Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Torture by Rendition: They Do This In Our Name!
4:15 PM /
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12 Comments:
Joseph,
You've hit the nail on the head once again. I, too, am ashamed of this government and morally outraged that the majority of Americans do not seem to understand how this president and administration are leading us down a road that history will condemn. Mr. Bush's legacy will surely be a testament to his ineptitude, but will also illustrate how complacent Americans were as our own rights and those of others were trampled on.
Dear Gay in Florida,
Once again I want to thank you for taking the time to leave such insightful comments on issues that are so much more serious and frightening than the vast majority of Americans wish to realize--because they would then have to deal with them.
You are very much appreciated. I also invite you to contribute perhaps a longer piece of your thinking as a guest contributor to these pages.
Be well, my friend,
Joseph
How are you going, Prof. Bosco? I'm an American who's NOT ashamed at being a part of the atrocities committed by my native land. That's because my wife and emigrated from America precisely because of them.
We voted, donated money to non-Republican candidates, marched in demos and used word-of-mouth on as many people as we could to try and turn the tide. When the murdering weasels stole another four years in power in Nov. 2004, we began working on getting out. We didn't think of ourselves so much as "good Germans" as we did "smart Jews" who knew to get out in 1934 instead of waiting too long. (Only we're not Jewish.)
It wasn't easy, mate. We both had high-paying jobs and a lovely hillside house in San Francisco with a 180-degree view of the Pacific. Sold off half of everything we owned to lighten the load, and are now living in a rented house that's nothing near as posh as what we had before. I'm a registered nurse, which allowed us to get a work visa to enter Oz, but my lone salary here is only 1/4 of the income we had before.
Was it worth it? Hell yeah! (My wife doesn't agree as wholeheartedly as me, because she was truly in love with S.F.) But we can sleep with clean consciences. Instead of feeling trapped in a land run by madmen, screaming about the murder being done with our tax dollars, we look back with sadness at the acts of our homeland. I'm not religious, but if there is a God and I'm called to judgment, I'll be able to say "I did what I could to stop it, and then I got out of the way."
Dear Bukko,
I am not at all religious, but may I say purely rhetorically: God bless you. I left the states for China early in the 2nd year of Bush's illegal dynastic restoration--the first such event in American history--for much of the same reasons you and your wife did. Unfortunately, as a fairly well-known journalist and author in America, I do feel shame, no matter how much I write, donate, and speak against him and his cabal, because I still feel there must be something I, we, all of us can do.
Of course, I am silly and stupid, but I have been through this before and we won: In the early 50's McCarthy and his horde came after my father; in the late 60's and early 70's they came after me; now I know for a fact that the NSA is coming after me again--I'm not done fighting the bastards yet. Although many will say, with justification, that I am living and working in an even more repressive state--the difference is the Central Government of China makes no pretense at being an open society. And, since I have something they want and need, expertise in modern media, I am allowed freedoms that I did not have as a journalist and teacher in the States.
So you choose your poisons and hope that you survive to fight and see a better day.
Thank you so very much for taking the time to drop in and leave such a positive voice.
All the best,
Joseph
Joseph,
Thanks for the invite to contribute. I leave any submissions to you from my blog that I listed on your site.
David
You've got guts, mate! Leaving after only TWO years of George the Second... We still had hope for the U.S. then, that the reign might just be a temporary bad patch in the history of American democracy that could be corrected.
We haven't given up the fight down here. We're still active in environmental groups, and are as political as people with no voting rights can be. We spend a lot of time advising Aussies "Don't become like America." They don't need much convincing on that!
And tip of the cap to Richard @ PekingDuck.org for publicising you.
paronoia will destroy you
Anonymous,
Not nearly as quickly and as surely as hiding behind anonymity will brand you a coward and keep you one until you leave this world and make it a better place by doing so.
Joseph Augustus Bosco
"...now I know for a fact that the NSA is coming after me again".
Are they now? For what reason might they be? Are you that important? Does the NSA suspect that you, as a former-journalist-turned-English-teacher, will do the US and its interests harm?
Or are you engaging in an exercise called "Operation Self Importance"?
EA the III
Dear Mr. Alonzo,
You and your kind are the only decent argument for there being a god: He loved fools so much he made so very many of them!
I don't know what you are so constipated over--my success or your lack of same? Whatever it is you are certainly troubled over it. I do not teach "English"--never have, never will--and I am still very much a working and publishing journalist.
As to the NSA monitoring of me, it has nothing to do with my sense of self-importance--as I clearly state. But that lack of importance did not stop McCarthy & Company from going after my father (fact; easily verified) or the FBI quite openly following my every move during the late 60s and early 70s (fact; easily verified).
In this cyber-linked world, it is very easy to trace a computer back to its source. When the same computer in a certain building 20 minutes from Dulles airport suddenly starts methodically logging onto a site and copying 20 or 30 pages a day for well over a month, and then continues to log in every day since like clock-work, it becomes laughably silly and not paranoia to again realize how foolish these folks still are after all these years.
I am as proud to be an American today as I was when like-minded idiots thought I was a subversive "danger" to America way back when. That is the joke, Alonzo, I am of ZERO importance to anyone other than a few garden-variety criminals whose cases I still work.
I have been fortunate in my life to have published a few books successfully in America by William Morrow & Company; to have been respected enough as a crime journalist to appear on just about every major talk show in America whenever another major murder case caught America's sensationalized frenzy; and I was extremely blessed to have been invited to teach "Writing the Non-fiction Book" at the U.C.L.A.'s Writers Program in the late 90s, particularly since I had so many gifted professional writers in my classes that then went on to have fine publishing careers.
Is any of that important in the great big scheme of things? Absolutely not. However, all of those things--particularly being solely published by one of America's largest and most successful trade-book publishers--places my humble efforts in a league of less than a few hundred folks in this big spinning rock we call earth.
One should do a bit of Googling before taking on a fool's errand as you have so foolishly done here. But then there is something else stirring in your small, black heart than what you are exposing here--this is personal for you for some benighted reason. More's the pity, because I do not know you, have never heard of you, nor am I ever likely to.
Whatever your problem with me is, I would strongly suggest you grow up and get over it. Surely there is something important in this world you can do positively as opposed to negatively. Do something of note and then come calling again and perhaps I will take your insecurities as creative anxiety and not misplaced envy.
Thank you for taking the time to drop in and leave a comment.
All the best,
Joseph Bosco
On the contrary, sir, I was only stating an opinion based upon my own experiences--which prompts me to ask the question again: why, in a world filled with terrorists, and other threats to the US, would the NSA waste their valuable manpower, resources, and time to monitor your website? Either you are a threat (which I doubt very much) or you are a bit too paranoid for my tastes. A shame that.
Dear Mr. Alonzo,
Forgive my not responding sooner, but I've been quite busy of late. I just don't understand how you keep missing the point: I am NOT a threat; never said I was or imagined I was--either during the 60s or now. I agree with you 100% that all parts of our government have far better things to do than monitor this website and at least 99.99999% of all websites in the world.
I can only tell you that a computer in the NSA building logs onto this website every single day. I am sure it is being done robotically, and that it is not being manually monitored. But, the government announced to the world that it was indeed doing such things with websites and telephone calls from abroad--after the New York Times, and others, finally chose to release the story.
So why do you think me paranoid for reporting the very minor point that the current government is ridiculously, automatically, logging onto this site? In a comment, by the way, not even in a post itself, that's how unimportant it was and is to me.
However, they are not actually wasting any time or manpower, that is not how ECHELON works. It routinely sucks up raw data and only "flags" a computer, phone, or website, when a suspicious pattern of behavior is electronically "observed." Obviously that has not happened to this website, and almost surely never will happen to this website.
While I am rather well known in the American crime beat circles of journalism, I am NOT well known for political commentary. I am switching my emphasis away from the "murder business," it's a young man's business and I'm tired of doing it. I do want to do more political commentary, but mostly I want to go back to writing novels, which was my writing career choice before my agent, publisher and readers stereotyped me into true crime. It is one of the main reasons I came to China--second only to the fact that I did not want to live in Fortress Bush America and cower in fear from a gang of international criminals, not warring states.
Even though I am a very vocal critic of the Bush administration, my loyalty to the United States has never been in question, and I have never written or spoken a subversive word about America.
It is this administration, like Nixon's, that is paranoid. Are you too young to remember CoInTelPro from those dark days of the late 60s and early 70s? They did it! They admitted it. There are reams of now public documents as evidence of what certain government organizations were doing with civil rights groups and anti-war groups. My god, the silly stuff they did against the Black Panthers in the Bay area is one of the most laughable--albeit sad enough when looked at at the time--"operations" against American citizens in memory. I mean, publishing crude comic books that appeared to come from different black organizations so as to foment inner turmoil is only one of them! Seriously. Use Google and educate yourself on how silly and paranoid some "political" folks can be.
I assure you, I am the least paranoid person you will ever correspond with. I am NOT a conspiracy buff. I am a working journalist, mainstream author, and teacher of journalism and creative nonfiction writing. Period. The only thing I am "dangerous" to is a full bottle of good Scotch.
Good day to you sir,
Joseph Bosco
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