This Is the Land of Wolves Now
Masked agents snatching people off the street. Government officials using caged prisoners for propaganda videos. We are the villains.
1. POWs
Two weeks ago Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a law that grants the president extraordinary powers during times of war. Here’s his proclamation:
Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.
Some of the individuals who have been apprehended under the Alien Enemies Act have been rendered to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Yesterday, Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, toured this facility and then staged a photo-op and interview in front of a cell containing dozens of what we can only assume are prisoners of the supposed “war”1 we are fighting with Tren de Aragua.2
Look at these images. What do you see?
In the background are a few dozen men, crammed into a cell. Their bunks are stacked four-high. Their heads are freshly shaved. They wear identical white shorts. They are all shirtless.
Their poses are similar. Three rows of prisoners stand still in the front as Noem speaks, their hands either at their sides or clasped in front of them. The rest of them are arrayed on the bunks so as to create a visual for Noem’s use. None of these men is speaking. Or moving. Or making any facial expressions. They have clearly been posed by the jailers, forced to hold position so that they can be useful props for the American woman so that she can manufacture propaganda for her regime.
We have seen this kind of thing before. Just not from America.
I want to be deadly serious about this: We are now the bad guys.
Let’s discuss.
The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.
The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.
This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.