THE WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME
Mosul courtesy LA Times
It was the worst of all possible outcomes.
They had created a journalist who knew how spectacularly incompetent they were, and how unethical.
He had been harassed, threatened, bullied and intimidated for years on end.
"I've had a great deal of difficulty dealing with the surveillance," he told one of the locals at his morning cafe. "It's been extremely intrusive."
He had hated bullies all his life, ever since being bullied at school and at home.
He had been to a high school reunion, and sat briefly looking at the beach where he had walked along as an adolescent after taking what he thought would be an overdose of aspirin, waiting to die. He was bashed when he got home for being late from school.
His life was rewinding backwards, and everything that had happened, every torment through that interminable winter, had compounded the feeling of destiny, of dark forces trying to extinguish him, of a kind of group madness which could not stand those who were different to themselves.
Who authorised the targeting of a journalist of more than 30 years standing?
Which head honcho, or head boofhead as he thought of them, had authorised the operation, the endless signs that he was being ridiculed, intimidated, yes threatened. They had tried to bring on an early heart attack. They had tried to encourage him to commit suicide. They had done everything they could to destroy him.
And in their insane pursuit they had destroyed themselves. For it would take only the most basic of public service inquiries to pinpoint the people responsible, and to use the information thus gained to topple them. Because if they couldn't handle a simple domestic operation aimed against a domestic journalist, how could they be handed the responsibility for the nation's national security? How could they be trusted to behave with dignity, to be beyond reproach, to justify their million dollar salaries.
The truth is even worse than you know, the Watchers on the Watch told him.
And he believed them.
THE BIGGER STORY:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/03/isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-no-longer-in-mosul
Western intelligence sources believe the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no longer in Mosul, Boris Johnson has said.
In an unusual reference to intelligence, the British foreign secretary said Baghdadi’s audio recording issued on Thursday calling for the defeat of the Iraqi forces fighting to liberate Mosul was “cruelly ironic since some of the intelligence we have suggests he had himself vacated the scene himself and is yet using internet media to encourage others to take part in violence”.
Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi urges fight to death in Iraq, audio claims
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In his first address for a year, Baghdadi called on his supporters to “wreak havoc”, saying the struggle was a prelude to victory. Isis fighters patrolled the Mosul streets broadcasting Baghdadi’s call.
Johnson said the battle to recapture Mosul, in the face of Isis’s “scorched earth campaign”, would take time and represented “the coalition’s greatest challenge”. He also insisted lessons had been learned from the aftermath of the 2003 Iraqwar, making post-victory stabilisation in Mosul as important as the military capture of the city.
There is widespread concern that, despite a year of planning, there is little agreement among the many ethnic groups in the region on the future political structure of Mosul or the surrounding Nineveh province.
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