From Project Censored’s “Top 25 Censored Stories” for last year:
Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced on January 24, 2006 that it had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps in the United States.
According to a press release posted on the Halliburton website, “The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.â€
The “emergency influx of immigrants” clause is terrifying, but not too shocking: after all, that’s what happened after 9/11, and it wasn’t the first time in U.S. history. What really caught my eye, though, was the “or to support the rapid development of new programs.”
Project Censored cites Peter Dale Scott, an independent journalist who followed this story:
It is relevant, says Scott, that in 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft announced his desire to see camps for U.S. citizens deemed to be “enemy combatants.†On February 17, 2006, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the harm being done to the country’s security, not just by the enemy, but also by what he called “news informers†who needed to be combated in “a contest of wills.â€
A few months back a lobbyist said something to me along the lines of: “We lost on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. I wish we didn’t, but we did. Now we just have to move on.”
The comment struck me as odd, considering that the legislation and the Green Scare in general is far from over, but I didn’t think too much of it. Reading through the Department of Homeland Security’s “Endgame” plan, and the detention center contracts, crystallizes the problem with that mentality.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act wasn’t just an isolated bad bill and “eco-terrorism” rhetoric isn’t just a silly PR stunt. It all has to be viewed in a broader context of the War on Terrorism. Using legislation to target specific political groups as “terrorists” based on ideology dovetails perfectly with simultaneous campaigns to label people “enemy combatants,” strip their legal protections and create detention centers for “new programs.” To be very clear, the AETA doesn’t mean corporations can round up activists and put them in detention camps, but in this political climate it certainly has chilling implications.