El Salvador And The Dark Lessons of Guantanamo

Edited by Sam Thielman

BY NOW, you’re likely well aware of the Trump administration's "deportations" of migrants to El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), where torture is rampant, confinement can be indefinite, and slave labor such a feature that right-wing President Nayib Bukele posts about it. 

I have "deportation" in quotes because, by design, many if not most of those "deported" are Venezuelan, so they're not going back to their country of origin. That makes the experience of these 238 people something better understood as an extraordinary rendition. Extraordinary rendition was a feature of the George W. Bush-era CIA, involving a cooperative third country—often charming places like Bashar Assad's Syria, Moammar Gaddafi's Libya, or Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan—taking custody of detainees who were not going to get anything like a trial. They were going to get tortured. 

Those in custody, lacking the ability to contest their detention, become whoever those caging them say they are. There is a reason that the T in CECOT translates to Terrorism. A great deal of very recent history demonstrates how claiming someone is a terrorist unleashes upon them the State of Exception—and more recent history shows that more often than not, the perpetrators will get away with it. We're seeing that on display not only in El Salvador but, horrifically, in Palestine.

Via my friend Adam Serwer, 60 Minutes reports that more than 75 percent of those the Trump administration has rendered to CECOT appear to have no criminal record. They wouldn't deserve to be in a torture-enslavement detention center even if they did, but still. It's not accurate to say these are cases of mistaken identity, since mass deportation is not the kind of enterprise that is interested in drawing distinctions. The point is to assert the authority to inflict the most catastrophic treatment upon an out-group, under cover of a claim that such people are dangerous, while insisting that no lawful authority can stop it. They can be gay makeup artists, but once they pass into the custody of Trump and then Bukele, they are retconned through propaganda to be gang members, criminals, terrorists. 

It's impossible for me not to see the shadow of Guantanamo Bay in so many cases of indiscriminate arrest and transfer to a horrific, lawless prison. Long before CECOT existed, people entered into the custody of the United States military at Guantanamo because foreign intelligence agencies dumped their undesirables there, or as the result of vendettas with people who used the U.S.' bounty offers to settle scores. Ironically, Trump's earlier plan to vastly expand Guantanamo's migrant detentions has stalled. But CECOT reflects an important difference that indicates the Trump people have learned from what the Bush administration perceived as a vast judicial overreach opposing Guantanamo.

At the dawn of the War on Terror, the Bush administration established Guantanamo to be a place beyond the reach of the law. The Least Worst Place by Karen Greenberg—another friend—is a good resource on this. Various Justice and Defense Department lawyers had no problem contradicting one another when it came to Guantanamo. Guantanamo Bay could be foreign soil, beyond the reach of habeas corpus when ACLU attorneys filed claims on behalf of the men inside. And it could be American soil when it came time to immunize its military personnel from the Federal Torture Statute that governs conduct by U.S. officials overseas. Think of Guantanamo like quantum legal superpositioning. 

But starting in 2004 and culminating in 2008, federal courts—and, in a handful of major rulings, the Supreme Court—rejected Bush's assertion that those at Guantanamo possessed neither legal rights to challenge their detention nor redress to seek it in U.S. federal court. I want to be clear that judicial constraints on Guantanamo were never as robust as Bush feared and as the detainees hoped. The recognition of habeas corpus applying at Guantanamo did not actually free detainees from Guantanamo. But it did empower (again, I don't want to overstate this) what's become known as the Gitmo Bar—the defense attorneys who kept legal pressure on Bush's three successors to charge or release the detainee population. 

It's important to remember that the courts have typically deferred to the executive branch throughout the War on Terror. But once judges lost patience with Bush's argument that the courts could have no role at Guantanamo, what remained was the reality that the Guantanamo population was in U.S. custody. That meant that U.S. officers at Guantanamo would be obligated and in a position to respect the court's rulings with regard to detentions. 

CECOT solves that problem. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, rendered by the Department of Homeland Security to CECOT nearly a month ago, is the victim of what the Justice Department has acknowledged is an administrative error. But the Justice Department just as quickly asserted that his rendition can have no remedy, because Abrego Garcia is not in their custody. Then it punished the attorney who conceded Abrego Garcia's rendition represented an error. 

In this regard, CECOT is an opportunity for the Trump administration to have what the Bush administration meant Guantanamo Bay to be: a place truly beyond the reach of the law. It represents a reset to the ambitions of the first stage of the War on Terror, one that learned from the reversals of the subsequent stages. After all, no court ever injuncted the U.S. from extraordinary renditions—and we will never know basic information about those renditions, including just how many people the U.S. rendered. 

The Trump administration's claims that it has no power to deliver people like Abrego Garcia from CECOT insults your intelligence, since Trump is paying Bukele to cage the Venezuelans and more broadly the U.S. has vast amounts of other foreign-policy influence over El Salvador. Such insults will become legal facts if and only if U.S. judges accept them. 

The ACLU's Lee Gelernt tells 60 Minutes that he's going to challenge the CECOT claims in court—something that seems to take the shape of insisting deportations not be renditions—much as he did the Bush administration's claims on Guantanamo. The history of Guantanamo indicates that judicial intervention will probably not be enough to free people from CECOT. But it just as clearly shows that if left unchallenged, CECOT will swallow ever larger numbers and groups of people. "[T]his exchange with El Salvador introduces a new market sector in the globalized carceral economy," Andrew Kornfeld and Esul Burton wrote last week, "the trade of incarcerated migrants." 

LAST WEEK the Pentagon announced a major military buildup in the Middle East. Two aircraft carrier strike groups, belonging to the USS Harry S Truman and the USS Carl Vinson, will now operate there, as will additional fighter-aircraft squadrons. That's on top of THAAD high-altitude air-defense batteries already in the region, A-10 close-air-support squadrons in Jordan, F-35 combat aircraft squadrons in Saudi Arabia, and at least six B-2 big-boy stealth bombers on Diego Garcia, a militarized island in the Indian Ocean that serves as a bombing staging area. This is all happening while Trump threatens Iran; bombs Yemen (illegally); and welcomes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House today. 

Several times over the past 15 years has the U.S. put two aircraft carriers in Middle Eastern waters. They don't always bomb when that happens. But that should not provide much comfort while the U.S. and Israel fantasize about fundamentally transforming the Mideast balance of power.

ISRAEL'S GENOCIDE in Gaza and the West Bank has reached depths of depravity that challenge the ability of language to express. IDF units force Palestinian captives to advance into positions that draw contact fire or explosive-detonation, to the point where an anonymous IDF veteran described the practice in Haaretz not just as literal human shields but "a sub-army of slaves." Apparently the name given to such a practice is the Mosquito Protocol, and I cannot ignore the Holocaust education provided to me in Hebrew School when it comes to the meaning of depicting human beings as pestilential insects. And then, last week, video emerged of the IDF murdering 15 Palestinian Red Crescent rescue workers, after which they buried the medics in a mass grave and lied about it in a still-unraveling story. I watched on my phone as Israel bombarded Gaza to the point where human bodies visibly flew in the air, and I'll avoid sparing you the link if you didn't see that. If you want to witness it, the videos are easily searchable. 

But you should read something I can only describe as a pre-deceased plea by a Gazan teacher and journalist named Ruwaida Amer to be remembered as a human being. "I am not a number," she writes. 

If you have experienced even the most superficial Holocaust education, you know exactly what Ruwaida Amer's plea sounds like. You know exactly what it is. I grew nauseous reading her feel like she has to insist that she is a human being and not a number.

Last year my family attended a Passover seder at a friend of friends', and I apparently insulted my host by talking about Gaza and Zionism. I don't think I can bring myself to commemorate Pesach this year. Not in the shadow of an intensified genocide committed by Jews on the pretext of Jewish safety. I will never accept that my safety depends on transforming Ruwaida Amer from a human being into a statistic. And my safety would be worth nothing if it did.

REST IN PEACE to hardcore pioneer Al Barile of SSD. Play "Boiling Point" today. 

IMAGINE BEING the Pakistani government right now. You're in power in part because the U.S. greenlit the ouster of Imran Khan. Then you get some IMF relief after secretly agreeing to help the U.S. provide artillery to Ukraine. To make sure you stay on Donald Trump's good side, you provide him with the Abbey Gate bomber. Your reward is a 29 percent tariff on your exports to the U.S., one of your major trade partners, particularly for your textiles. How sweet it is to be a willing client of the American empire!

TO END THIS on a hopeful note, I liked this dispatch from FOREVER WARS friend Luke O'Neil reporting from this weekend's protests. 

No one on my feeds the past 48 hours will shut the fuck up about the right way to protest. The group behind the protests this weekend around the country that millions of people came out for may or may not be the same old Democrat bullshit. I do not know and I don’t really give a shit right now. I will tell you what is true and that is that tens of thousands of us marched and chanted and listened for hours as speakers from all manner of political groups I am excited about and ones I am skeptical of came together for one thing we can agree upon which is that this country – this evil fucking country that we all despise and yet must continue to live in for better or worse – is being dismantled and sold off for parts for the benefit of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their rich friends. If you object to this ravaging then you and I have a place to begin negotiating from. …

Listen to me I still hate these donation-seekers who tell us a better future is only possible by chipping in $10 to their organizations. But if this isn’t an example of millions of people around the country ripe to be organized and ushered into a new understanding that a better world than this is possible then I don’t know what is. All protests are different in their own way but at the heart of them they are all usually pretty simple: It doesn't have to be this way. I refuse to let it be this way. We refuse to let it be this way.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.