Have you forgotten yet?

 It's now been more than 110 days since the U.S. government sent 238 people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador—without charge, trial, or conviction—to be confined for perhaps the rest of their lives on the White House's orders. They're still there more than three months later—with no contact with their families or attorneys, and no confirmation that they are even still alive. 

Revelations in recent days have confirmed the extent to which the U.S. government directly controls their fate. Marco Rubio apparently even undertook negotiations with the Venezuelan government—offering to release the Venezuelan prisoners in El Salvador in exchange for Americans held captive in Venezuela. 

In other words—the U.S. government is treating these prisoners as its own hostages—who can be shuffled around as diplomatic bargaining chips—even as they claim publicly they have no influence over their confinement. 

We have also learned a great deal about the kind of treatment they are experiencing̦̦—conditions indisputably amounting to ill-treatment and torture. During Kilmar Abrego Garcia's confinement in the CECOT prison—according to court filings—the guards reportedly forced him and the other inmates to kneel in painful postures—then beat anyone who lost their balance. 

Every single American should be terrified at these facts—for our own sake if for no one else's. As a government whistleblower reportedly told the New York Times (and keep in mind—this whistleblower is no human rights crusader—he was actually one of the government attorneys who defended Trump's Muslim ban in court, during his first term!): 

If they can do this sort of thing to Abrego Garcia, to 238 people that nobody knows, and send them to CECOT forever with no due process, they can do that to anyone, [...] It should be deeply, deeply worrisome to anyone who cares about their safety and their liberty, that the government can, without showing evidence to anyone of anything, spirit you away on a plane to wherever, forever.

Indeed. And yet—after 110 days—how many Americans are still thinking about their fate? How many of us remember that there are still 238 innocent people—against whom the U.S. government has never presented charges or any reasonable basis whatsoever to believe they were actually gang members or criminals—confined in torturous conditions—with our own tax dollars paying for it!

How many of us still remember?—even as senior administration officials have published tweets and Instagram reels advertising their own participation in this torture and brutalization?—do we ever spare them a thought? 

Have you forgotten yet, as Siegfried Sassoon once asked in a poem—for the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days...

How quickly we forget. Donald Trump himself has obviously forgotten. In the world of spectacle he has created—his reality TV presidency—no news cycle ever lasts for longer than three days at a time—because Donald Trump's own attention span cannot endure longer than that. I'm sure he no longer remembers these prisoners—even as they are still being tortured in a dungeon on his own orders. 

We all watched their abuse and humiliation. Administration officials publicly celebrated it. They re-posted videos of the men being led off in chains, forced into chairs, and shaved against their will. 

Why shaved? What purpose did that serve? To brand them. To inflict a literal stigma. The Salvadoran officials—acting on U.S. orders—might as well have pressed hot irons into their flesh. 

Their goal was simply to send a message to the prisoners and the world—we own them now; they are beyond the reach of any law or dignity or human rights; we can desecrate their bodies with impunity. 

I recently read Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth—his memoir of his time in a concentration camp in wartime France—and he notes at one point: "Prison experts all over the world know the extraordinary psychological effect of imposing the convict skull on a man, regardless whether the measure in itself is hygienically justified or not." 

That's why Nayib Bukele and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem and all these creeps made sure the people watching at home saw the men being forcibly shaved: to show the extent to which they could humiliate their victims with impunity—to underline that we have no recourse against them—that they can imprison us and torture us in violation of court orders—and we can do nothing to stop them. 

I think of men as innocent as I am as Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote, [...] Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars / Their trousers slit for the electrodes / And their hair cut for the cap...

Yes, indeed, the torturers and the confiners and the gulag wardens of the world know very well the psychological effect they are trying to achieve—when they forcibly shave a prisoner's head. 

We all saw. We all watched it happen. It was only three-and-a-half months ago. And yet—the world has moved on, since those gagged days, as Sassoon said. Or at least—the news cameras have moved on. Donald Trump's ever flickering and insubstantial interests have moved on. A fundamentally trivial person himself, he is able to take only a trivial interest in anything—even his own atrocities. 

But the victims's families have not moved on. Their sisters and mothers and brothers and fathers have not moved on. And neither should we. What would we do—after all—if it had been our own brother or father—if we had seen our father strapped into that chair, forced to bend double, placed against his will under the shaving razor—would we forget so quickly? Would we move on after just 110 days?

Look up, as Sassoon says, and swear by the slain [...] that you'll never forget!