In other scary stuff that's really happening, but that you won't find news of anywhere but on the net, check out this post, a first person account of a visit to a FEMA run camp for displaced Katrina victims.
And then there's this, which would dispel any thoughts we might like to nurture about how the first thing is just an isolated incident.
What scares me most about stuff like this... well, it's hard to pick which aspect scares me most about it, honestly, but, still... I read stuff like this and I can't keep the phrase 'trial run' out of my head. It's very much like someone out there is seeing how well this whole 'detention camp' thing can be run... is our bureaucracy up to it? Will our law enforcement and our military just follow orders? Will the press cooperate?
Most important of all, will we lie down for it?
First they locked up a bunch of Middle Easterners they grabbed up in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we didn't do anything, because we weren't Middle Easterners from Afghanistan or Iraq. And then they declared a few Americans enemy combatants and locked them up without trials because of what maybe they might have been planning even though there wasn't any evidence of it, and we didn't do anything about it, because, you know, it was just a few Americans, and they were kind of ugly anyway. And now they're detaining a few thousand American disaster victims, and we aren't doing anything about it, because it isn't in the papers and all those people are just trashy black folk, anyhow, so who cares?
How long is it going to be before they're locking up our neighbors... our co-workers... our family members... or us? And who's going to care then?
They insist that they have the right to detain pretty much anyone, indefinitely, without charges or a trial, in the name of national security. They insist they can eavesdrop and surveille us, without oversight or notice or limitation of any kind, in the name of national security. They insist they have a right to torture, in the name of national security.
How bad does it have to get before we all wake up and realize we don't want these people to have power over us? That it's not safe? That they are not protecting us, or our friends, or our children... that, in fact, we have a predatory government and they really are out to get us?
Yeah, they're moving slowly. You know why? Because they're afraid of us. They're afraid we're going to wake up and do something, before it's too late.
Although, honest to Christ, I don't know why they're afraid of us. All we've done for the last century is act like a goddam deer in the headlights.
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So this Boy Scout, couldn't have been older than eleven, is holding up this kinda chubby looking Scotch Pine. It was.... ehhhh... okay...
You know we will.
ReplyDeleteAlso keep in mind that part of the new border control inititives involves new detention facilities (doubtless substantial sections of said construction and administrative contracts going to Haliburton) which will also serve as handy places for, well -- as we've seen from this government -- whoever the Bush administration decides is an enemy.
ReplyDeleteConsider that perhaps as high as 7% of the people detained at Guantanamo were actually "picked up on the battlefield" as the Bushies contend nearly all of them were, The rest are there because it either suited some groups' aims or because the great minds behind these operations thought the best way to find people was to put an open bounty for, well, anyone someone was willing to finger as an insurgent or terrorist, and make that offer to people in desperately depressed, war-torn areas for whom the payoff was princely wealth within their local economies.
They're furiously trying to conceal that the vast majority of people held there are people turned in because they were personal enemies, strangers in the wrong place near the wrong, hungry people, or people the local regimes didn't care for. If the Bush administration suddenly had to bring these people to trial, the administration would (well, it should, but then again so should so much already) go down in flames of infamy.
For now, though, the fear-mongers are in control, and like many an infamous scoundrel before them everything they want to conceal is a matter of National Security.