Monday, February 6, 2006

They're getting our rooms ready...

Long Beach (CA) Press-Telegram

The story showed up in Tuesday's Press-Telegram, as I was reading "Night," Elie Wiesel's horrifying autobiography of a teenager in Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Appearing on page A5, the story said the federal government had awarded a $385 million contract for the construction of "temporary detention facilities." These would be used, the story said, in the event of an "immigration emergency."

The new detention camps will be built by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. The latter, as you likely know, is the defense-related corporate giant with fists full of contracts involving the war in Iraq.

Considering what took place in Nazi Germany, as well as the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans in 1942, no detention camp should be built without the widest possible public scrutiny.

Bottom line: The contract cries out for greater attention. So far, the government's expressed reason for building them is insufficient and ill-defined. And even if the camps do relate to illegal immigration, their purpose could be changed overnight.

Let's not have it said, years from now, that no one ever questioned this.

Does this mean we won't even get to go Gitmo?

On a related note from Working for Change:

2/6/1943: U.S. government requires the 110,000 Japanese-Americans imprisoned in internment camps to answer loyalty surveys.

Japanese-Americans, Reality-based Americans, what's the diff?

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