More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from Isis, according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent - a death toll far higher than previous estimates.

Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes and Isis fighters, according to Kurdish intelligence services.

Hoshyar Zebari, until recently a senior minister in Baghdad, told The Independent that many bodies "are still buried under the rubble". "The level of human suffering is immense," he said.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/islamic-state-orphans-face-angry-vengeful-iraqi-troops/news-story/1a62a66a6b8bab8260e4b3ceee1a9ffb

Caked in dust, dazed and emaciated, the two young sons of an Islamic State foreign fighter squatted in the rubble beside their injured father, silent, staring listlessly into the middle distance as they waited to learn their fate.

“Chechens!” proclaimed the Iraqi army troops as they crowded around their captives, who minutes earlier had crawled out from the rubble of the Old City.

Neither boy was older than 10 and they were evidently foreign: pale-skinned and grey-eyed, with long, fair hair falling past their shoulders.

Their father could offer them no help. Half naked, skin taut over his bones, he gaped and grimaced wordlessly beside them, deranged either by shellfire or a head wound.

The fate of these foreign children, unwitting remnants of the so-called caliphate’s last stand, has become the focus of a highly sensitive operation involving the Iraqi authorities, child protection agencies, the UN and foreign intelligence agencies.

Amid the febrile and retributive mood, with growing evidence of widespread vengeance killings of anyone connected to Islamic State, the operation has a simple aim: ensuring that these children survive long enough to be transferred to protective custody in Baghdad, pending repatriation.

INTELLIGENCE REVIEW:

https://pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/2017-Independent-Intelligence-Review.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This Report sets out the conclusions we have drawn from an extensive, wide-ranging study of the Australian intelligence community conducted from November 2016 to June 2017. 

We engaged intensively with the leaders of Australia’s intelligence agencies. We also met with Ministers and Parliamentarians, with present and former members of the Australian and allied intelligence communities, and with senior officers of the operational and policy agencies that represent the primary customers of the intelligence agencies. 

Our Report draws heavily on the insights we derived from these meetings (which numbered over 150) and from our detailed analysis of the 34 Submissions we received from agencies and departments as well as the wider community. It is clear to us that the Australian intelligence agencies are highly capable and staffed by skilled officers of great integrity. They have performed strongly since the most recent review of the intelligence community in 2011, particularly in the areas of counter-terrorism, support to military operations and assistance in addressing the issue of people smuggling. 

Our agencies have a strong positive culture of accountability under law and to responsible Ministers. Individually, the agencies feature world-class tradecraft and very high levels of professionalism. They are held in high regard by their international partner agencies. A central theme of this Report is to provide a pathway to take those areas of individual agency excellence to an even higher level of collective performance through strengthening integration across Australia’s national intelligence enterprise. The aim is to turn highly capable agencies into a world-class intelligence community.

These forces of change are challenging the structures in place for co-ordinating the activities of our intelligence agencies. 

Those structures were established some decades ago on the basis of principles set out in the landmark Royal Commissions into the intelligence agencies conducted by Mr Justice Hope in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. The clear dividing lines he highlighted – between foreign and security intelligence, intelligence and law enforcement, intelligence collection and assessment, and intelligence assessment and policy formulation – continue to provide the foundations of Australia’s intelligence community.

We assess those delineations have broad enduring relevance. They capture, in particular, the essential requirements for a relationship of trust between government and the wider community in Australia about the legitimate uses of intelligence, and therefore the legal framework within which the agencies need to operate.

With an annual budget approaching $2 billion and about 7,000 staff spread across 10 agencies, it is clear to us that on size alone the Australian Government’s intelligence activities supporting national security are now a major enterprise. They would benefit from being managed as such.