T.I. TARGETED

Robert Monaghan

The leaves shimmered ever more frantically, the mica light cutting shards through his peculiar headache. Treachery was everywhere. Dishonesty everywhere.
"I want to write a book called Dark Dark Policing," Old Alex said to Glen. "That's something you would know about."
"Don't know what you're talking," came the response.
These people hid within their own artifices.
"Bullshit," he responded.
Glen was easily within the top percentiles for human intelligence. But he lied to his bosses, he lied to his targets, he lied to the flash crowds he manipulated, and he held truthsayers in contempt.
In the end it wasn't so damn smart.
The surveillance, harassment which had gone on month in month out, year in year out, produced its own madness.
"Go harass somebody whose actually guilty of something," he told the microphone in the car, in between unhelpfully abusing them for incompetence and dishonesty.
He was angry, at the prolonged abuse he had endured, but it was an anger which led nowhere, its own rabbit hole.
Sometimes he even sought reconciliation.
"Apologies all round. Let's reset to zero. Let's start again."
But there were so many different agencies, so many different agendas, the goal posts shifted so constantly, that it no longer seemed possible.
In the Outback he listened to the Flat Earth News that was Radio National, with the Prime Minister making great play of a deal with America to take the refugees on Manus Island.
It was combined with a media blitz, including pictures of the Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull, the ultimate face of Australia's moneyed class, parading for the media on various naval battle ships.
It was as an offensive abuse of power and manipulation of the media as it got; a dog whistle to the anti-immigrant lobby over a few hundred refugees; the deal being so widely broadcast and so unquestionably championed by the media highly unlikely to produce any tangible results.
Meanwhile the powers that be were selling off the country's basic infrastructure, farmland, ports and prize real estate to foreign interests willy nilly, while running legal immigration to anyone who could afford to pay at historically high and unsustainable levels; thereby creating massive social dislocation and enormous resentment over rising housing costs and high unemployment.
They were selling the country to the highest bidder, and using the misfortune of a few refugees to hide their real actions. 
It was an evil sleight of hand.
And as Turnbull strutted the HMAS Canberra, he thought he'd got away with it.

THE BIGGER STORY:


 

Islamic State militants have forced 1,500 Iraqi families to march to Mosul from the village of Hammam al-Alil, where advancing soldiers have found a mass grave feared to contain dozens of bodies.
As Isis loses control of areas, summary executions and forced marches of civilians have become a grim feature of the military campaign to oust the militants from their last major stronghold in Iraq, now stretching into its fourth week.
Nearly 300 former members of the security forces and 30 sheikhs, or local leaders, had reportedly disappeared from other villages around Mosul, a senior United Nations official said.
Col Khalid Jaburi, a representative of the Iraqi council of ministers for rescuing Iraqis fleeing the fighting, said Isis had taken former police officers, former soldiers and civilians as they withdrew from Hammam al-Alil.

MALCOLM Turnbull ordered the largest ever maritime and air surveillance patrols off the Australian coast after concerns a deal to resettle refugees in the United States could be used as a marketing tool to ignite the people smuggling trade.

US President Barack Obama agreed to take hundreds of refugees stranded in Nauru and Manus Island during a meeting with Mr Turnbull in September but the announcement was delayed to allow Australia to increase its border patrols.

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