This is Neve. I know I’m logged in as Paul, but he’s been called off for a few moments and I thought I’d take this time to rant, just a little, about something.
Did you know that the detention center — isn’t that a lovely, innocuous name? — where they held Gil was one of several, many, that were built by the Halliburton lackey-company Kellogg, Brown, & Root? Did you know that there are many of these “facilities” scattered across the country, with room for something like 20K people? Did you know that they were contracted years ago!?
I’m searching the record and and having trouble finding mentions of these giant… I hesitate to call them concentration camps but I’m having trouble coming up with a better term. I mean, “detention center” is so blandly anonymous that I refuse to use it. These things were started way back in 2006 or something and only a handful of fringy websites mentions them at all. They are often cited as being “temporary immigration detention centers” but the truth of the matter seems to be that they were built without any real purpose in mind.
Much of the publicity, such as it was, surrounding these things was about the Halliburton tradition of overcharging the government drastically for such things. The price tag was $385 million. But I’m more concerned about the forethought that went into this. Our government, way back then, was planning to incarcerate tens of thousands of people. The whole “immigrant” thing sounds like the flimsiest of excuses, especially in light of A. Bush’s stance on immigration and B. the fact that the jackbooted thugs just rounded up and arrested all these protesters. And yes, Gil is out but lots of other people — “troublemakers” — aren’t out.
And their families haven’t heard from them. At all. I don’t know if you’ve been following this in the news — it’s usually buried in the back pages, but about 100 people have just … been disappeared. Pouf! Gone! Paul got to know some of these folks — well, their families — on his great quest to get Gil released. Most of the missing are not, according to the government, actually missing. They are merely in detention center 12 when their families are at detention center 24 and then when the lawyers show up at Number 12, oh, no, there was an error and they are at Number 5, which is closed for the holiday weekend by now, call back on Monday.
But thanks to the internet, there’s a scary pattern emerging among the people trying to hunt down their loved ones and it’s frighteningly in line with the idea that the Bush administration built these giant jails specifically to house people with the balls to disagree with him.
There’s more and it’s scarier. Google this phrase if you want to really make yourself paranoid: Graham and “Fifth Column movements”. But April is tossing and turning and I’ve got to go.
