Monthly Archives: September 2026

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Yes, Cruelty is the Point

Marie Nahayo’s lifeless body was found hanging from a tree in the courtyard of her home in Burundi, East Africa on March 8 of this year.

Human rights monitoring groups flagged her case as part of a deeply worrying trend of “staged suicides”—disguised murders intended to cover up violent crimes. During that month alone, 11 lifeless bodies were found across the country all killed by extreme violence.

“March 2026 marks the continuation of a cycle of serious and systematic human rights violations in Burundi,” reported ACAT-Burundi, a human rights group. “The evidence gathered confirms that the right to life, a fundamental pillar of any rule of law, is repeatedly violated in various forms: assassinations, enforced disappearances and torture.” 

Bodies in the street in Cibitoke neighborhood of Bujumbura, Burundi (Human Rights Watch)

“At the same time, Burundi struggles with high malnutrition, limited access to clean water, sanitation, and healthcare, and frequent climate disasters that intensify hunger and poor living conditions,” says Third Country Deportation Watch.

The US State Department urges travelers to re-evaluate trips to Burundi due to safety and security risks, with the potential for political unrest and violent crime — such as armed robbery, carjacking, home invasions, and assault — existing nationwide.

Despite this perilous situation, on August 27, 2026, the United States detained and forcefully transferred 12 nationals from Cameroon, Angola, Mauritania, and Sudan to Burundi under a third country removal agreement.

“Such arrangements are taking shape in particular in Africa, where Mr. Trump has ushered in a new style of diplomacy that prioritizes deal-making over enforcing human rights and promoting democracy,” the New York Times reported in April 2026. “The policy is called “America First in Africa”.

The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate deportation agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, the Washington Post reported on September 21, and documents from inside the Office of Remigration (A 1984-ish term if there ever was one) reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments.

More than 23,000 people have reportedly been sent from the United States to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, including large numbers of children and adolescents. According to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants as the Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements.

The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.

On Sept. 18, the New York Times reported that two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration “were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers. Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.

Equatorial Guinea agreed to take deportees from the United States, but has given them no legal rights or documents that would let them live or work there, even temporarily, leaving them in limbo.

About 1200 Venezuelan migrants have been sent to El Salvador, with many of them deposited in CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. Migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.

ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, and health risks”.

Deported men shackled by both hands and feet, guarded by US service members, aboard the plane to South Sudan

Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they’ve been held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel.

Not only are people being deported, but the administration is making the process as cruel as possible.

“There have been widespread reports of ICE agents using the threat of sending people to third countries in order to pressure them to sign and accept deportations to their home countries,” says Amnesty International. “The cruelty is by design. It is meant to force immigrants to live in fear …filled with fear that they’ll be arrested and deported to an unfamiliar and possibly unsafe place.”

“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in a seminal essay in The Atlantic in October 2018. “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear,” he said.

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Texas Congressman Picking People’s Wallets With Deceptive Pleas

Congressman Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican in office since 2021, knows how to pull a fast one in the fundraising festival.

Rep. Ronny Jackson

He’s blanketing email inboxes with a deceptive, plaintive plea from Team Ronny. This one came to me in Oregon:

Ronny’s no stranger to controversy.

In March 2021, a scathing Pentagon inspector general report said he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” while serving as a White House physician, made sexual comments and “disparaged, belittled, bullied and humiliated” subordinates. The report also said he “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol during two incidents” on overseas presidential trips in 2014 and 2016.

President Trump nominated Jackson to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs during his first term in 2018, but Jackson withdrew his nomination after accusations of drinking on the job and over-prescribing medications to patients. 

Texas voters in the heavily conservative 13th Congressional District later elected Jackson to Congress in 2020 anyway with a strong endorsement from Trump. 

Now Jackson’s out there playing tricks with emails ostensibly seeking the opinions of recipients on the midterm elections:

“Patriot, we’d like to invite you into the inner circle,” the message says. 

“You’ve gone above and beyond to display the traits of someone who truly cares about their country, their community, their family, and the future of traditional conservative civilization. Therefore, we wanted to reach out to you personally, one-on-one, to get your thoughts on the outlook of the upcoming midterm elections.” 

To lend a patina of legitimacy to the message, the plea then includes a series of questions:

❓DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PLAN TO DEPORT ILLEGALS?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE OUR NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT RISK IF AMERICA LACKS BORDER SECURITY?

❓ARE YOU PLEASED WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP’S JOB PERFORMANCE SO FAR?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE DOING MORE TO STOP ANTI-AMERICAN IDEOLOGY FROM BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS?

❓ARE YOU GLAD DONALD TRUMP IS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?

❓DO YOU SUPPORT THE SECRETARY OF WAR, PETE HEGSETH?

❓DO YOU BELIEVE REPUBLICANS WILL MAINTAIN MAJORITY CONTROL IN CONGRESS AFTER THE 2026 MIDTERMS?

❓If the 2028 Presidential Election were held today, who would you prefer to win?

Then, of course, comes the real message. “Add Your name and submit your answers” along with a $20.26 contribution or show your dedication with a contribution ranging from $47 to $3,500. 

 “Your contribution will benefit Texans for Ronny Jackson and Trump National Committee JFC”, the email assures recipients.

Ah yes, but how much to each? In tiny barely readable text, the message says you have click through to find out. If any recipients do, they will discover that $19.25 of a $20.26 contribution will go not to Trump, but to “Texans for Ronny Jackson TX-13”. Only $1.01 will go to “Trump National Committee JFC. The same percentage division applies to all contributions.  A $1000 contribution will send $950 to Jackson and just $50 to Trump, a $3,500 contribution will send $3,325 to Jackson and $175 to Trump. 

To add insult to injury, unless you are careful and uncheck a box, the pledge will become a monthly recurring contribution with an indeterminate end date. In adopting this scheme, Jackson joins other politicians who have been criticized for manipulating contributors. 

In 2021, the New York Times reported that the Republican National Committee and the campaign committee for Donald Trump had refunded $12.8 million collected from people in the first half of 2021 who thought they were making a single donation. Instead, the online solicitation signed them up for weekly contributions. 

Four state attorneys general have begun looking into the online fund-raising practices of both political parties, specifically seeking information about the use of prechecked boxes to enroll contributors in recurring donation programs that spurred a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds last year.

The attorneys general for New York, Minnesota, Maryland and Connecticut sent letters to WinRed, which processes online donations for Republicans, and ActBlue, which processes online donations for Democrats, asking for documents related to the practices.

In 2023, researchers at Columbia University who analyzed millions of campaign contributions found that about half of top Republicans had signed donors up for automatic recurring contributions.

Critics allege that the practice is an attempt to intentionally manipulate small-dollar contributors. In May 2021 the Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted unanimously to recommend that Congress officially ban pre-checked recurring donation boxes, demanding mandatory “affirmative consent”. Congress has not, however, taken action to ban the practice.

Similar efforts at the state level have failed, too. In 2025, for example, the New Jersey assembly considered, but didn’t pass, Assembly Bill No. 5559 (the “Political Donation Transparency Act”) which would have prohibited automatic enrollment in recurring political contributions and established penalties for violators. A 2026 effort in Missouri failed as well when  HB 1788, which would have restricted recurring contributions, passed the Missouri House, but ultimately died in the Senate.

Jackson is seeking another term in November. He will face Democratic candidate Mark Nair, who ran unopposed for his party’s nomination.

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Their Blood Is On Our Hands: Trump’s Terezin

It wasn’t designed to be a concentration camp with gas chambers for mass annihilation. It was intended to be a waystation, a stopover before prisoners were moved elsewhere.

Terezin, contained within the walls of the fortress Theresienstadt 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic, was established by Germany’s Gestapo.

Terezin concentration camp

More than 150,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark were sent there, including 15,000 children. They were held for months or years. An estimated 33,000 died there from extreme crowding, malnutrition and disease. About 88,000 were sent to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland, as well as to smaller camps elsewhere.  Less than 150 children survived.

Access to Terezin during WWII by outside impartial investigators was denied until the King of Denmark demanded it in late 1943 to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there earlier that year. 

In late 1943, Christian X, the king of Denmark, demanded an inspection of Terezin to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there in October of that year. According to the organizationTerezin: Children of the Holocaust, to hide their cruelty, the Germans initiated a beautification program, “Operation Embellishment,” a ruse intended to mollify the king’s concerns.The area was cleaned up, many of the Jews were sent to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding and even fake shops and cafes were built to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. 

A photo of Jewish children in Terezin during the
inspection by the International Red Cross.

The International Red Cross carried out an inspection hosted by Adolf Eichmann on June 23, 1944. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Red Cross issued “a bland report about the visit, indicating that the representatives were taken in by the elaborate fiction”.  Today’s visitors to ICE detention centers should we wary of ICE “cleaning things up” to deceive them.

Today, President Trump’s mass deportation push has resulted in the detention of a massive and growing number of alleged undocumented immigrants in the United States. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports holding an average of approximately 65,000 to 73,000 people daily in its detention facilities. It’ is a vast network with detainees constantly being shifted around multiple times far from their homes. In theory, all these people are subject to deportation.

KING 5 Seattle television recently reported that ICE is repeatedly flying detainees back and forth across the country. The station cited a case where a Cuban man detained in Florida was subsequently flown from Miami to Denver, Colorado, then to Florence, Arizona, back to Denver, then to Florence again, then Denver, then back to Florence. “A lot of lawyers and judges around the country…believe that ICE is intentionally doing this to put people away from families, from legal representation and just honestly to try to encourage them self-deport,” the station reported.

For concerned people trying to keep track of the detainees the process is a nightmare.

The more frightening nightmare, however, bringing up memories of Terezin, is the use of American detention centers as waystations for deportations back to home countries where great danger lurks and to third countries where they are not citizens, frequently don’t speak the local language, have no personal ties and are subject to God knows what brutal conditions and even death.

More than 23,000 people have reportedly been sent to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, and according to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants. The Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements. As Jonathan Capeheart has said, “…the stories from immigrants swept up in third-country deportations should shock the conscience of a nation that says it believes in equal protection and the rule of law. “

The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.

On Sept. 18, the New York Times reported that two men deported to Equatorial Guinea by the Trump administration “were hooded, bound, beaten with guns and shoved down a flight of stairs recently by police officers at a remote hotel where immigrants are being held indefinitely, according to witnesses and lawyers. Videos and interviews show that police aggression inside the hotel escalated in recent weeks and peaked on Sept. 11. The police put burlap sacks over the two men’s faces, tied their hands with rope, beat them with guns and shoved them down the stairs as several deportees watched. The beatings were recounted by multiple witnesses and lawyers.”

ICE has deported over 200 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador and deposited many of therm into CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. The migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.

ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and health risks”.
  
Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they were held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel. And last year U.S. immigration and federal authorities tried to deport nationals from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines to war-torn Libya until a federal judge blocked the planned flights.

As reporting of the abuses associated with third country deportations spreads, it’s tempting to think the Trump administration is not ashamed, but gleeful, as word gets out that not only are people being deported, but the administration is making the process as cruel as possible.

Even in cases where ICE is deporting people to their home countries, the situations are often dire. There’s been an escalation of deportation flights to Haiti since the  June 2026 Supreme Court decision that allowed the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), stripping legal protections from an estimated 330,000 Haitian immigrants. The humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti will expose all such deportees to harm. According to the New York Times, some 3,000 people were killed there in the first six months of this year, many of them in gang-related violence.

“Millions of people in Haiti continue to face a compounding crisis of food insecurity, forced displacement, deadly disease outbreaks, and surging violence,” says Alice Ribes, the International Rescue Committee’s director for Haiti.  “Public services in many areas have collapsed under gang rule, leaving people with limited or no access to clean drinking water, food, medical care, and education.”

ICE attempts to minimize or conceal the conditions in America’s detention centers and the threats faced by deportees to their own and other countries are America’s “Operation Embellishment”.

The blood of those in harm’s way will be on our hands.

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Trump’s Shameful Attempts to Define American History

Of all things, an article in The Cut, a digital section of New York magazine, about the death of Gloria Steinem on September 2 at 92 spurred me to write this piece about Donald Trump and the Smithsonian’s interpretations of history.

Frankly, I’ve never thought much about Gloria Steinem, but for some reason I was intrigued and pored over the entire 5,948-word article. What a fascinating life!

“She was a talented, driven, and powerfully charismatic emblem for a movement that was always more complicated and sometimes more radical than she herself was,” wrote Rebecca Traister. “Her life, her work, and her contradictions together provide a remarkable illustration of the political and social disruption mainstream America is willing to tolerate, occasionally celebrate, and also revile.”

Traister wrote that Steinem frequently said she hoped to live to 100. “I’ve so loved being here,” she said in the HBO documentary. “I love it so much. I never want it to end.”

So what’s the connection of all this with Donald Trump and the Smithsonian?

The Washington Post reported on September 2 that the Trump administration is threatening to cut off executive agencies’ cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution “…if its leaders do not abandon what the administration described as “an ideological agenda that seeks to transform both the Smithsonian and the country.”

Trump set off a misguided attack on The Smithsonian when he launched his campaign against the institution last March. that was when he signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that instructed his administration to eliminate what it called “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and restore it as “a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

The executive order instructed Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, to work with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to withhold funding for exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race.”

What the order really did was order that the telling of America’s history conform to Trump’s ideological view that there be just one public interpretation of American history, his.

But the fact is history is constantly being reviewed, re-interpreted, revised, re-thought. Topics of intense interest to one generation slip back as new topics emerge. Historical revisionism is a fundamental element of the discipline as new evidence emerges and societal perspectives change. Interest in some figures declines as new heroes and villains emerge.

Benjamin Franklin spoke to this fact in 1787 when he called upon those gathered art the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had devised:

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

My decision to examine more closely Gloria Steinem’s life was a reflection of a new interest in somebody with whom I was only vaguely familiar. In a similar vein, I’ve been tackling books that offer new perspectives on historical events.

For quite a while there was a widespread belief that North America, for example, was some vast, wild, untouched wilderness barely populated by primitives before more sophisticated and civilized Europeans arrived. You will be dissuaded of that notion if you read Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi by archaeologist Timothy R. Pauketat. Research has revealed that in pre-Columbian America native civilizations built massive urban centers like Cahokia in southwestern Illinois which was populated by tens of thousands of people.

I long admired Apple’s leaps into China to grow its business, but I got a new perspective, and new concerns, on the implications of Apple becoming so deeply intertwined with China when I read “Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company” by Patrick McGee.

As the son of a man who served proudly in the U.S. Navy during WWII, I have always been interested in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb, wondering whether it was the right decision, particularly as some revisionists have challenged it. I’ve read multiple books on the war and that decision, arriving at the conclusion it was the right one in the face of up to a million American casualties if an invasion went forward. And, by the way, historians have been constantly re-evaluating Harry Truman the man and his presidency.

I’ve read the first two books of Rick Atkin’s trilogy on the American revolution, Bernard Bailyn’s “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” and countless others to better understand that world-changing event.

Before seeing Ken Burns’ documentary, The American Revolution, were you aware of the astonishing effort led by Boston bookseller Henry Knox to haul 59 heavy cannons and mortars from captured from British forces at Fort Ticonderoga across 300 miles of frozen wilderness to Boston, forcing a British evacuation of the city without a shot being fired? Wow! It spurred me to read an entire book, Henry Knox’s Noble Train by William Hazelgrove, about the endeavor.

The Noble Train

I’ve been taken aback to read of the extent to which slavery extended far beyond the South into into New England, even into the Norman Rockwell-perfect small town of Wallingford, Connecticut where I grew up. As Anne Farrow wrote in “The Logbooks: Connecticut’s Slave Ships and Human Memory”, In Connecticut and elsewhere in New England, “All the best families owned ‘captives’.”

Slaves on a tobacco farm in Connecticut

I grew up as a child idolizing Charles Lindbergh for his single-handed crossing of the Atlantic to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis. I even made a special trip during a later visit to Hawaii to visit his grave on the grounds of the Palapala Ho’omau Church at the end of the road to Hana on the coast.

t wasn’t until I read numerous books about his life that I learned he was a leading spokesman for the America First Committee that opposed America’s entry into WWII. Also, although many Americans shared his early opinions, Lindbergh went further, blaming “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration” for pressing for American intervention. I also learned after he died in 1974 that he led a double life, starting a romance with a woman in Munich, Germany in 1957 and having three children with her who knew him only as ”Mr. Careu Kent”.

Charles Lindbergh speaking at an America
First Committee rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana,
October 3, 1941.

Suffice it to say, every time I turn around I find stories that challenge my views on people and issues of historical significance.

On July 4th, of all days, White House Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley released “Saving America’s Story,” a 162-page report accusing the National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism”. The report’s key finding: “museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

What ought to dispirit all Americans is something else. That’s the Trump’s administration’s impulsive and capricious efforts to shut down debate on America’s glorious, and yes, flawed, history.