Great. The Kleptocrat has announced plans to build a “migrant operations center” at Guantánamo Bay, “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”
I have thoughts.
He's building a concentration camp to hold
up to 30,000 people his goons identify as “criminal aliens”, in the most hidden
and inaccessible place the US controls. The current facility at Gitmo maxes out
at 800, and there are currently about 100 prisoners—uh, “detainees”, whatever—there.
Imagine what it will take to expand that to 30,000. Either he’s thinking of
letting the construction contract to his buddies, or he’s expecting to use
slave labor to get the job done. ¿Por qué no los dos?
This choice is not accidental. Guantánamo
is the 21st Century analogue of Poland, which was where the Nazis
located their six Todeslager—the killing centers of Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,
Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oh, yeah—they built “concentration
camps” in Germany and occupied western countries, but for the real work of genocide,
they put the facilities far from the Vaterland, so Germans wouldn’t
smell the smoke coming from the crematories.
Even people in South Dakota and Wyoming might
object to that sort of thing, job prospects in prison management notwithstanding.
Not in theory, you understand; just NIMBY.
To put the scale of this “detention center”
into perspective: 30,000 is roughly the population of Rahway, N.J.; Gloucester,
Mass., Winter Park, Fla.; Juneau, Alaska; Bangor, Maine; Laramie, Wyo.; or East
Palo Alto, Calif. It’s the undergraduate student body of the University of
Southern California, Clemson University, the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst or the University of Iowa. Pulling something like that
out of the Kleptocrat’s ass because it’s the best way to hide crimes against
humanity—well, what could possibly go wrong with that process?
We started down this path of lawlessness
in the pursuit of geopolitics when George W. Bush announced the Great War on
Terror and repurposed the naval station to imprison men scooped up in raids all
over the Middle East and West Asia—often just on the say-so of others who had
scores to settle. (Much the way people ended up in Dachau or Sachsenhausen on
being denounced by their neighbors.) And then held them in prison without trial
for years. Our hands are not clean. But man—we’re just diving face first into
the abattoir with this insanity.
Since the White House has declared that
shoplifting $100 in merchandise constitutes major crime if you aren’t White (basically),
this means that people with anything less than a US passport in documentation
can be swept up and jailed without due process, because migration. (It
was the first bill he signed in office, the so-called Lakan Riley Act.) And
those people could end up in Guantánamo. Because once he’s built the facility,
he has to justify it by filling it.
Well, but it’s Friday, innit? So our
earworm for today is “Guantanamera”, a folk song based on a poem by 19th-Century
Cuban poet, nationalist and philosopher José Martí. The poem is about a girl
from Guantánamo, but she’s a proxy for his love of Cuba. He would be appalled
by these plans.
Let’s hear Cuban artist Celia Cruz singing it.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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