CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison, opened in January 2023.
On April 28, 2004, the CBS weeknight program 60 Minutes II reported the story of prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Iraq. The broadcast included leaked snapshots from Abu Ghraib, in which American military police gleefully photographed one another in the commission of brutal, sexual torture of their detainees. Critic David Levi Strauss took up the task of reading the images, and in The Brooklyn Rail, he contended that “the looks on the faces of those reservists, and their easy, hamming body postures were intended to show that they, unlike the Iraqis, were not subject to the depredations of Abu Ghraib; that they were actually not there at all, but back home, mugging for the camera.”
At the time, digital point-and-shoot cameras were understood to be for private consumption, and their grainy JPEGs rarely traveled farther than a family email or a personal blog. Abu Ghraib put the lie to these presumptions. “How are we going to wage war anymore, with everyone watching?” chameleon commentato…