Heh, even the extrajudicial imprisonment camps can be outsourced now. Why look bad having your military run Guantanamo when you can do the Uber model it for a cheap price.
Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
Reminds me more of the Amazon Delivery Partner model where the way you want to do something implies harming innocent people, so you have a third-party do it to shift blame for the deaths.
No doubt about it. Even in the U.S. we have a serious slavery problem. If you are incarcerated you do not have the same rights and most certainly can and will be made to labor if you want any hope of getting out.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
If we have indentured slaves in the U.S. then just imagine what they are doing at CECOT. Our judicial system is punitive. They would rather you working for 25 cents an hour cleaning vomit off hospital gowns then they would have you learning to read and write. Cash rules everything around them.
I came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place.
An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?
According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.
The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.
Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.
Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
The drug cartels are viewed as terroristic activity, so yes, there are a lot of terrorists in El salvador by that perspective. Shouldn't be too surprising when cartels commit outrageous acts like the Mejicanos massacre
Yeah anyone criticizing the mass incarceration in El Salvador as unjust should really familiarize themselves with the crimes of the gangs down there. The obliteration of a social scourge in a single presidency was nothing short of miraculous. That's why Bukele was re-elected at the highest levels in history - his people genuinely love him for it. The right to a fair trial is great in places that have law and order, but when you witness beheadings, mass executions, torture, etc. daily, you won't miss that right at all.
Bukele, who calls himself "the coolest dictator in the world" [0], won his first election in 2019, and his second election in 2024 in landslides. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world and was basically dominated by brutal cartels. Bukeles solution to this was to use the military to round up everyone who is a suspected gang member. Note that this includes people who simply have too many tattoos or are young male who have relatives related to gangs. They built a mega-prison, aka concentration camp to contain these people, but it seems like it is significantly below capacity, estimated at 16k prisoners while being able to "house" up to 40k people. The conditions in the prison are aweful [1].
It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.
But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]
What El Salvador did is not new.
But they will run into the same problem as every other SA dictatorship that is "tough on crime": the military will become the new cartel.
Did you miss the year of press cycles where this guy took El Salvador from one of the worst crime rates in the Western Hemisphere to one of the best by liberally arresting anyone he thought might be related to crime gangs?
From Wikipedia:
> During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
Who, pray tell, publishes the Salvadorian crime rates? Dragnet arresting young men will reduce crime in any country, but that sure is worse than the disease because while that action of arresting innocents is not "illegal" from the regime's perspective, it should be. So "crime" has gone up, and perpetrated by the state against citizens.
At this point you have a better chance of being freed from this prison camp being a citizen of any other nation than the US which is sending people there without giving them a chance to prove that they are innocent or a citizen of the United States.
At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.
In my country top lawyers every once in a while take an interesting case pro bono just because they enjoy having a duel with the State in the courtroom.
But I have been thinking about this. Ultimately our entire judicial system is all just words on paper. What happens when the government ignores a court order?
In the US the government is specifically retaliating against law offices that have done this in ways that Trump doesn't like and those offices are largely caving and offering millions of dollars of pro bono work to Trump.
Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court, as if rulings from district and circuit courts somehow don't actually have the force of law.
I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals. As we have heard for a long time, if the bill for breaking the law is too small it is just a fee and if you steal from enough people it becomes a statistic.
I'm not optimistic about this. I think removing due process to allow for exporting people without any rights is a terrible idea. The writers of the declaration of independence specifically named these.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is the root of all evil in our society. Every violent criminal, every death of despair, it all can be tied directly to white collar crime.
White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.
This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.
If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.
A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.
But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
> I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals.
You are so right. Whatever the benefit of having laws at all is, it evaporates when laws are selectively not applied.
We're seeing the consequencefs of it today, in the "content creation" business and many other. It's a dog eat dog situation. Truth lost any relevance. As the influencer you know very well that whatever you're feeding your audience is empty hope, dreams and fantasy. As long as the check from IG/YT/TikTok is big enough, you don't care. Why care?
I think we might also find that who is rich and powerful can easily get flipped upside down over night. Being rich is not actually all that hard when law enforcement exists to uphold private property rights. But without rule of law, everything is quite literally up for grabs and might will make right. I hope our business leaders are mulling this fact over and considering whether they have either the force of personality or the physical strength to keep what they currently have in a new regime.
The crushing of margins crushes the middle class before it crushes the rich, there is no point where the rich cannot afford private security. While they may end up less wealthy in absolute terms they’ll likely end up more wealthy in relative terms.
> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism. Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.
That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.
There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."
They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.
What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
Where do you get your news from? I cross-checked your comment with Wikipedia. In the Sanlu case, the executives were sent to jail, and they were ordered to destroy their stock because Sanlu was on the brink of bankruptcy. Life imprisonment and the death penalty don’t exactly sound like a slap on the wrist to me.
The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.
This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.
Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.
Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.
We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.
Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.
At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."
There will always be cynicism, quietism, fear, injustice.
Yet it is possible for people to come together and change the world for the better. This has happened many times before, on a global scale: the spread of democracy, abolition of slavery, decolonization.
Lately I’ve been thinking of this as an existential question. We are thrust into this life, into an unjust world. Each of us chooses how to face it.
I remember an account of a mass execution of some villagers by Nazis in Eastern Europe. I imagine being one of these people facing that time in history, with what feels like too little power.
I believe the best way to face such a thing, if a person can muster it, is courage.
Far... far... worse. The Rwanda exile program at least had some concept of due process in both the UK and Rwanda. The Rwanada exile program was at least stopped when the courts told it to instead of trying to remain secret long enough to avoid the courts having a chance to forbid it, and then outright ignoring the court orders forbidding it when that failed.
Here the program is "ICE picks you up off the street, without telling anybody. Writes in some internal document that you're a foreign national member of a gang, without telling anybody or giving you a chance to challenge that. Ships you off to El Salvador's concentration camp, without telling anybody". To this date even the lawyers challenging the program don't actually know the name of everyone who was shipped to El Salvador.
Maybe somebody finds out, by looking at ICE publicity photos that you happen to be in the background of, maybe not. Maybe you are a member of the gang, maybe you're a US citizen whose never even heard of the gang. Doesn't matter, there was no chance to challenge ICEs decision. You weren't even informed of the decision, you were just put on a plane without being told why. And once you're there, even if somebody figures out that's where you are and challenges the decision on your behalf, the US has no authority to bring you back.
Readit News
Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
Dead Comment
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
If we have indentured slaves in the U.S. then just imagine what they are doing at CECOT. Our judicial system is punitive. They would rather you working for 25 cents an hour cleaning vomit off hospital gowns then they would have you learning to read and write. Cash rules everything around them.
Deleted Comment
An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?
According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.
The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.
Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.
Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-t...
It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.
But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/26/naybib-bukele-...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-pris...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#I...
From Wikipedia:
> During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.
But I have been thinking about this. Ultimately our entire judicial system is all just words on paper. What happens when the government ignores a court order?
Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court, as if rulings from district and circuit courts somehow don't actually have the force of law.
Spineless cowards, everywhere.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
I'm not optimistic about this. I think removing due process to allow for exporting people without any rights is a terrible idea. The writers of the declaration of independence specifically named these.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.
This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.
If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.
A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.
But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
You are so right. Whatever the benefit of having laws at all is, it evaporates when laws are selectively not applied.
We're seeing the consequencefs of it today, in the "content creation" business and many other. It's a dog eat dog situation. Truth lost any relevance. As the influencer you know very well that whatever you're feeding your audience is empty hope, dreams and fantasy. As long as the check from IG/YT/TikTok is big enough, you don't care. Why care?
They know the answer and that’s why they lined up like show ponies at the inauguration.
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
Why not?
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-...
Deleted Comment
There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."
They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.
What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandalhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_Education
Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.
Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.
We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.
Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.
At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."
- "What if they shoot you?"
- "Me? what for?!"
Yet it is possible for people to come together and change the world for the better. This has happened many times before, on a global scale: the spread of democracy, abolition of slavery, decolonization.
Lately I’ve been thinking of this as an existential question. We are thrust into this life, into an unjust world. Each of us chooses how to face it.
I remember an account of a mass execution of some villagers by Nazis in Eastern Europe. I imagine being one of these people facing that time in history, with what feels like too little power.
I believe the best way to face such a thing, if a person can muster it, is courage.
Here the program is "ICE picks you up off the street, without telling anybody. Writes in some internal document that you're a foreign national member of a gang, without telling anybody or giving you a chance to challenge that. Ships you off to El Salvador's concentration camp, without telling anybody". To this date even the lawyers challenging the program don't actually know the name of everyone who was shipped to El Salvador.
Maybe somebody finds out, by looking at ICE publicity photos that you happen to be in the background of, maybe not. Maybe you are a member of the gang, maybe you're a US citizen whose never even heard of the gang. Doesn't matter, there was no chance to challenge ICEs decision. You weren't even informed of the decision, you were just put on a plane without being told why. And once you're there, even if somebody figures out that's where you are and challenges the decision on your behalf, the US has no authority to bring you back.
They're paying to keep you there, but """can't""" bring you back.
It is not prison if there is no due process.
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