In this week's episode:
- In The Lede, investigative editor Mark Schoofs talks to contributing editor Christine Kenneally about her reporting on the child abuse that took place at St. Joseph's Catholic Orphanage in Burlington, VT.
- Host Julia Furlan interviews Charlie Warzel about the horrifying world of deepfakes.
- In What in the World, world editor Miriam Elder breaks down some of the week's world news.
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The Lede - 00:00
Mark Schoofs: Christine, why don't you just start by telling us about this orphanage Saint Joseph's in Burlington, Vermont?
Christine Kenneally: Yes. So Saint Joseph’s was actually founded in 1854 and it was run by an order of nuns. The nuns were the sisters of Providence, and they had actually come down from Quebec. In fact, most of them were French speaking. For many decades, a lot of the nuns at the orphanage were speaking French to the English-speaking kids. So the orphanage closed around 1974 so it ran for more than a century. And for much of that time, although there was a decline in the last couple of decades, there were maybe 20 or 30 nuns present at the orphanage. And there were sometimes up to 350 children.
MS: And who were those children? Yeah, tell us about those children.
CK: These kids had come from, essentially from the surrounding area, from Burlington itself and from the countryside around Burlington. And even though St. Joseph’s was in fact called an orphanage for most of its existence, most of these kids won't orphans at all, you know, these kids had come from incredibly poor families. They also came from families in many cases where they weren't being looked after properly where the parents were, maybe alcoholic or addicted with parents would just feel where they couldn't look after their kids. Their father had died or the mother was ill, you know in some cases the state had taken the children away from their parents because they were being either abused or neglected at home, and then they put them in the orphanage.
MS: And then at the orphanage, many of them were abused again.
CK: That’s right. That was just, that's just a truly horrible thing about the story and the nature of abuse, and the extent of the abuse is is honestly hard to take in, you know kids were sexually abused and not just by priests, you know the story with which we’re all now familiar, right? So not just priests, not just men, they were laymen at the orphanage who actually abused these kids. And many of the children told stories about being abused by nuns as well by the women, but there was not just a sexual abuse, there was emotional abuse. It's the incredible cruelty, the things that we said to these children that they remembered their entire lives, really just really awful shaming things which was as terrible for many of these children as the other kinds of abuse, but then of course there was physical abuse as well. And that's that's really something that's been so invisible for so long, not just sexual abuse but the physical abuse. And the physical abuse you know was in many cases just a straightforward torture for these children. So kids were hung upside down out windows. They were hung upside down over stair rails. They had water streamed into their faces. They were held under water. They were burned. You know, there are so many eyewitness accounts where the eyewitness was actually incredibly traumatized, because they saw a beating by an adult who was absolutely out of control and unhinged.
MS: It was very difficult to read and some of the other things that that happened. For example, they would be locked in cabinets or closets or attics and sometimes for hours, and sometimes even for days. Sally Dale and many others talked about being forced to eat their own vomit. And I remember at one point Christine you created a spreadsheet. And this spreadsheet kind of collected all the different sorts of punishments that you had found through your research around the world. And what was horrible, is that even though these tortures were very specific and often very odd, you found that they had been perpetrated around at orphanages around the world. Talk a little bit about that.
CK: Yeah, that that was incredible and it was eerie and haunting and just and so disturbing to actually see that pattern starts to emerge, as I was talking to people and reading all these different materials from all over the place. One very common story was when kids wet their bed. You know, one of the reasons kids often wet their beds when they're asleep at night is because they're under terrible stress. That’s not always the case, but it can be because they're incredibly stressed, that is there’s something terrible is happening in their lives.
So. This is a really common story and kids wet the bed. What happens to the kids who wet the bed is so heartbreaking. They were punished for wetting the bed, which just that alone. You know, it's so clear that that's a really unhelpful way to get a child to start wetting their bed, but the punishments were just extraordinarily humiliating and shaming in orphanages all over the world.
They would be forced to drape their wet sheets around themselves and parade through the dorm or up and down the hallway. The other kids were encouraged to laugh at them, to point at them, to shame them. A lot of people are still traumatized not just because they wet their bed, and they were punished because they were made to shame these other kids who wet their bed again and again.
MS: Yeah and even though we're talking about extreme physical abuse, being made to kneel or stand for hours, sometimes with their arms straight out or being outright hit or punched, or or being made to eat their own vomit. That's not the worst, and there are stories of actual alleged murder. Talk to us about Sally Dale, the main person who we follow in this story.
CK: Yeah, so well, you're absolutely right. I mean the the stories of physical abuse were sort of so extreme, they were up to and including allegations of death. And there were quite a few of them that came out of Saint Joseph but it's not uncommon for many of these places to have those stories emerge. Sally Dale, you know, who's just so critical to our story, for a number of reasons. One. She was there almost as long as anyone had ever been at the office, and she was there for over 20 years and she's been there since she was two years old. So she was very much a creature of the orphanage. What was incredible about Sally was that, she was still somehow somehow she had managed to retain her own self, and she had this call that you could see even in these videotaped depositions in the 1990s, decades after she was there. There's a stubbornness to Sally Dale. There was this quality of resilience and honesty. We checked out every story we could check, not just the terrible stories, but the good stories and the banal stories and you know, everything we could check out checked, out. So Sally Dale's Important for all those reasons. Sally Dale is also critical because she witnessed a number of events where she believed the child had been murdered. So when she was quite young, Sally recalled being at the back of the orphanage, and she was being shown around the orphanage by a nun because she was about to move into the big girls door, which was something that apparently happened when you're around six years old. And she looked up. No, I'm sorry. So Sally was being shown around the back and she heard the sound of smashing glass and then looked up and a small boy was flying through the air. She could see that behind him, there was a nun standing at the window. The nun had her arm straight out. And the child had the grounds before her and he bounced a little and then he was still and Sally believe that he had died and he had come from a fourth-story window, but she was so shocked and terrified and overwhelmed, it took her two days to ask what had happened to that boy. And the nun said to her.
Don't worry. He's gone home to his mother for good.
MS: Now, one of the things that we do know is there are some places where just the stories of death cannot be denied, because there are simply bodies that have been found in the orphanage in Scotland, up to 400 bodies in unmarked graces at a at a boys school in Marianna, Florida, dozens of unmarked graves in a in an orphanage at the in the Blackfoot nation in Montana. Let's just step back for a moment. What was the American orphanage system in the 20th century. What are we talking about in terms of scale?
CK: That's what's so incredible about this story. The American orphanage system is almost entirely invisible and yet it was huge. So we think that at least five million children pass through the orphanage system in the 20th century, that we know that there were many of those were at the start of the century, that the orphanage system was at its peak in around the 1930s, and there are at least 1,600 orphanages at that time. Many of them were run by Religious institutions, and the Catholic Church was an absolutely huge player in that field. But when I think about that 5 million, I think about not just that five million, but the children of those five million who are in ways part of that system and they don't even know it. I mean I've spoken to many of them that kids whose parents were the only system, their lives are often indelibly shaped by their parents experience. And in some cases it just because their parents never really learned how to parent. In many cases, it’s because their parents are very powerfully traumatized by what happened to them and nevertheless they grew up and they had children of their own. They often didn't tell their kids that they were in the orphanage system, but these kids were just deeply affected by it.
MS: Nonetheless, you know you. The last couple of decades many other countries, Canada, the UK Germany, Ireland your country Australia, have all had substantial official government inquiries into aspects of the orphanage system and that of course was crucial for you because you had verified government inquiries that you could rely on for much of research, but that has not happened in the United States. There has been no real reckoning with the orphanage system. Instead, in a very American way, what is left is for these individual former residence or they're sometimes called survivors of the orphanage to lodge a civil suit, something that is emotionally grueling, that is expensive that can often be stymied by the statute of limitations and that happened in the case of St. Joseph's. So why don't you just tell us about the attempt to use the civil lawsuit procedure in the United States to get some form of a reckoning?
CK: Yeah, you know I thought about this so much and the contact that you just described is a really powerful one, for there being all these government inquiries in other countries of the world.
And what is really extraordinary about those inquiries, is that they begin from a place of much greater acknowledgement and even compassion for the victim, and yet with their sort of compassion, they also have the power of subpoena in many cases. So they are able to compel these institutions to produce records. They are able to compel these representatives of Institutions to turn up and to give statements at that. That's really incredible what that's produced elsewhere. For better or for worse as you say. If the stories go anywhere in the United States, I've tended to end up in the court system with the civil cases. And of course the nature of these cases is that they're combative. So, you know a lot of the former residents of St. Joseph's experienced the 1990s litigation as as it's traumatizing all over again as brutal and painful all over again. It was not it was not a healthy or helpful process for them. You know, I I guess people might argue that the value is that they might get some kind of I think the payouts, in cases like these when people win in America, tend to be enormous, perhaps compared to compensation that might be gained through government inquiries elsewhere in the world, but at the cost. The personal cost is extraordinary.
MS: And in fact that the in the case of the settlements that were reached at St. Joseph's, it was it was a small amount one person said $10,000. Another person said not even enough to buy a used car, but just tell us the story of the litigation. It began with one person who sought out a lawyer, I believe his name was Joseph Barkin. And let's talk about that moment when he walks into the lawyer's office because it's an extraordinary moment.
CK: So Joey had actually gone to the church, and he tried to report what has happened to him, and he'd been given the runaround. He’s being basically kind of sold so we decided to take matters into his own hands and he found a man named Phil White, he’d been a prosecutor in Vermont. He told Phil when he was at st. Joseph’s in Burlington Vermont, a nun had taken him into as a kind of little utility room under thick haze and she cut him in the genital region with an incredibly sharp object. It was dark, he couldn't see it and he still had the scars to that day from that one incident in that room.
MS: And it’s actually his wife who had you know, after they got married noticed them and asked what happened. And that was what began Joseph Barkin’s sort of process that it made him end up in Phil White’s office.
CK: That's right.
MS: And so began a years-long effort that involved more than 20 separate suits, brought by two separate lawyers that again, this process ran over a period of years. And what's crucial for readers to understand, is that many many of the stories are based in testimony under sworn oath. Many many many depositions where lawyers are able to cross examine these people. And I think that's important for folks to understand, that this is not just some some interview that you conducted in a bar, but
rather much of this evidence is given under oath.
CK: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things that made St. Joseph's Orphanage the right story to tell the whole story of the orphanages of America, because of this incredible body of materials that have been generated in the 1990s.
MS: So for example, just Sally Dale has 19 hours of videotape deposition, you read through literally thousands and thousands of pages of documents and one of the things that's happened since we published the story is that a television station in Vermont? I believe it's WCA X interviewed the current Bishop of Burlington I believe it is, and he did offer an apology for the abuses that happened at the orphanage, but he also dismissed any accusations of murder there as quote unquote Urban myth. What do you think about that?
CK: Yeah. I was really surprised by the fact that he taken that approach. After this been so much cover up revealed cover-up of sexual abuse by priests across the country. And in this story alone as you well know, cover-up of events at the orphanage. I just don't think that kind of answer or approach works anymore. I just I don't think there's any credibility to it. And what was really amazing to me too, is the story is literally about the ways in which only stories can be verified. The story was literally about corroboration. The story is literally about the fact that there is an enormous amount of evidence out there, that it's not even too late now to back up, to validate, to to verify, so many of the stories that the orphans told, and I actually thought it was particularly striking for the reason that we were able to get our hands on a huge number of documents, that the diocese is almost certainly in possession of still. And they provide evidence that even priests he took the stands during the orphanage litigation in the 1990s, priests who themselves professed disgust and shock at the accusations who suggested in in the tone or the things that they said that what the former residents are saying was in fact a myth like kind of story, are themselves or were themselves, actually predators of children. So once again, it's just no credibility.
MS: It's interesting because you found that over a 39 year span, there were only three years where the priest in charge of the entire orphanage in orphanage complex was not an accused abuser. So for virtually the entire time of those 39 years, the person running the show had been accused of sexual abuse. And I think it's interesting too, this Pennsylvania grand jury report that just came out.
I'm going to quote from it. It said quote priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing, they hid it all for decades. And I think what what many readers have expressed is that they want some way to get to the bottom of what happened, and I don't know what that way is forward and I don't know whether you know, what what the way forward is. But this National Reckoning that has happened in other countries has not happened here.
CK: That's absolutely right I, I don't know exactly either but I do believe that that grand jury is incredibly significant, and I really think it's the beginning of a greater justice because it wasn't just it wasn't just a news story. It really provided us with a larger picture as well, II can't remember exactly but it was something was it not like 1,000 victims.
MS: Correct.
CK: 300 priests. I mean it really shows us the scale of the abuse and the scale at the cover-up and that this report is history being made. This report is the record-keeping of all these stories and that
MS: Right, but it's all these stories of sexual abuse and what you have provided is an entirely new front an entirely new frontier, and dimension which goes far beyond priest sexual abuse, and exposes an entire regime of physical abuse emotional shame, and humiliation and at the far edge of that brutality and abuse, allegations of actual murder, and it's that which I think we do need to have more investigation of and inquiry and a reckoning with.
CK: The former residents of St. Joseph’s and the residents of orphanages all across America deserve to be heard in that way.
MS: Christine. Thank you. Thank you for the story and thank you for this time
CK: Oh, Mark. Thank you so much.
Deepfakes - 00:00
CHARLIE WARZEL: Hey, it's Charlie. Can you hear me alright? The reception here is pretty shitty. Have to get a good signal.
JULIA FURLAN: I don't trust this voice. I don't know. It's weird because you're you're calling from your phone and it's shockingly similar to the weird recording that you made with this app called Lyrebird. Tell me what it is and explain to everybody how it works. By the way, it's spelled. LyreBird not Liarbird.
CW: It’s an important distinction. Lyrebird is a Canadian company, and it's a tech startup that basically created a technology that can type anything into a text box, and it will stitch the words together to create it. And so it can take words that you've never actually said, and recreate them based off of the way that you say other words. So the way that Lyrebird got a digital copy of my voice is, I started using the software, and reading these short sentence long prompts. And I read about 215 of them in there. So it took, you know just about an hour or so of really boring, bland sentence reading and each time, you know, submitting the clips individually. And once I did that it basically created this this longer profile of my voice, and figured out how I would say things and sort of use that to predict, rather than have me actually say every word in the English language out loud.
JF: It's like it's taking your words and turns them into Legos and then it can build all kinds of stuff with those Legos, right?
CW: Yeah, and the more you give it, the better it is obviously um, and I think that one thing to know about this, is that this is still really, as impressive as it is, rudimentary technology. It's kind of just stitching things together, but in the future it could you know, pick up on your cadence even more. It could understand what kind of parts of your voice lead you to, you know, have a crack or a break in your voice, when you might want to stutter or pause, and it could you know start to inject things like ums and ahhs and really get good.
JF: You did an experiment where you tested how real this voice could sound and you tested it with a very special person.Tell me about that.
CW: That's right. Do back in April. I trained my digital voice to try to sound as much like me as I could in about an hour. And then I decided to test it on the person who knows my voice probably better than anyone else, and that's my mom. She’s been listening to me, you know rant for 30 years so.
JF: Poor thing..
CW: I figured if I fool her yeah poor thing indeed. Um, I feel if I could fool her, then this would really prove that it's good enough to trick a lot of people. So what I did, is I was going to be meeting my mom for dinner that night.
CW: and I decided to type out a whole bunch of preset phrases in lyrebird and then call her just like do a quick check and make sure that we were on for dinner that night.
CW: It worked seamlessly. She didn't believe even for a second that anything, you know was amiss. It sounded like I'm sure on her end, you know, just one of those kind of, grainy poor reception calls.
JF: Akin to what we're hearing you on now.
CW: Yeah, exactly. Um, in fact, you know, there's a really now that you know this, no reason to believe that you know, you're not listening to a bunch of preset recorded phrases.
JF: Oh, no, I'm afraid. So a couple months ago Jordan Peele made a video with BuzzFeed where he impersonated President Obama, and he said some pretty wild stuff.
OBAMA VOICE: Ben Carson is in the sunken place, or how about this. Simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.
JF: This isn't just audio. There's video components that can be made too. And that is pretty freaky.
CW: It definitely is. I mean we, the video stuff I think is, is sort of more inspiring in terms of technology that may we maybe didn't think could have existed before. One thing to keep in mind about it though, is that we've been dealing with things like photos with Photoshop and manipulation for years. And we've managed to get accustomed to the idea that hey, is that image fake did that person really wear this or they really in this situation. So I think we do get used to this but what's difficult about right now, is that these fakes are coming out, these video fakes, these deep fakes and they're not only believable, but they're getting exponentially better every day. And we are also experiencing at the same time, you know, the the birth of all of this social media and stuff travels so quick, that you know, things can get out there before people really had a chance to verify them or knock them down or you know, if you do sort of try to debunk a video like that. Sometimes it can be too late, it can spread to fast.
JF: Right. One major question I have here, is why do we need this? Like why are people making this software?
CW: I I really don't know why the world needs this. Please explain. Yeah. I mean, I think that's always the question that I go to, right. Why are we doing this and you know, the and the reason really is that technology is changing very fast and you know things like neural networks and things like artificial intelligence are getting better. And people are applying it to every facet of our lives. And so the people at Lyrebird, um, I think they they had this idea that this could be possible, and they wanted to do it in what they're arguing is a very ethical way.
JF: What?
CW: They have a entire page on their website that outlines how they see this. They have made it so that once you record their voice, it is sort of locked and only available to you for your own purposes. No one can you know, grab your voice and take it. But I think you know what they've done is they've created this interesting technology, they want to show it off, but they they want to do it in a way that raises awareness and shows people that this technology is already out there. Other people could be doing this. And that I think is the most important part of this sort of idea of education. My mom was fooled by this, not just because it was a decent copy of my voice, but also because she didn't know something like this existed.
JF: How are we supposed to know what is real and what is fake? Can you give us some pointers or some advice?
CW: Sure. It's all kind of at this point common sense. The first thing is to look at the source of anything that seems a little weird, right. If you see a video where Barack Obama looks like he's talkin from the White House and he you know starts saying weird things like in the Jordan Peele video, you can sort of look at where that first came from did come from some weird fever swamp message board like 4CHAN. If so, there's a good chance that's probably something weird. But you know, if it’s coming from very legitimate news sources, maybe there's reason to believe it. That's the first thing. The second thing is to sort of inspect, if it's a video especially, to inspect the video itself. So deep fakes are pretty good, but there's certain characteristics that are a little off still, like the mouth, per se. The mouth often moves in like a really weird sort of non-human way.
JF: Right.
CW: If it looks kind of uncanny, right. So if it looks sort of like Nicolas Cage, but it also kind of looks like a version of Nicolas Cage you've never seen before, you know, that that's like a really big alarm bell. If it's very very good, you can pause the video and kind of scoot through it frame by frame. And oftentimes that will reveal some really weird stuff, like blurry lines in the face, stuff that would never appear on a non doctored film. So there's ways.
JF: But in audio you kind of can't. There's not a whole lot of ways to check on that, are there.
CW: Yeah, I mean, that's the that's the scariest part about the audio, because it has to be the level of believability is definitely different than with videos. Seeing is believing, to some extent. And and we're a lot better at training our eyes than I think we are training our ears.
JF: What is the worst case scenario versus the best case scenario?
CW: Well, there's a whole bunch and this is where I tend to lose people, at like dinner parties or whatever. People just walk away from me because I started to.
JF: Oh God.
CW: But the easiest to understand worst-case scenario is that somebody impersonates the voice or you know creates a realistic video manipulation of someone like the president. He declares war on North Korea and you know, there's a nuclear war. That's a pretty bad one for sure. That's also you know, pretty unlikely at this point. The technology not really there, but I think what's more scary to me because it's more plausible, is this idea that over the years we get more and more examples of this kind of technology. A couple people get fooled here and there, and then you have things like spam emails or spam phone calls that become way more believable, and that this idea that reality really starts to become difficult to distinguish. And in being difficult, people just slowly kind of peel away a little. And so this researcher that I met with who started me on this whole quest he described this, the term is something called reality apathy. And what that means is when you're sort of faced with a really exhausting task of differentiating every single thing, and having to decide whether it's real, you just start to stop engaging as much. You know, if your inbox is all really believable spam, you start to check it less. And I think that that's what's kind of scary. If we get to a point where we're all just worn down by the fact that nothing is what it seems.
JF: Charlie Warzel or maybe a robot that is his voice, thank you so much for talking to me.
CW: Thank you for having me.
JF: Okay, don't do that robot voice.
What in the World - 00:00
JULIA FURLAN: Hello, and welcome to What in the World. This is the point of the show where our world news editor Miriam Elder explains all the big international news that's happened this week. Hi, Miriam.
MIRIAM ELDER: Hey, Julia.
JF: So today, we're playing another round of 15 second foreign policy, where I play a clip related to something that happened in the world this week, and you tell us what it means and what is going on. Are you ready?
ME: I'm so ready.
JF: Okay, here we go.
TRUMP VOICE: This has to do, they used to call it NAFTA. We're going to call it the United States Mexico trade agreement, that will get rid of the name NAFTA. Has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by NAFTA.
JF: What is Donald Trump talking about, Miriam?
ME: That was probably the most normal part of a very bizarre phone call that he had, that President Trump had with the Mexican president this week, announcing a new trade deal. He had him on speakerphone, but it took forever to get started. He was like “Enrique. Hello. Do we have Enrique on the phone?” And he wasn't on the phone.
JF: Presidents. They're just like us. They have technical difficulties.
ME: It was bizarre all around. But the whole point is that Trump campaigned on destroying NAFTA, portraying it as something that was bad for the American worker. Uh, and so instead he's kind of gone to the side to try to forge this deal with Mexico, in a bid to bring Canada in and basically develop some sort of a new NAFTA that he will however, never call NAFTA.
JF: And the point of it is that it's excluding Canada, right? Like NAFTA was about Canada Mexico and the United States, and this one is all about his best friend, Mexican president. It's all about Mexico and the United States. No Canada.
ME: It is, but part of the point is to pressure Canada to come to the table and make some uh concessions that the US has wanted, and the Canadian foreign minister has been in the US this week. So they're expecting to see progress there.
JF: Okay, number two. Here we go.
JIM MATTIS VOICE: As you know, we took the step to suspend several of the largest exercises, as a good faith measure coming out of the Singapore Summit. We have no plans at this time to suspend any more exercises.
JF: What is this guy talking about Miriam?
ME: Well, this guy is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, and you might not recognize his voice because he doesn't actually talk to the press all that much. But what he was saying in this is that uh war games or military exercises that have been a regular occurrence between South Korea and America, will go on as planned. They were cancelled a few months ago.
JF: Right.
ME: When the U.S. and North Korea.
JF: Were making friendships.
ME: Making friendships according to Donald Trump.
JF: Right, exactly.
ME: Trump was going around saying North Korea is agreed to the completely denuclearize. Everything is amazing, mission accomplished, uh, surprise surprise, that's not the case and so this week Trump canceled a visit by his secretary of state, and has just made it clear that um, he's finally realized that things maybe aren't going as swimmingly as he thought, and so part of that is restarting the military exercises.
JF: War games is such a weird phrase.
ME: It is weird. We should call them military exercises because you know, war is never a game.
JF: Agreed, excellent point Miriam. That's why you’re here. Okay, number three.
CHRISTOPHER DOMINIC SIDOTI: The mission has concluded that criminal investigation and prosecution is warranted, focusing on the top tap madore generals, in relation to the three categories of crimes under international law, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
ME: That was Christopher Dominic Sidoti, who's a member of the UN fact-finding mission that just issued a report on what they saw as they investigated the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar of Rohingya people. They were accusing the top military brass in the country of orchestrating this genocide that has forced over 700,000 people to flee. There's been mass rape, there's been murder, and the UN doesn't throw around words like genocide easily. And they also aren't really forceful very often, as we've seen in Syria and other places. So this was a really really huge move.
JF: And Facebook is a part of this entire conversation, right?
ME: They are, the UN even called out Facebook for being complicit in spreading this hate, which is a first for for the UN. And uh in the wake of that and in the wake of reporting by uh one of our reporters, into the role that Facebook was playing, allowing these generals, like these generals were posting on Facebook calling Rohingya people dogs.
JF: Wow.
ME: And even worse. So Facebook then took the step to ban to ban more than a dozen generals and other people from from using the platform, which is also like a new step on the path of Facebook finally trying to regulate what its platform is used for.
JF: Hate speech.
ME: Hate speech, basically.
JF: 700,000 people have been forced to flee. What happens next, Miriam?
ME: Well, so these people, many of them are living in a part of Bangladesh called Cox's Bazaar in really horrific conditions. But what happens now, is the UN is looking to stop this and for some sort of accountability. So they've recommended the head of the Armed Forces to be referred to the international criminal court. So in theory this could unfold in a way that we saw accountability like with Rwanda or in Serbia. So the international process in theory could start but what happens to the people on the ground is a much more difficult question.
JF: Thank you so much Miriam.
ME: Thank you.
Thank you!
This episode was produced by the PodSquad! That’s Megan Detrie, Alex Laughlin, Camila Salazar, Ahmed Ali Akbar, and Julia Furlan. Our boss is Cindy Vanegas-Gesuale, and our music is by Chad Crouch.