mr. kiriakou is in a federal prison for leaking the information that the us government is engaged in illegal torture of prisoners. the agents who carried out the torture are not, i note, in prison.
it is not ok for a government to engage in acts against its own laws and it is not ok for a government to enact laws to prevent it from being exposed when it does so.
the only good government is an open and honest government, so these people who are letting sunlight in so the citizens of the country can see and discuss what does and does not go on in our names and the name of freedom are heroes.
they are serving the best patriotic ideals, at great cost to themselves.
mr. john kiriakou is in prison for work he did on my behalf, so each thursday i write him a letter.
there's nothing i can tell him about why his sacrifice is important; he already knows that.
but prison life is tedious and terrifying and then tedious.
and tedious.
...i hear. i've never been in prison, but i hear that it involves a huge amount of tedium and that distractions are much welcome.
i want to make mr. kiriakou cookies, but instead i send him a letter each week briefly thanking him for his work and then moving on to a page of nice chitchat, which i hope will break up his time just a little bit.
here are some excerpts:
--
today it is sunny and warm here, which is a welcome change from last week, when it was nothing but filthy blattering, slat-blasting, barrel-busting rain and the road crews had to hot juggle to keep up with the washouts.
a pair of orioles has been sitting nearly every day in the tree outside my window. i had never seen orioles before where i live.
i am sore and muddy and i have not yet had a shower this evening, so i smell kind of funky. today i went mountain biking and the ground is slippery and i don’t yet have a sense for how my wheels will roll so i am still riding tentatively and slowly, like granny panties.
this was not any good last night when we were riding the season opener in our local race series. we were to have opened LAST week, but see rain, above.
--
tonight for dinner i made macaroni and cheese. i’m almost fifty years old and i only made real mac and cheese for the first time this year. i made it tonight with american cheese along with fontinella and gouda since i happened to have gouda, see above.
i like american cheese in it because american cheese makes it smooth and creamy.
and lately i have been feeling like i don’t get enough protein and today in the grocery store i saw a vegetarian kielbasa that looked interesting so i bought that and fried it in a pan and tossed it sliced in the casserole when i put the mac and cheese in to bake.
yesterday was a race day and we were riding the black course, which is difficult and technical. i was slow, but i do pretty well for a little middle aged lady.
this afternoon it started to rain and it is expected to rain until sometime next week.
--
the oyster mushrooms in my kitchen have fruited again and i think tomorrow night i will cook something with them. it’s just a kit my mom got me for my birthday last winter, but it’s yielded a number of good mushrooms.
i’m thinking, though, how to grow mushrooms on a regular basis and it turns out after some googling that you can grow them easily if not quickly so long as you have starter stock, so this week i’m going to look into getting the shavings and straw i’d have to use to grow them regularly. it’s supposedly a six month project, but cool to do.
i'm probably going to get put on a terrorist watch list for writing these letters, but that sort of thing is why whistleblowers are going to prison in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment