THEY WANT TO KILL YOU

Postcards of Rome Courtesy Michael Fitzjames

Something odd had settled into the house, the burnt smell of witch's brew, and it was no longer safe.

Someone, or something, was trying to communicate with him, or warn him, and he slept as if extinguished, to avoid all revelation.

"What do you want?" he demanded to know in the middle of the night.

And answered his own question: "They want to kill him."

Somewhere along the line he had adopted the Thai habit of talking about himself in the third person.

They want to kill him. They want to kill you.\

The surveillance had driven him beyond distraction.

In fevered, sweatless nights he woke up being interviewed on television: "What do you think of the Australian authorities?"

The national security authorities.

 I think, I know, from my own experience, they are remarkably dishonest, astonishingly incompetent.

He intoned. He intoned. They wept and swept the remnants of failed operations.

They tried to cover their own diseased tracks.

They tried to hide their own systematic abuses.

For surveillance in and of itself was an act of intimidation and abuse, and he had experienced the full weather of it, from one day to the next, one month to the next, one book  to the next.

There will come a time, he felt like saying to the microphone in the car, when you will wish I was just abusing you; because at least then you knew what I was thinking.

Extra-judicial, without conscience, fired not by justice or truth or emergency necessity, not by protection of the homeland, certainly not by common old fashioned decency, the harassment aka surveillance was targeted at individuals who did not tow the government line.

And those who did not tow the line they wished to kill, without warrant, without judicial oversight, without conscience.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the power these secretive agencies had been granted by successive waves of gormless politicians had made them utterly, totally corrupt.

"Why are they so bad?" he had once asked.

"You've got to realise, there are some good people."

If only the good people were in ascendance, but they were not.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/02/middleeast/mosul-iraq-advance/

Karama, Iraq (CNN)The eastern suburbs of ISIS-held Mosul are in sight, but the Iraqi forces trying to liberate the city are still struggling to get there.
ISIS snipers, relentless gunfire and mortar shelling are still keeping troops from penetrating the city's border.
CNN Senior International Correspondent Arwa Damon, traveling with US-trained Iraqi counterterrorism forces, was just 200 meters from Mosul's eastern perimeter on Wednesday, with just a barren berm between her and more than 1 million civilians trapped in the city.

"There is no escape route. There have been no routes that anyone has established in fact for the civilian population to leave," she said.

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