Happy Birthday to My Beloved Son

 Duncan, my beloved son, I was prevented from wishing you a happy birthday yesterday by threats that you would be harmed if I did so.

As a result, I found myself silenced, when I wanted all day to extend to you the retelling of your miraculous birth, your blessed welcome into this world, and the way, impossibly, you smiled at me when I first held you in my arms.

What a tumultuous journey we had already survived, given the high risk pregnancy that both you and I had endured.

But there, at Stanford Hospital, on St. Patrick's Day of 1997, with a room filled with doctors and nurses ready for any emergency, you simply smiled up at me as if to say "We made it."

We had passed a first critical test that would not be our only one.

Later you enjoyed a childhood in which you were cherished and upheld, but your young adulthood has represented a horrific gauntlet due to a corrupt FBI.

Central to all of the crimes this agency has perpetrated against you is the loss of your personal sovereignty, your individual self-determination, your human right to say "yes," to say "no," to say "I choose this and not that."

And Duncan, I am here to say that your sovereignty must be restored to you in full, generously, abundantly, completely, until it is entirely and irrevocably returned.

Those who have perpetrated human trafficking crimes against America's youth have quite a public reckoning in store.

And those who have separated you from your independent decision-making capability owe you, our family, and our entire nation an apology without end.

The weight of those crimes fall upon the men within the FBI who directed them, not upon you.

The objective of the torturers within the FBI is the same as the objective of all torturers -- to separate their victims from their own knowledge of themselves, and so to cause the greatest spiritual and psychological distress possible.

So, I say this to you in response.

I remember who you are, who you really are, and I am here to recall you to yourself.

There is no human trafficker who can separate me from my knowledge of your fierce spirit.  There is no predator who can make me abandon your virtuous soul.  There is no employee of the FBI who can convince me that you cannot be returned to yourself, and there is no person on this earth who will convince me to stop trying.

I do not relinquish you, my son.

I do not forsake you.

I do not abandon you.

And I never will.

Happy birthday, my beloved son.

I love you with a love that transcends all wrongs against you.

Feel my arms around you,

Mom