Flooding
Canadian and US troops were pulled off guard duty this week to help in the grim search for bodies after flooding at the Haitian and Dominican Republic border. The death toll is 2000 and could go higher.
The troops are working with international aid agencies to help survivors get supplies, medical treatment and fresh water. The area has been deforested by the desperately poor cutting wood for fuel.
At least 10 thousand people need food, water and basic relief supplies.

US Prisons
We don’t really know how many people are being held in unnamed prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and even in the US because of the ‘war on terror.’
A report released yesterday shows that 1 in every 75 males in the US are incarcerated. 2.1 million are locked up, because of the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘three strikes’ and despite the fall in domestic crime.

“The prison system just grows like a weed in the yard,” said Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, which pushes for a more lenient system.

Without reforms, he said, prison populations will continue to grow “almost as if they are on autopilot, regardless of their high costs and disappointing crime-control impact.”

Others see it differently.

But Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) said the report shows the success of efforts to take hard-core criminals off the streets.

“It is no accident that violent crime is at a 30-year low while prison population is up,” Ashcroft said. “Violent and recidivist criminals are getting tough sentences while law-abiding Americans are enjoying unprecedented safety.”

There were 715 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear in 2003, up from 703 a year earlier, the report found.

The nation’s incarceration rate tops the world, according to The Sentencing Project, another group that promotes alternatives to prison. That compares with a rate of 169 per 100,000 residents in Mexico, 116 in Canada and 143 for England and Wales.

Russia’s prison population, which once rivaled the United States’, has dropped to 584 per 100,000 because of prisoner amnesties in recent years, the group said.

It shows no signs of slowing or targeting minor offenses and minority groups.

68 percent of prison and jail inmates were members of racial or ethnic minorities, the government said. An estimated 12 percent of all black men in their 20s were in jails or prisons, as were 3.7 percent of Hispanic men and 1.6 percent of white men in that age group, according to the report.

Iraq Prison Abuse
The voices speaking up in the Christian celebrity and leadership group in the US have been disappointing according to Christianity Today Magazine. In this article I was in Prison and You Abused Me…

Now it’s become clear that at least one of these infamous “bad apples” was apparently a Christian. Spec. John Darby, the soldier who reportedly confronted Spec. Charles A. Graner, the ringleader of Abu Ghraib, claims that Graner told him, “The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the correction officer in me says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.’ ” Other accounts suggest that guards abused prisoners out of hostility toward Islam—one soldier reportedly asked a prisoner if he believed in anything, and when the man responded that he believed in Allah, the guard replied, “I believe in torture, and I will torture you.”

Early church fathers have a great deal to say. Augustine:

“We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.”

The Lutheran Augsburg Confession states:

“It is taught among us that all government in the world and all established rule and laws were instituted and ordained by God for the sake of good order, and that Christians may …. punish evildoers with the sword, engage in just wars, serve as soldiers, etc.”

Yet note how the article ends: “But when commands of the civil authority cannot be obeyed without sin, we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).”

The article links up to contemporary US Christian leaders words, a few more historical viewpoints and this:

Let’s rightly react with revulsion when we see these pictures, and call for an accounting for the crimes committed. But let’s also recognize the evil nature in ourselves, and out of this recognition, cheer on the work of Christian Peacemaker Teams and others seeking to counter the evil done by Christians who have failed to live up to their calling. May God have mercy on us and the guards and prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

May God also have mercy on the men and women in US prisons and in the unknown prisons overseas rounded up and filled because of the ‘war on terror.’

Iran
A 6.2 magnitude quake in central Iraq has killed 30 and injured over 100.

Myanmar
A cyclone hit the western section of this country killing 140 and leaving 18 thousand homless. Phone and electricity is knocked out. The country is appealing for international aid, particularly clean drinking water.