The uncaring of America

Old prisons do give up their secrets and new prisons begin

One evening this week I sat holding a two-month-old baby, and for several hours. The peace and pleasure of it is still with me, the tiny relaxed body tucked in close, the squirms and fussing just his way of asking for a better, tighter hold.

This infant you could say is homeless, except that dear friends are his foster parents, taking him in on a moment’s notice when he was three weeks old. Helpless vulnerability has a way of doing that, of pivoting a busy family mid-course and making even those of us on the sidelines feel like kin. Because right here right now he needs us to be.

Across America and around the world, thick communities are changing diapers and welcoming strangers, putting together hot meals and throwing down bed mats under tarps unfurled against the day’s heat, or the night’s cold. Years ago a doctor friend in Africa stumbled across a mother and child abandoned in the mayhem of a shooting war. The mother was dead but her infant was alive. My friend carried the baby, across fields to find an airfield, across borders to a waiting hospital, and finally aboard a plane, home. That baby’s life was not easy but he is today a man with a college education and a place of belonging. He is loved by those who decided to be the family he didn’t have.

We do these things because there are structures in the modern world that make it possible. We will make split decisions to sacrifice for the helpless and needy, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot and for a long while, when we live in societies where it’s mutual habit, a trained reflex that binds us together. In just a short time in the United States, the structures making it possible to step into the gap are starting to fold. Worse, I fear, the images of brutality day by day are numbing us to the inhumanity of it.

We used to argue in America over how to care for the vulnerable. Now we’re being asked not to care. We once could take for granted that prisoners no matter their crime would get clean facilities and safe meals. Their loved ones would be notified where they are. We would not be asked to ignore in our own backyards the Geneva Convention standards we helped to write for the rest of the world.

We could assume thirteen-year-olds would not be taken off the street in raids for no reason. They wouldn’t be trafficked across state lines with no word to relatives or legal aides. They wouldn’t be held in so brazen a contempt of the law that only the intervention of a member of Congress and the governor of another state could win their release.

We would not be asked to respect federal agents who show up in our communities in plainclothes and unmarked cars, wearing balaclavas and mirror shades to hide their identities. And in our churches, we would not be silent about deaths in Africa that only months ago were preventable, unthinkable. We would not be cheering any nation, even an ally like Israel, that denies for months a whole people group food and openly talks about rounding them up into a camp.

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Today is the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica, the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II. Bosnian Serb forces operating in an area supposedly under protection of UN peacekeepers killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. I interviewed the mothers of Srebrenica months later, one of my first overseas assignments, and to this day they remain powerful witnesses to ethnic atrocities that are with us still.

Memorial to Srebrenica massacre victims (courtesy Council of Europe)

The lead perpetrators at Srebrenica were brought to trial and prosecuted, but international justice has a checkered history, made more difficult by Trump sanctions this year against the International Criminal Court. Though the United States has never been a signatory to the ICC, it’s now a crime, punishable by fines and prison sentences, for American citizens to submit evidence to its chief prosecutor. A lawsuit is pending.

Other news:

Local media in Florida first broke the story of dire conditions at the new U.S. detention facility dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, visited by President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last week. Florida officials challenged what appear to be multiple and diverse accounts of detainees at the remote facility going without water and medications and given spoiled food. One said his Bible was confiscated.

• On Thursday, Miami’s Catholic Archbishop Thomas Wenski condemned the facility conditions after one state official touted its remote location—saying, “You don't need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out, there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons.”

In Syria, the notorious death factory, Saydnaya Prison, is giving up its secrets.

Inside the prison, a pair of concrete buildings ringed by razor wire on a mountainside near Damascus, Assad’s regime carried out industrial-scale torture and death that likely killed tens of thousands of people over more than a decade. The regime orchestrated the killing in a bureaucratic manner rarely seen in recent history. Assad’s security apparatus kept meticulous records of the detainees’ transfer to the prison and other facilities, court documents and death certificates of those executed.

“It’s the worst atrocity of the 21st century in terms of the number killed and the way a government was directly involved,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes. “I do draw a line to the Nazis and to Soviet Russia in terms of the organized nature of state terror.”

In Gaza an Israeli airstrike hit Palestinians near a medical center in Gaza on Thursday, killing 10 children and six adults. Two American aid workers were injured on Saturday by thrown grenades, and starting Wednesday, only one feeding station was open for about 2 million people who have lived for months under an Israeli aid blockade and face starvation. The International Red Cross says mass casualty incidents around food distribution have tripled in the last month.

• The State Department approved $30 million for the U.S.-led distribution regime run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a shadowy and apparently for-profit organization led by Johnnie Moore, co-chair of Trump’s 2016 evangelical advisory board.

• Israel’s military announced plans to move Palestinians living in Gaza to a camp atop the ruins of Rafah—a “humanitarian city” that would initially move 600,000 Gazans and ultimately all 2 million. Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard calls it “an operational plan for a crime against humanity.”

In Iraq, 30 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants burned their weapons at the mouth of a cave today, marking a symbolic but significant step toward ending a decades-long insurgency against Turkey. The PKK announced in May it would disband and end its separatist struggle.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an inside look at how the Trump administration put together an unconventional deal for peace and minerals.

The PEPFAR program could be described as one of the most successful programs in medical history, writes Pete Wehner in The Atlantic, and one once championed by pro-life conservatives. It changed the health trajectories for millions living in sub-Saharan Africa, and overall is credited with saving 26 million lives and enabling almost 8 million babies to be born without HIV. Yet since the Trump administration largely shuttered the program six months ago, pro-life evangelical groups and leaders who supported the program have been largely silent—even as an estimated 75,000 adults and children already have died as a result.

• UNAIDS officials this week called PEPFAR cutbacks a “ticking time bomb” that could lead to more than 4 million AIDS-related deaths and 6 million more HIV infections by 2029.

• Already derailed: plans to roll out this year across eastern and southern Africa a breakthrough preventive drug called lenacapavir that offers total protection from HIV with a twice-yearly injections.

In Texas, the H.E. Butt Foundation has good resources and organizations for help in the aftermath of deadly floods.

In France it’s finally time to celebrate artist Paul Cezanne.

I’m reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (and still plugging with Mark Twain).