They're Disappearing Them
Somewhere around 1000 detainees held at Alligator Alcatraz have disappeared.
Alligator Alcatraz, Donald Trump’s first concentration camp, was ordered shut down last month by a court over environmental rather than humanitarian concerns. As they started emptying it, well over half of its inmates fell off the grid before an appeals court stopped the shut down and kept it open.
The facility, created only a few weeks earlier at an isolated airport deep in the Florida Everglades, was built to house alleged illegal aliens in tents and intimidate people from entering the United States in the first place lest they end up as inmates. It was built in a deeply isolated, environmentally sensitive area to keep prying eyes away from its happenings. It boasted a runway capable of handling the largest commercial aircraft, far enough from any cities that planes could come and go without being seen.
Within weeks, reports surfaced of the air conditioning system in the subtropical tents being woefully inadequate, food being maggot-infested, access to toilets and showers insufficient for the population. It has been described as a human kennel, with its occupants systematically dehumanised and treated at standards below those of Americans waiting for their execution or of soldiers captured and held in prisoner of war camps; this facility would not meet even the detention standards of the Geneva Convention for enemy combatants.
But storing thousands of people in cages and feeding them maggot-filled food wasn’t the deal breaker for the American court system; rather, reducing the habitats of the “threatened wood stork, and the endangered Florida bonneted bat and the Florida panther” is what put Alligator Alcatraz out of business, however temporarily.
In preparing to shutter — or perhaps just fold up — the facility, ICE had to plan to relocate all their captives. The Miami Herald tried to trace the fate of each and every one of the detainees. What they found is that over 1,000 of them are completely missing, even with the camp remaining open.
Amidst all the other scandals going on in the United States right now, this one has not gained the traction and attention it warrants, as the Republican shock-and-awe campaign to destabilise the country continues.
The news cycle competition is pretty fierce, of course. Trump’s latest impeachable offence was to send a directive to his Attorney General demanding she prosecute his political opponents in spite of a lack of evidence. We know this because he inadvertently sent the private instruction as a post on Truth Social.
Then there’s the Pentagon requiring all journalists who cover the American military to sign a pledge to have their stories vetted and not publish any information that is not expressly approved by the Pentagon, or lose their media credentials.
There’s Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension at Walt Disney-owned ABC for mocking Trump’s bizarrely uncaring reaction to the death of his friend Charlie Kirk, after a threat from the Federal Communications Commission to revoke ABC’s broadcast license if they did not cancel the popular late night comedian. After Disney was reported to have lost some $3.8 billion from the public reaction, the show was restored last night.
Kirk’s memorial service itself was a 5-hour event more akin to a Nuremburg rally than a funeral. It raised millions of dollars for the MAGA movement, with the president taking the podium to express hatred and ill will toward his enemies.
And who can forget this week’s revelation that US Border Czar Tom Homan allegedly accepted a low-budget movie cliché $50,000 cash in a bag bribe from under-cover FBI agents, expressly to influence the direction of the Trump administration — and the investigation was quashed. Small potatoes for this news cycle.
There is more, of course. There was Trump’s rambling and wholly inappropriate hour-long speech to the UN yesterday in which he told the entirety of the United Nations that they’re all going to hell. The US military illegally killed three more Venezuelans in another boat. The administration declared that Tylenol, which was invented in 1955 as the brand name for acetaminophen, which itself was first used in 1878, causes autism, which was first described if not yet named in 1747, when taken by pregnant mothers — allowing the extremists in control of the US to find a way to blame women for autism.
Even this is not an exhaustive list of the distractions taking place this week. Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily posts will one day be the most comprehensive single historical record of this American experiment in overt fascism, documents still other events from the past week:
There’s also the on-going Jeffrey Epstein case, where a significant number of victims have come forward to speak out. Epstein ran a high-class pedophile/kompromat ring to which Trump, who conveniently owned a young women’s beauty pageant at the time, has been repeatedly linked. But because the FBI files themselves have not been released, even though much of the MAGA movement exists because the files are known to exist, for some reason Trump continues to be given the benefit of the doubt by a cowed mass media and a whole class of spineless politicians.
In light of the rest of the week’s stories, it is not surprising that few media outlets are talking about the fact that at least 1,000 people that the US detained in a concentration camp have disappeared. Until they are found — if they are ever found — the story won’t be complete, so no news, right?
After the Holocaust, many people claimed they simply didn’t know what was happening, or that they were mere bystanders who bore no responsibility.
In this information age, that won’t be an excuse when this nightmare finally ends.
