Muslims in the US: Why is Halliburton building internment camps?

Uh oh

On January 24th it was announced that a subsidiary of Halliburton KBR was awarded a $385 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention centers in the US. These centers might be used for immigration, or for disaster relief, or vaguely “…to support the rapid development of new programs.”

As early as September of 2002, John Ashcroft discussed internment, even of American citizens who were deemed “enemy combatants” and Peter Kirsanow of the US Civil Rights Commission said that he “could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country.” If there’s a future terrorist attack in America “and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.”

“Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters,” says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the US military’s account of its activities in Vietnam. “They’ve already done this on a smaller scale, with the �special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo.”

Now we are beginning to see this mentioned by a number of sources (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), but it is still not front page news, although it is not only Muslims and Arabs who are concerned about what sort of emergency might require detention centers. And what are these mysterious “new programs“?

I believe that all Americans should be very concerned. It might be “someone else” they come for first, but if this is the direction our nation is going, who knows where it will end.

Sheila Musaji is editor of The American Muslim.