Detention Camps, Railcars With Shackles, and the Wachowski s
Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:14 am
How do you feel about Makow?
Rick Reuben wrote:Please present your evidence that these camps and trains are principally designed for rounding up illegal immigrants. If you don't have that evidence, then blow it back up the ass from whence it came.Andrew. wrote: a plan principally designed for rounding up illegal immigrants
The original rationale, as Cranius said, was a massive refugee influx. From an Alternet piece published two years ago:
The government's plans for an 'immigration emergency' include relocation and detention centers -- courtesy of Kellogg, Brown and Root.
Some time between now and 2010, the U.S. government expects some uninvited guests -- a massive influx of undocumented immigrants. In preparation for their arrival, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) backed the National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which mandates 40,000 new beds and barracks for foreign-born refugees at four undisclosed locations over the next five years.
On Jan. 3, 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) expanded an existing contract held by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) and renewed it to accommodate up to 20,000 refugees from environmental and political disasters. A future expansion in 2008 calls for another 20,000 beds.
Detention of immigrants and other undesirables without charge is nothing new. After the Civil War, many states supplied troops and police to assist private armed guards to arrest and detain striking workers. In 1918, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and a youthful 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover launched raids to round up and deport alleged subversives. In the fall of 1934, striking textile workers were interned in camps at Fort MacPherson outside Atlanta, Ga. Congress approved the Internal Security Act of 1950, including FBI Director Hoover's "Security Portfolio," a plan to arrest and detain up to 20,000 dissidents. 1984 Director of Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) under Ronald Reagan reconstituted a readiness exercise, Operation Night Train, code-named REX 84, a potential roundup of up tens of thousands of Central Americans residing in the United States for internment in ten military detention centers.
But the difference here is that the emergency detention and removal plans for 2006-2010 are built on a new contingency support contract. Originally awarded in 1999 by the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, the contract sought logistical support for imagined immigration events. Contingency support contracts are good business for KBR, which provides insurance for calamities that don't happen.
Ron Paul's immigration ad depicts shadowy Mexicans swarming a hillside while the narrator booms about their menace and drain on U.S society. Then, as captions read "No Amnesty," etc, a Latino in the emblematic position of a human body directly subject to sovereign power - spread-eagled against a squad car while a white border official or cop handles him - plays as the background.
And yet Ron Paul - the guy who gushes about the Reagan presidency - is the answer.
So... illegal persons and detention centers... Here's some topical political theory, sloughed from my Robotic Chomsky Pussy (where the juices of my pedantry mingle and sing like the Mousai):
Gary Sauer-Thompson wrote:I'm reading Agamben's fragmentary, dense, multi-layered Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with the sovereign, the one who decides over life and death of its subjects; and the second deals with the engimatic figure of homo sacer, the "sacred man", one who can be killed and not sacrificed; but who can be killed with impunity.
According to Agamben, the connection between politics and life is fundamental to the Western tradition and there is a close and originary bond between sovereignty and this politics of life. Agamben argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, which is distinguished from bios, or politically or morally qualified life, the particular form of life of a community. The constitution of the political is made possible by an exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously makes bare life a condition of politics.
In contrast to arguments that understand political community as essentially a common 'belonging' in a shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that 'the original political relation is the ban' in which a mode of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a historically specific form of political authority that arises with modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the essence of the political.
The sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life from merely existent life, political and human life from the life of the non-human. Consequently, there is a difference for Agamben between biopolitical life and bare life:----the former being the managed political subject of power relations, and the latter being the necessary negative referent by which power-relations (through the sovereign exception) demarcates what counts as legal life, life that matters. So there there is a limit, or an 'outside' to power relations in biopolitical life.