What do we tell our Children?

How do we say we did NOTHING but sit on our hands as 66 people died in Family Detention Centers for NOTHING more than a Civil Violation as our Administration stays hindered by armies of those pushing for restrictionist laws and our government can not move forward with Comprehensive Immigration Reform!?!
The 66 risked their LIVES to provide their Children the Opportunity for the American Dream! Did they die in Vain?

I believe Winston Churchill said it best.

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."  --- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943

No, it’s not the New York Times. It’s not the Washington Post. In fact, it’s not even the Boston Globe. But it is a mainstream newspaper and one I peruse as often as I can, the San Francisco Chronicle, that has decided to cover the Bush regime's quiet, sustained effort to blanket the country with huge detention centers. Single-bid contracts have been signed and implemented for sometime now (beginning in late 1999) with Halliburton Inc's offshoot KBR to build these detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States.

I've around long enough to see some of these things cycle through our political life. Sometimes they pass with the administration and sometimes they get worse.

I recently spent some time on the web researching the Bush Doctrine and neocon (Straussian)-based policy. What I didn’t expect to find was an operational government program which targets immigrants and "potential terrorists" on a grand scale.  Never missing an opportunity for Orwellian titles, the Department of Homeland Security has named this little gem "ENDGAME."

Its goal is "the removal of all removable aliens, (including illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers required to be retained by law) or potential terrorists." (p. 2-11)

Can't "potential terrorist" mean, well, anybody?

Details below~~

Did anyone else feel troubled by the choice of how to humorize their coverage of the Univision presidential debate? Instead of doing anything thoughtful and smart, which they are capable of, they chose to make fun of the Latino community's concern about immigration.  

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory - the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed - belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure - the accidents, the unaccounted civilian dead, the crimes and the atrocities - is always exceptional.

In the days after a shocked world beheld the vacation pictures of depraved American soldiers enjoying their stay at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein too enjoyed torturing innocent Iraqis, Phillip Kennicott of the Washington Post wrote these poignant words.

Americans, though by and large horrified by these scenes, were resting their collective conscience assured by the President that these reprehensible acts were the handiwork of no more than "a few bad apples", and not representative of the overall U.S policy toward the treatment of prisoners.

There have been rumblings about the possibility of the Department of Homeland Security building detention centers in various locations around the United States.  The President has secretly added many signing statements to Congressional legislation.  I received this today and was shocked by the detailed information it included.  I'm not much of a journalistic researcher and was hoping some of you who are pros, could verify how much of this is valid - or not.  The combination of the expansion of executive powers and this elaborate plan to apparently imprison some of us is pretty scary stuff.....

Check out the details below:

Another amazing, jaw dropping policy by Bushco is what happens to children of families swept up in anti-immigration raids. Often they are left on their own in their communities, while the parents are detained and/or deported.

These raids are becoming more and more common, by the day, yet no efforts are made to make sure the children are safe, properly taken care of, schooled as required by law, or reunited with their parents and caretakers. Many of these children are actually U.S. citizens, having been born in the U.S. to their illegal immigrant parents.

This cold hearted, inhumane, careless and outrageous way of handling living human beings is a logical part of the new Bush immigrant policies. Expect more raids in the coming weeks and months, as immigrant families are seized at work places or communities and placed in detention centers around the country indefinitely, especially as fees for green cards and residency status are planned to be raised much higherthan many will be able to afford.

Slipping quietly under the MSM radar we find this story of the ongoing crisis in the world of retailing.

Perhaps we’ve all been too distracted by the red-hot economy, or the elections, or the twin deficits to be paying attention to the ‘domino effect’ that continues to ripple through the retail world.

It is exactly this crisis that rules out the possibility of there ever being a ‘capitalist utopia’. It’s all about market share and the big guys, having wiped out all but the most specialized of the little guys, are now starting in on each other...

Seems like one of the "bad apples" the Republicans claimed were responsible for torture is George Bush himself:

WASHINGTON: The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including one signed by President George W. Bush, that have guided the agency's interrogation and detention of terror suspects.

(snip)

The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one document, as described by the ACLU, is "a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees."

The second document, according to the group is a Justice Department legal analysis "specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members."

International Herald Tribune Link is here. Story is by David Johnston of the NYT.

I have spent the last six years ignoring my gut. Oh, sure, I titillated it a few times with Fahrenheit 9-11 and theories about Bush's back box. I read -- but rarely commented -- in the "tinfoil" LIHOP and MIHOP diaries, and it was easy to dismiss Bev or Greg based on the intellectual weight and irresistable wit of dKos' many articulate naysayers.

"You can't get me," I'd think. "I'm too smart for that." I've got college and grad degrees, I've been around the block, I've been on debate teams and can look at a thing more ways than one. I'm going to wait for the incontrovertible evidence, by God.

Almost 15 years ago, I was walking down Wellington Avenue on Chicago's north side, headed from where I lived on Clark Street to a store on Broadway. About mid-block along the dark street, a man reared up in a yard, stared straight at me, and dropped his pants to his ankles. I did not engage him in conversation. I did not weigh his many possible motives. I didn't wait for someone to tell me what to think. I ran like bloody hell.

Keep your pants up and follow ...

My husband and I searched to see if this was already up here, but don't see it, so here goes my first diary.

This article is from February from the Pacific News Service.  Today is the first I heard about it and it's horrifying if it's true.  Has anyone heard more about this?

UPDATE: As pointed out by redtravelmaster below, this has been diaried before, including here and here. But as, we all know from watching the Bush/Orwell administration, repetition makes for good educatin'.

Yesterdays' nationally publicized roundups of illegal immigrants for deportation is not something new. It has been going on since late 2003 when the Homeland Security program to deport illegal immigrants began. What appears new is the Bush administration's announced crackdown in what is an obvious attempt to pander to the disappearing conservative base. From what can be surmised, apprehended immigrants are placed in detention centers before they are deported. Does anyone wonder what inspired the Republican House immigration reform legislation?

These reports will undoubtedly please the law and order crowd, but not civil rights groups.

Here are some earlier reports of successful roundups from 2004 and 2005.

There's been ongoing discussion these past weeks over news that the Department of Homeland Security awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KRB to build massive detention centers.  Here on DKos there's been speculation as to who the DHS would actually put in these massive camps, "Should they be used."

Now we know.  Today, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has announced these detention centers will (at least for now) be used to house illegal Chinese immigrants.  Not just the actual adults that are here in the US illegally, but Entire Families.

My in-laws have built a house in the lovely horse country of Northern Virginia just at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The land there is all rolling hills and walls made out of native rock ringing broad acres of open fields. The road to the in-laws' house is small and winding, a narrow turnpike that rolls over single-lane wood bridges. Old wood farmhouses and more ambitious homes faced with more of that native stone, sit far off the twisty road amid the hills. Sprinkled along the turnpike are several wee and very old towns - a general store, a church, and nothing more. For someone like me, from the suburbs, it's a dream. It's gentrified country.

Looking out any of the windows at the rear of my in-laws' house, you will see a small mountain standing ten or fewer miles away. It's a long ridge, and its flanks are dotted by the occasional whitewashed farmhouse, but it's mostly trees. But wait - what's that on the left there? No, farther left. It looks like a collection of buildings too big to be the farm of a country gentleman. And is that a guard tower?

Is anyone putting the pieces together? Do you see what is happening. The data mining, wiretapping, control of the media. I have heard the words fascism sprinkled here and there, but every day I become more convinced that we really are heading for some sort of fascist government. That martial law will be declared soon and all the dissidents will be rounded up into these detention centers. This has nazi germany written all over it. The parallels are amazing, using the Reichstag Fire as an excuse to introduce new laws that result in the detention and death of millions of people. Using terrorism as an excuse to create the Patriot Act which completely renders the bill of rights useless. The American people are ripe for the picking, just put us in front of a TV and nothing else matters. Hell were to busy going about our daily business of trying to make ends meet and such to really notice what is happening, or care for that matter.

What ought to shock and terrify every American is that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, was awarded a $385 million contract to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency": "The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts."

--snip--

 What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.

Link and more on the flip.