How decades of abuse at Guantanamo undermined democracy and built a black hole of detention for Trump today.

Read the post that inspired this episode: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/choking-on-the-mess

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The latest Next Comes What episode takes on the "worst of the worst" mythology that Trump's cabinet used to justify sending immigrants to Guantanamo this month, and how this bucket of lies is no different than those that have been handed to the American public for years about the island. Andrea Pitzer talks about her own visits to Guantanamo a decade ago for pretrial hearings of detainees and to see the conditions of detention. She considers the ways in which falsehoods about people held there, torture undergone by detainees, and the very nature of whether the government can own memories have warped American justice under six presidents. Andrea traces how Gitmo's past has been seized on by Donald Trump to launch a new era of mass detention on the island. The issue concludes with the ways the administration's efforts to mislead have been undermined by journalists and everyday people, which court cases are already having an effect, and what you can do to help keep the steroidal twenty-first century expansion of this nightmare from becoming permanent.