while Gitmo and other black-site detention facilities may be closing, under provisions stated in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 it is still lawful to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens if they are deemed (according to a frighteningly vague criterial standard) to be “enemy combatants.” Rendition (and by extension, torture in foreign prisons) is still the order of the day. Furthermore the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 clearly outlines our government’s standing policy to consider American citizens as potential terrorist threats and to treat us accordingly. No comfort then is gleaned when one considers that the National Defense Authorization Act (again, by a broad criterial standard) allows for the unconstitutional federalization of the military to police American citizens, and that the Army’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program allows for the convicted to be sent to work in labor camps on Army installations. Active duty military personnel, fresh off of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have already been stationed inside the U.S. under Northcom with the expressed mission of quelling civil unrest and conducting gun confiscation in the event of widespread rioting due a national emergency like the total collapse of our economy. And as of 01/09 the Department of Homeland Security has been newly authorized to build more internment facilities and FEMA Camps throughout the country in which to “house” U.S. citizens and illegal immigrants (Mexico, anyone?), and “to support the rapid development of new programs.” New programs? Not surprisingly, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton/KBR was awarded the contracts to build them. - by Daniel Walker
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