Peace: Resume for Amnesty International
Application for Amnesty international
- Amnest international 22851675 523067418047122 7753233972710472452 n.jpg
- Screencapture-linkedin-jobs-view-researcher-fixed-long-term-at-amnesty-international-usa-484095499-1509449552538.png
- Screencapture-glassdoor-job-listing-researcher-fixed-long-term-amnesty-international-JV IC1132348 KO0-26 KE27-48-htm-1509449379508.png
- 2017-10-31 05 33 44-.png
- the job was only open 10 days. Which means it was probably already filled before they posted it.😓
Cover letter
For nearly two decades I have wanted to work for Amnesty International, but I just didn’t know it. In 2000 I served in the United States Peace Corps Ukraine. It is there that I had a deep paradigm shift, realizing that the people of the Soviet Union were not as bad as I was lead to believe in the Cold War. I fell in love with the people and I started to study American foreign policy in Odessa. When I returned to America with my new wife and step son, I began to deeply research American foreign policy in my free time. In those thousands of hours of studies I found a gem by Amnesty International:
- "Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame." -- Amnesty International, 1996
In 2004 my new family moved to San Antonio Texas were I earned a Masters in International Relations concurrent with my Juris Doctorate. I loved my International Masters Degree program, I would debate passionately about the role America had in the world with current US military and NSA students. For my law school writing requirement I wrote my second published book, America’s Other War, Terrorizing Colombia (2017). The law professor I wrote it for felt the book should be more legally centered, but I felt that it was important to share the stories of the plight of the Colombian people. At the same time, I had two extenships in law school, including working 9 months at the Center for Legal and Social Justice defending immigrants in Federal District Court.
After graduating with honors from my International Relations master’s degree program, I took the Texas bar in 2007 and failed. My heart simply wasn’t into it – when I was supposed to study, I spent too much time writing articles on Wikipedia such as Union of Banana Exporting Countries instead of studying. My dream was to work internationally or domestically being a voice to those victims of the United States government. Graduated and jobless, I traveled to numerous large international relations job fairs in Washington DC and was deeply disappointed at how few organizations focused on violent American foreign policy. As was typical, at one job fair I met one very young girl at a shabby booth in an obscure corner of the job fair. Her booth was to volunteer for an organization against Israeli aggression which was supported by the United States. I asked her some specific questions and it was abundantly clear that the organization was poorly managed and had little influence on American foreign policy.
I took a job at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in Washington DC. Overlooking Congress and the Mall our office was the very top legal firm of DHHS. DHHS is the umbrella organization for all federal programs involving health. One of the attorneys suggested I take the Washington DC bar exams, which I passed in 2009. When I passed my boss allowed me to shadow another attorney and help write legal briefs on procurement. Again, my heart was not into it and the attorney went on to write the briefs without me. I applied for numerous other jobs in DC over the next 5.5 years but none of them involved shedding a light on violent American foreign policy. The breaking point was in 2013 when I assisted another attorney to defend the government in the case: Manuel Gudiel Garcia, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al., (2011). It was a horrific incident that I had read about years before, colloquially called the Guatemala syphilis experiment, in which United States government doctors intentionally secretly infected Guatemalans with syphilis. As I read these documents and helped file the briefs defending the United States government I was horrified that I had even a small part in defending these immoral murders. The plaintiffs lost and DHHS won. After nearly six years and without a backup job I quit DHHS in 2013. I had been divorced in 2012 so I was now free to pursue my true passion.
I started to network in Washington DC with the international community and the available jobs were the same, none of them focused on confronting the violence of the United States overseas. For example, the federal United States Institute of Peace indirectly supported violent US foreign policy. USAID helped clean up after US Wars but did nothing to challenge American violence. In the interim to make money immediately, I started a solo law practice focusing on bankruptcy and foreclosure, but again, it was not my true passion. Finding no real peace organizations in the United States Federal government, I began to study and network with the small peace movement in the United States. I was detained at the Pentagon and outside of the CIA. I went to seminars and networked with people in the peace movement. I wrote up detailed power point on how to create a national grassroots organization could push for peace. I quickly found that the contemporary peace movement is a disorganized joke and there are no jobs immediately available. I created a Political Action Committee (PAC) and website called May1787.com – named after the month in which the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed. When these men met in 1787, three quarters of the world was in bondage. These twelve men did the impossible – they abolished slavery in the British Empire in their lifetime, which led to the end of slavery worldwide. I know that war can be abolished the same way that slavery was two hundred years ago.
In September 2015, two years after the divorce was finalized and I won the martial home, I quitclaimed the house to my ex-wife and moved to Moscow, Russia with $1,000 in my pocket. I had a job as an English Teacher but my ambitions were much greater. I quickly formed a partnership with a Moscow lawyer to do Employment Law cases in Moscow court. I was on Russian national television three times, once as a foreign policy expert on America. In April 2016 I walked into the main KGB (FSB) headquarters in downtown Moscow and ask for political asylum. I hired an attorney across the street on a 500,000 ruble installment plan to get me political asylum. I turned over a secret cyber-security document I had found in Washington DC, the original that I had hand delivered to the Washington Post but never heard back from. With my Moscow director friend from Ukraine the plan was for me to work the Russian television circuit exposing American violence.
Today I have returned to suburban Utah. I posted the above 1996 Amnesty International quote on Facebook last week, and it suddenly dawned on me: Amnesty International, an organization which I wrote letters for in my undergraduate university over two decades ago, has always been hidden in plain sight, you are the organization that I have wanted to work for almost my entire adult life.