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A few years back, when some newspapers suggested
that Bush had laid in place the foundations for martial
law, and Tommy Franks was alleged to have told some cigar magazine that
another 9/11 would certainly eventuate in that, one couldn't help thinking of
Oliver North. Details of North's plan for introducing martial law in the event
of widespread civil disobedience came out during the Contra hearings, and the
Miami Herald exposed
a programme called Rex 84
in which such measures were envisaged. The plan,
"was said to be similar to one Mr. Guiffrida had developed earlier to combat
a national uprising by black militants. It provided for the detention of at
least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps."
It's now 2006, post-Katrina, and the Bush government has handed Kellogg, Brown
& Root another fat little contract to build and maintain "temporary
detention facilities" in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants,
or
in case of another natural disaster in which thousands of people are displaced
- because detaining people in a hellhole of a flooded city, depriving them of
food, water & medical aid, and then subjecting them to martial law, doesn't
look good on teevee (supposing one could get more than a glimpse of this picture
from teevee). Kellogg, Brown & Root seem to get all the breaks with this
administration. It's not even funny any more.
There had been suggestions that civilian
internment camps were on the way for some while. Most of this came from
various religious-style kooks and paranoid right-wingers. Big Government was
comin-a-gitchoo. After Guantanamo, and the mass post-9/11 detentions in the
US, it's hard to even raise an eyebrow. Mass
detention camps for Arab-Americans? Blurring
the distinction between terrorism and dissent? Criminalising
protest? We've seen that old schtick before,
over and over
again.
Because these things are not a fixture of daily life for most Americans,
one assumes that outright government repression is an anomaly. From John Africa
to Waco, from suppression of labour to Cointelpro, the record suggests otherwise.
