SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
I was almost late for work the next day. After coming home, I'd stayed up for hours banging
away at the document dump. I hadn't meant to, but Jolu's idea of searching for words in
the dump gave me some ideas.
The first thing I searched for was “Masha” and “Zeb.” I got a few documents with “zebra” and
“mashallah,” but nothing else. I tried “Marcus” and “Yallow.” There were five “Marcus”es
but none of them were me.
Then I tried “Carrie Johnstone” and hit the jackpot.
Carrie Johnstone had been a busy little soldier in Iraq. There were more than four hundred
documents that mentioned her by name. I went after them alphabetically at first, but it was
all confusing, until I had the bright idea of sorting them by date and starting with the oldest
and reading toward the newest -- a document that was just over a month old.
Reading those four hundred documents -- some very short, some very long -- kept me up
to three in the morning, and the more I read, the more I learned about Carrie Johnstone's
weird and terrible career in and out of the U.S. military.
The first documents dated from Johnstone's career at FOB Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old
palace. There was a memo she'd written describing the handover of a bunch of Iraqi
prisoners to the Iraqi police. I didn't see at first why anyone would bother to save the
document, but the next memo explained it. It was a memo explaining why they hadn't
told the Red Cross about the transfer of prisoners, and hadn't gotten any kind of chain-ofcustody
receipts from the Iraqi cops. A little googling and I figured out what that meant:
fifty-one men, women and children had vanished into the custody of Iraq's police force, and
no one knew whatever became of them. They had been arrested after anonymous tips,
or snatched off the street for “suspicious behavior.” And for all anyone knew, they were
nameless and rotting in a jail somewhere, while their families wrote them off for dead. Or
maybe they were dead, dumped in a mass grave.
Then she'd ended up at FOB Grizzly, working as an “intelligence officer” alongside the military
police. She'd been reprimanded for unauthorized “stress interrogations” of suspected
terrorists, and had overseen an arrest sweep that brought in more than five hundred suspects,
all of whom had been released over the coming months as it emerged that they had
nothing to do with terrorism.
It was around then that she left the military, and though she'd written a letter of resignation,
there was also a memo from a commanding officer to Army Human Resources Command
saying that she'd been “shown the door” after an “incident” involving “materiel.” Another
memo was more explicit -- she'd been involved in a plan that delivered American guns and
ammo to private mercenaries working for a military contractor, and those guns and that
ammo had been part of a massacre that killed over a hundred people.
From there, she'd gone private, working for the military “contractor” -- hired killers, according
to a quick search -- and had distinguished herself with a very lucrative bid to take over
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