Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Welcome to Argentina del Norte: May I See Your Papers

Maureen Farrell has an excellent piece called Detention Camp Jitters over on Buzzflash that is a must read.

Notorious Halliburton subsidiary and Vietnam War profiteer Kellogg, Brown & Root has an extremely lucrative contract with Homeland Security to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency".

WTF? Is anybody out there listening to this shit? These are concentration camps, and it's not a new idea for Americans. Just in my lifetime, to pick three prominent examples, we shipped away Japanese-American citizens in WWII, we passed the 1950 McCarren Act which authorized the government to lock up "Communists" in camps, and we saw Nixon stooge and crypto-Nazi Tom Houston come up with the so-called Houston Plan which called for, in part, the abrogation of civil liberties and the rounding up of political dissidents and other un-American subhuman types, to detain them in sports stadiums.

Got that? Stadiums. Like in junta-ruled Argentina (and in Pinochet's post-Allende Chile; see for example the excellent Costa-Gavras film Missing -- based on a true story -- about a young American expatriate "disappeared" by the junta), we evidently expect so many detainees that we would have to commandeer whole sports stadiums.

Subsequent secret detention plans include Rex-84 and Nighttrain-84, ostensibly military preparedness/border control drills, the 1987 Iran-Contra Hearings exposé of Oliver North's preparations for "civilian inmate labor camps", and the new so-called Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, one provision of which includes herding people into ... sports stadiums. (Hmmm... I think I'm seeing a pattern here.)

Finally the capper came with John "Christ is in My Pocket and God is in My Ass" Ashcroft's plans to detain American citizens without benefit of charges, trials or conviction -- which led to the prominent cases of José Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi. This Ashcroft wet dream isn't over yet, and the smart money is on the Republican-packed Baby-Doc-apologist lock-step-fascist Supreme Court to ultimately rule in favor of the government.

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-- Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943.
Maybe we all ought to have our passports ready. Maybe try to get a second passport if we can.

If it isn't already too late...

4 Comments:

The Author said...

Amen, brother. There's way too much to be upset about these days, and it just keeps getting worse. I'm crossing my finger for the coming elections.

All that aside, locating Christ in one's pocket and God (presumably the Father) in one's ass raises a number of challenging theological issues vis a vis the Trinity....

Anonymous said...

Great post. I often wonder what the sheople will be saying when the Brownshirts are marching in the street, the Constitution is burned and all of our civil liberties disappear under the rule of King George. Do you think they will even notice?

Came over via Otter. I look forward to reading more of your posts.

Farnsworth68 said...

Well, Clark Kent, when it comes to actually having to do any real thinking, it looks like someone put kryptonite in your cookies.
Here's a few things that will be hard to get through your Kool-aid sipping thick skull:
Our "enemies" as you call them are NOT the entire population of Muslim believers on this planet--if they were then we've already lost: they number over one billion people.
But that aside, exactly what does the abrogation of our civil rights have to do with them hitting NY or LA?
Here's the question people like you can't answer: Why did Bush say in 2004 that wiretaps require a court order when -- at the same time -- he wasn't willing (or able) to get that court order?
When the FISA court approves routinely 99.9% of the requests brought before it, why did the Bush Maladministration Injustice Department not even bother to go ask for it?
Maybe when the brownshirts are marching in our streets, Big Brother is monitoring all of your conversations, and all of your civil liberties have been taken away, maybe then you'll fucking get it.
And no, you are not going to be one of the lucky few in the Inner Party who will be immune from oversight by the fascist overlords. Those people have already been chosen, and you aren't on the list.

"Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Unknown said...

Yeees Laaaaawd. I have been saying the same thing to the troll that's been over at our blog. I don't think much of any president who will step on the Constitution.