"In 2015 I made two trips to Guantanamo while writing my history of concentration camps...
The first visit, I went to a pretrial hearing of the five 9/11 suspects...
One person I talked to not long after that was Mark Fallon, a career NCIS agent, who said something that stuck with me. As NCIS chief of counterintelligence operations for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, he’d been part of the early interrogation program at Gitmo. He protested the U.S. turn to torture in interrogations there internally, later condemning it in public and writing a book, Unjustifiable Means.
Fallon told me that after 9/11, with the turn toward black sites and torture around the world, the U.S. had become a rogue state. And because we had brought those secret, illegal interrogation sites into being around the world, America had not only became a rogue state, but had pulled other states into that orbit. He thought the U.S. would remain a rogue state—and the danger of doing even worse things would remain—until there was full accountability for the program.
* * *
Given where the country is at now, I reached out to Mark Fallon again. When we spoke last week, I asked him what he thinks of our current moment, and whether America is still a rogue state.
He noted that the cabinet nominees put forward so far are in many cases the negation of the agencies Trump is inviting them to run. Each one exemplifies the opposite of the values of the institutions he wants them to lead.
“These nominees appear to be those who will destroy or hinder the internal workings of government,” he said, “which even Al Qaeda failed to do.”"
— Andrea Pitzer, America as a Rogue State: Trump’s malicious chaos targets democracy at home and around the world. Degenerate Art, November 19, 2024
Still, in 2026
There's "a related evil that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are currently perpetrating outside U.S. borders: the creation of an international network of concentration camps around the world," Pitzer writes in 2026 (Planet of the Camps, April 7). "One of the challenges for Trump and Miller right now is that they can’t deport everyone they want where and when they want." A U.S. court may not allow it, or the intended destination may not accept the person. But in one case, for example, "Cameroon had accepted the men in exchange for implicit or explicit benefits, including the U.S. fostering corruption and looking the other way on human rights abuses following the October presidential election there," and there are "at least 25 countries with which the U.S. has made similar agreements, getting them to accept detainees from third countries, even if deportees have no historical connection or ties of citizenship with the destination country." Meanwhile, " the nonprofit Mobile Pathways has identified more than 13,000 immigrants to the U.S. who are facing deportation to third countries."
Multinational and international detention networks have existed in the past, often set up by some of history’s worst actors. During World War II, Nazi Germany made use of transit camps and hubs to deport targeted populations (especially Jewish detainees but also members of various Resistance groups) eastward from (and often to) occupied territory.
After the Nazis were defeated, the Soviet Union converted many former Nazi camps under their control to use for deportation purposes, transporting dissidents opposing the weight of the Iron Curtain to meet their death, wind up in camps, or remote exile inside the borders of the U.S.S.R. This pattern was part of a larger effort of deportation and dislocation. In the Baltic states, Operation Priboi tore more than 90,000 people from their homes in the spring of 1949. Tens of thousands of those counted as “enemies of the state” were women and children.
I’ve mentioned in previous episodes the ways in which various governments coordinated with one another in the Americas under right-wing dictatorships in 1970s and 1980s in a project named Operation Condor. This kind of collaboration allowed for outsourcing of detention and torture, and these countries carried out their abuses with broad support and sometimes training from the U.S. The synergy that is created when countries collaborate adds to the overall potential for harm.
Look at the rationales:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the subject of a court hearing today over the government’s attempt to deport him to Liberia. Prosecutors argue that they’re not deporting him to Africa instead of South America to punish him. Instead, as Todd Lyons wrote in a brief filed last month, Abrego Garcia must be sent to Liberia precisely because the U.S. has gone to so much trouble to negotiate a third-country agreement there.
To help people, act early, she says. For example, "make sure they have legal representation. Few things are as critical as this. Groups like the National Immigrant Justice Center, which works in the Midwest, exist all over the country, and help to make sure that detainees get lawyers."
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