I visited Manhattan during Labor Day Weekend, 2001, and then returned that November to find the area barricaded by plywood walls, and the walls fliered with the pictures of missing people. Two years later a boiling dread roiled the March of 2003, as America’s futile and illegal invasion of Iraq had become inescapable. Years later I stood on the corner of my small town holding a sign protesting that pointless failed war, and I was called a communist, a terrorist, and a traitor.
A few years after that, I opened my local newspaper to find a column by Jonah Goldberg insisting that the “abuse” suffered by detainees in American captivity was not really torture. And even if it was, Goldberg reasoned, it was still necessary to foil “murder plots” and other imminent threats, and so it, the non-abuse, could not possibly be compared with the horrors of the KGB or the NVA. The “enemy combatants” held at CIA black sites and US Army prisons were too dangerous to be afforded frivolities such as due process or the Geneva Conventions.
Over the years Goldberg wrote multiple columns justifying the torture of prisoners of war and other detainees. Even in 2014, when he finally got around to calling torture by its name, he still insisted that “sometimes the real world gets a veto.” Context, he insisted, should matter.
The context for Goldberg’s column, and for so many of the ‘debates’ concerning the use of torture by American soldiers and intelligence officers during the presidency of George W. Bush, was the content of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. Those photos are what made that context real for us, the ones having the debate. Abu Ghraib had been a notorious prison during the reign of Sadam Hussein, and it was taken over and refurbished by the US military soon after the invasion of Iraq. Beginning in Spring 2003, Military Police officers systematically abused hundreds of ‘high value’ detainees held at the prison. They zip-tied prisoners and beat them; blasted music to keep them awake; raped them with lightbulbs and broomsticks; stripped them naked and forced them to masturbate each other; trapped their heads in canvas bags and stacked them into human pyramids.
The Abu Ghraib story first broke in a June 2003 Amnesty International Report, and again in a wire story that November. AP reporter Charles Hanley’s story covered the abuse, torture, and killing of detainees at three American facilities, but it was not picked up by the mainstream press, and Hanley couldn’t even get an official response from the military. “That only changed,” writes Richard Beck in Homeland, “when people saw the photographs.” Military Police Specialists Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman had documented their own heinous actions using their personal digital cameras, creating images which define forever the War on Terror: a smiling woman dragging a naked man by a leash; a terrified man in an orange jumpsuit inches from a snarling dog; a man standing on a box, his face encased in a bag and his arms held out in a crucifixion pose, and electrical wires wrapped around his wrists.
To call the testimony in these photographs disturbing undercuts the horror, a horror grotesquely accented by the grimy, grainy, flash-brightened limitations of digital photography. The US military made no attempt to deny that the abuses we saw were real. The official line was that a few “bad apples” engaged in torture and abuse on their own initiative. By often making themselves the stars of their own photoshoots, the MPs permitted many to believe that Abu Ghraib was a case of extraordinary sadism, perhaps merely soldiers under great stress deciding to blow off some steam. Yet all of this abuse had been perpetrated in the midst of much more intense interrogations conducted by Military Intelligence officers. One MP described Abu Ghraib as “Gitmo from the get-go,” with undocumented government agents ordering specific abuse from the MPs. It is entirely possible that MI interrogators tortured several prisoners to death. But because these men and their interrogation chambers were never photographed, and because no site-wide investigation to discover the existence of systemic abuses was ever conducted, any crimes that were committed outside the lens of an idiot’s camera were never discovered.
Because these photos could not be denied, the truths they documented, and the legal architecture which surrounded them, had to be talked around. Goldberg found justification in Hollywood products like Patriot Games. Speaking in his role on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2004, Chuck Schumer argued that while the Abu Ghraib guards should be prosecuted, torture itself could not be taken off the table. He posed a scenario: a nuclear bomb in a major American city could only be found and disarmed with the use of “some kind of torture, fairly severe maybe.” His solution was clear: “Do what you have to do.”
This exact fantasy was a staple of War on Terror era pop culture. On 24, Jack Bauer found himself needing, again and again and again, to mentally and physically torture terrorists, separatists, and other internal enemies. 24 screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh even told a reporter that he thought “it would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers…even kill people,” and across nine seasons, his show repeatedly brought that fantasy to life. Bauer and heroes like him were good men forced to get their hands dirty by their evil, inhuman foes, creating a narrative structure in which a government agent could engage in the most degrading acts and remain innocent. “Jack Bauer never wanted to torture anybody,” writes Beck, “but circumstances always found a way to force his hand.”
The Bush administration did not need to make the explicit case for torture; pop culture did it for them. Simply by tuning in to their local Fox affiliate, viewers could feel the transgressive shock of breaking a human rights taboo, and have fun along the way. America legitimized torture by transmuting it into entertainment.
On March 26, US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video of herself visiting a prison in El Salvador. The visit was to celebrate the deportation of dozens of alleged gang members and undocumented immigrants to CECOT, an overcrowded maximum security facility where all prisoners are held on permanent life sentences. The CECOT deportations were themselves celebrated in dramatic sizzle reels shared online by official government accounts of both the United States and El Salvador, in which heavily armed police rush the deportees off their planes and into the prison, a massive indoor facility where the lights are left on twenty-four-hours a day and inmates are not permitted utensils. Their heads are forcibly shaved, and the men are made to crouch on the concrete floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One of them appears to be wearing a boot on his injured foot. At the end of the clip masked guards force the stumbling men into their cell.
In her video, filmed profile-style on a slightly shaky phone, Noem is wearing a baseball cap and draw-string pants and a fifty-thousand dollar watch, and she stands in front of a massive cell. Throughout her address, the prisoners stand, silent and shirtless, props for the message being projected by the most powerful country in the world. Watch out, she’s saying. Toe the line or this could be you. Noem has made a habit of this kind of influencer-terror-kitsch — she routinely accompanies ICE officers on their raids around the country, and posts photos and videos to her official social media. These raids, like her tour of CECOT, are designed for publication on social media, and they make a point of emphasizing the degrading treatment suffered by their subjects. A March 27th Twitter post from the official White House account celebrated the arrest of an alleged Fentanyl dealer by noting that “She wept when taken into custody (picture attached.)” They then quoted their own post, and shared an AI generated anime image of the woman sobbing while a tough white man in a camo cap looks seriously on.
Regime associates have gone to social media to post videos of foreign students fleeing the country, Houthi rebels being annihilated in air strikes, and worse. These videos are meant to project a grizzly hard-heartedness, and the sense that no matter who you are, America will come get you. But they are also glibly, viscerally debased. These posts share the visual language of lifestyle influencers and manosphere tough guys, who fake wealth and strength until they actually have them. It would all be so unbearably tacky, were it not being pushed by the executive branch of the United States of America. Campy monsters helming the most powerful artifice in human history: America.
The Abu Ghraib detainees could see the camera flash and know that their degradation was being recorded, and every time the photos were seen — first in private, and then as part of the public record — this degradation was reenacted, reinflicted. Every person who looked at those photographs was forcefully cast in the play the MPs staged. The mass proliferation of cruelty was the point — and it is now too. Noem’s videos might be shot in better resolution, yet they all have a similar sick energy, as if everyone involved is getting off on their cruelty. Even you. Even if you don’t think you are, even if you don’t want to. Men deported to CECOT have been identified by their families in the propaganda videos, and these same men have been shocked to discover that they have been declared not only gang members, but terrorists. It doesn’t matter that almost none of them have been convicted of any crime. Their presence in the video — no matter how they got there — is proof enough for the Vice President to slander them online. This technology is a new element in the history of fascism. No other fascistic government had anything like the power and the technological advancement to mete out unimaginable pain.
These images and videos invite viewers to participate in the punishment of these men, and all others caught up in the Trump administration’s deportation machine. They make repression into a spectator sport. This conscription into the act of terrorism began during the War on Terror, when at the same time that Americans began to see their homeland as a battlefield. They bought bigger cars, larger weapons, and voted for politicians who created federal agencies which blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign, legal and illegal, all under the banner of fighting terrorism. Terrorism, as the ultimate threat, smashed through all previous legal barriers, and made a great many new abuses permissible. These agencies, including Noems Department of Homeland Security, broadened the definition of terms like ‘terrorist’ until a vast swath of people, including those who held ideas the United States did not like, became threats to be apprehended or eliminated. The Obama administration designated all “military-age males” killed in a drone strike to be enemy combatants until proven otherwise, a legal categorization which permitted the killing of civilians.
Thus, today an American college student can be declared a supporter of terrorism for constitutionally protected free speech, and a gay man can be deported for having a “gang tattoo” which does not even exist. Civilian death figures in Gaza are regularly dismissed because many of those killed are “combat-aged males,” their age apparently voiding their Geneva Convention rights and their human dignity. The Trump administration began its administration by declaring a whole host of foreign gangs and drug cartels terrorist organizations, opening them up to extra-legal retaliation. And all of these flagrant violations of the legal system which every single American citizen has been told she has the right to invoke is frictionlessly converted into High Res consumption on social media.
It can seem pointless to talk about aesthetics at a time like this, when the president announces he would like to ship American citizens to foreign gulags, and the secretary of state can revoke a green card for speech he does not like. But the chintzy, cheap quality of these videos, their AI sloppiness and camp, is important. The Abu Ghraib photos emerged from a torture dungeon, and they look like it. When the Trump propagandists transform their similarly shocking images into forms which Americans will recognize — the action movie, the influencer video — they make what is outrageous and unprecedented seem normal. Swipe a video of a cat playing a guitar, Swipe an AI generation of Trump Gaza, Swipe A row of shirtless men in cuffs, Swipe a woman baking sourdough.
In the America shown on MAGA TikToks and Instagrams and X accounts, there is no meaningful border between the desires and resentments of the MAGA base and the aims of the government — no distinction between enriching yourself and enforcing the law. Last month Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok went along on an ICE raid with Noem. She bragged about arresting “some criminal illegal aliens,” and even wore a badge. For her efforts, she received “exclusive footage” to share with her followers. Private citizens have been arrested for impersonating ICE agents — easy enough, when actual agents refuse to provide warrants or reveal their names. Many students singled out for deportation by the Trump Administration were selected from lists provided by private groups like Canary Mission, Project Esther, and Betar, who then trumpet the arrests on social media.
In other words: there is a market for this stuff, and it is booming. Americans seem to have an enormous appetite for these spectacles of violence and degradation, so long as they are perpetrated against people outside the protection of the law: terrorists, gang members, sex offenders — or anyone this administration decides to treat that way. Whole classes of online entrepreneurs, from the private individuals who ‘investigate’ human trafficking and the ‘pedophile hunters’ who take the law into their own hands, have successfully converted law enforcement into entertainment, democratizing the process that began on reality TV by extending it to cover the entire country, the whole world.
As the Trump administration reorients the might of federal law enforcement towards the punishment of undocumented immigration and domestic dissent, it will increasingly bring the war home, away from the ‘lawless’ border and into peaceful, normal American communities. Diehard MAGA supporters will be made to witness the kidnapping of families and children, and this time it will be families and children they recognize — even people they know — not faceless masses in viral videos. And those Trump voters, like the rest of us, will have to decide whether to side with families and children, or the uniformed thugs who are snatching them off the street.
So far, Americans seem not to like the sudden appearance of lawless secret police squads in their cul-de-sacs and outside their schools. In order to turn away from the distress, they will require some form of compensation — perhaps even entertainment. Trump’s theater of cruelty has revealed how all forms of online visual grammar are avenues for propaganda — that the basic way in which we go online is primed for these spectacles of dehumanization. These macabre performances teach us to treat the world and the people in it as things to be maximally exploited for our own material (and libidinal) gain. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh wasn’t wrong when he described the Abu Ghraib photos as “standard good old American pornography.” For many Americans, these forms of contemporary digital degradation strike a pleasure center; the suffering of others literally gets them off. In the days of Abu Ghraib, this was an inconvenient truth. Today the sadism is the point.