Texas Prison Camp Future American Gulag?

Detention facility currently holds as many as 200 children incarcerated
after midnight arrests

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Prison Planet
Monday, January 8, 2007

A detention camp in Taylor Texas that currently holds hundreds of rebuffed asylum seekers who legally entered the country, half of which are children swept up in midnight raids, is a potential prime location for the enforced transfer of American citizens during a time of national emergency.

The privatized Hutto jail, which is also administered by Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S. on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal concentration camps.

In 2004 the facility was on the verge of being shutdown due to lack of occupancy but new immigration policies, allied to the burgeoning growth of the prison industry and future plans to detain American citizens on masse, have revived the potential scope of the camp, and a new contract to intern 600 individuals was finalized with immigration authorities in December 2005.

The facility is euphemistically called a "Residential Center," yet charges of overcrowding and poor conditions are rife, with an estimated 645 people filling a facility that has only 512 beds.

"Innocent children should not be jailed and forced to live under traumatizing and dehumanizing conditions," said a statement from Texans United for Families, an organization that recently held a vigil protest at the facility. "It is bad policy and an impractical and inhumane response to a growing refugee crisis. The U.S. should seek alternatives to detention while making sure that it legislates policies that support families and keep them together and out of jail."

The Infowars team recently visited the facility and were promptly told to leave the premises before having their names taken, but not before they were able to get footage of the camp "playground" where some of the children were playing behind giant mesh barbed wire. The children were kept indoors throughout the taping and were only allowed out when the film crew left to eat lunch. View the video here.

One local said that other residents of the town were completely oblivious to the fact that the camp even existed, never mind its function and purpose.

Suspicions will undoubtedly be cast as to whether the facility in Tyler is part of a wider agenda to set up a network of internment camps that will be used to forcibly detain American citizens under emergency provisions. The pretext for this was set in the summer of 2004, when thousands of protesters in New York for the Republican National Convention were forcibly detained, some for over 24 hours, without charge in an asbestos infested disused bus facilityknown as Pier 57, or "Guantanamo on the Hudson" as other labeled it.

During the Iran Contra hearings in the 80's, previously classified information came to light about Continuity of Government (CoG) procedures in times of national crisis. The masterminds behind these programs were Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and the Rex-84 'readiness exercise' discussed the plan to round up immigrants and detain them in internment camps in the context of uncontrolled population movements across the Mexican border.

The real agenda was to use the cover of rounding up immigrants and illegal aliens as a smokescreen for targeting political dissidents and American citizens . From 1967 to 1971 the FBI kept a list of persons to be rounded up as subversive, dubbed the "ADEX" list.

Since 9/11 shadow government and CoG programs that were outlined in Rex-84 have been activated, including mass warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. The internment camp program is being readied for execution following the announcement on January 24th that Halliburton subsidiary KBR (formerly Brown and Root) had been awarded a $385 million contingency contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps.

A much discussed and circulated report, the Pentagon's Civilian Inmate Labor Program, has recently been updated and the revision details a "template for developing agreements" between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations."

The pretext given for which the camps would be used as reported by the New York Times was stated as, "an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space."

Following the news first given wide attention by this website, that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had been awarded a $385 million dollar contract by Homeland Security to construct detention and processing facilities in the event of a national emergency, the Alternet website put together an alarming report that collated all the latest information on plans to initiate internment of political subversives and Muslims after the next major terror attack in the U.S.

The article highlighted the disturbing comments of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who encouraged torture supporting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to target, "Fifth Columnists" Americans who show disloyalty and sympathize with "the enemy," whoever that enemy may be.

Respected author Peter Dale Scott speculated that the "detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law."

Daniel Ellsberg, former Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense, called the plan, "preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters. They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

One of the last acts of Congress before Christmas was to send President Bush a bill that establishes a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to preserve Japanese POW internment camps in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Is this really in the name of historical interest or does it dovetail with programs on the books to intern hundreds of thousands of dissidents in a time of crisis?