What We Don’t See
And why we need to start looking harder
In 2004, during the early stages of the Iraq War, members of our armed forces and members of our Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of war crimes and human rights violations at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Prisoners were beaten, exposed to physical abuse and many forms of sexual humiliation, including rape. One prisoner was killed, and his body was desecrated. Our troops did these things, and they did them with the help of our intelligence community. And they took many pictures for their scrapbooks while they did it.
Once the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib became known, the fallout was immediate and severe. The Bush Administration said the events were “isolated incidents”, but few believed that at the time, and fewer have believed it since. But the truth is simple. This is just what happens. If we allow those who act in our name to operate with absolute power but without accountability, then we can expect the worst human behaviors to become commonplace. And for every Abu Ghraib we read about in the media, other atrocities go unreported. We know it happens, but we just don’t look hard enough to find every crime because there are simply too many, and we just don’t have the grit to face our own inhumanity. So we call it an isolated incident and just move on.
While in 2004 the US operated under the appearance of law and order, today our government is ruled by chaos. Cruelty is rewarded, and our violent impulses are no longer a fault. Now, our baser instincts are what qualify us for government service. Basically, if you really want to hurt people, Donald Trump and Kristi Noem will pay you well to do so. You can shoot a mom in the face and a nurse in the back, and our government will call them terrorists and praise you. But this isn’t what frightens me the most; what frightens me the most is the knowledge that this cruelty – the unthinkable inhumanity Trump encourages us to embrace – is likely happening behind closed doors in our new American concentration camps.
ICE is currently trying to spend $38 billion on new detention facilities that will be able to hold tens of thousands of detainees. Many, perhaps even most of these detainees will end up being people without criminal records who came here legally and have played by all the rules we gave them. And when our elected leaders try to enter these facilities to do the oversight we elect them to do, they are consistently turned away, even though doing so is illegal.
To sum up, they’re buying huge facilities in out-of-the-way locations, warehousing people who they have spent half a century demonizing as some kind of threat to “real Americans”, and they won’t let anyone behind the curtain to see what’s going on. The question isn’t “Are atrocities occurring?” The question is “How much worse than Abu Ghraib can we get?” And knowing the character of Donald Trump, and the unhinged racism that he doesn’t even bother to deny anymore, it’s safe to say that many would rather be POWs in Iraq in 2004 than ICE detainees in 2026.
We will be learning about new and disgusting Trump crimes for decades after he’s gone. Of that I am completely certain. But when everything is known, and the tragedies of the Trump administration are fully catalogued, the horrors that have occurred and will continue to occur in our American concentration camps will leave the largest and most lasting stain on our collective understanding of what it really means to be an American.
Each and every one of us will define ourselves as citizens based on whether or not we looked hard enough at what’s happening and fought hard enough to stop it.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.