"Guest" Facilities

...The idea that dissidents could be sent to detention facilities is perhaps the most widely circulated theory, and it is as popular under President George W. Bush as it was under President Bill Clinton. And though Daniel Ellsberg has also suggested that dissidents could be targeted, most of the theories rest upon circumstantial evidence and long stretches of the imagination.

What we do know, however, thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald's investigation into Reagan-era initiatives, alongside documents leaked to the Miami Herald in 1987, is that when Col. Oliver North helped draft contingency plans in the early 80s, one of the reasons cited for possible martial law and internment was "national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad" -- a scenario which would become more likely with additional wars and in the event of the return of the draft.

Last year, the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that famously advocated preemptive strikes and wars on multiple fronts, called upon Congress to "take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps." Such steps should be relatively easy, given that since PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" was first published, states have been linking driver's license applications to selective service registration. According to the Selective Service System's Web site, "As of August 5, 2005, 35 states, 3 territories, and the District of Columbia have enacted driver's license laws supporting SSS registration."

With the military stretched to the breaking point, questions of conscription and subsequent draft-dodging are hardly far-fetched, but the very act of protesting, in and of itself, could become a federal offense... former White House counsel John Dean as early as Oct. 2001, ... wrote that, thanks to the hastily passed Patriot Act, the "right to dissent" is in jeopardy, with protesters possibly considered "terrorists."

Dean considered this an "unintended consequence" of the new anti-terror legislation, but the Oakland Tribune later reported that California's anti-terrorism intelligence center was already "blurring the line between terrorism and political dissent" and National Lawyers Guild president Michael Avery said that the Bush administration was "trying to criminalize dissent, characterize protesters as terrorists and trying to intimidate and marginalize those opposed to its policies"...

Even so, detention camp jitters could prove to be nothing more than Waitsian paranoia. After all, Kellogg Brown & Root held US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts from 2000 to 2005 without building a single camp...

That's likely classified information. Are you certain you'd know about it if they had?