Congressional reporter Craig Caplan reported that GOP members of the Ways and Means Committee visited El Salvador’s maximum security prison CECOT on April 15. Our tax dollars at work!

Those visiting included our very own Rep. Claudia Tenney, along with chair Jason Smith (Missouri) and representatives Ron Estes (Kansas), Kevin Hern (Oklahoma), Mike Kennedy (Utah), Carol Miller (West Virginia) and Riley Moore (West Virginia).

Tenney’s presence on this publicity tour — some members posed, signaling with thumbs up, in front of caged men — is not surprising given her stance on suppressing civil society and constitutional rights.

Posing in front of caged men, seen on racks of bunks, as Moore did, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did earlier, reminds us of the brutal images of sadomasochistic torture by U.S. soldiers at the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib. While those images were private, and the illegal tortures meant to remain undisclosed, the concentration-camp-for-hire is normalizing state-sanctioned discipline and disappearance. In fact, Trump’s administration, with Tenney and others supporting it, purports to suggest we should take pleasure in this (Trump all but said this). No one should be surprised, the United States has trained Salvadoran extrajudicial and paramilitary death squads since the late 1970s; CECOT is the industrialized and sanitized version of necropolitics. Democracy does not survive in this........

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