It looks as if Representative Alcee Hastings a Democrat from Florida has decided to reintroduce his FEMA Camp bill. A few years ago I was the first person to write an article about this awful piece of legislation. Fortunately, I was successful in exposing it to a much larger group of people via the alternative media and the bill did not move forward in the legislative process. The latest iteration of this bill has been introduced as House Resolution 390 otherwise known as the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act. This bill would authorize not fewer than 6 military installations as sites for the establishment of national emergency centers to be run by FEMA under the command of the Secretary of Homeland Security.
I was extremely critical of an earlier version of the bill which was proposed in the 111th Congress as HR 645. The bill used vague language to give the Secretary of Homeland Security carte blanche power to use these facilities for anything that the Secretary felt was appropriate. In other words if the Secretary of Homeland Security felt like using them as death camps than potentially that could have been considered a lawful use of the facilities according to the language in the bill. In this new version it looks like Representative Hastings got the message and decided to remove the vague language even though the Secretary of Homeland Security would still be in charge of the proposed facilities.
One of the minimum requirements of a national emergency center as defined by the bill is that it is capable of meeting for an extended period of time the housing, health, transportation, education, public works, humanitarian and other transition needs of a large number of individuals affected by an emergency or major disaster. It basically sounds like a concentration camp. Similar types of facilities were setup by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II to house large numbers of Japanese Americans. In other words, there is historical precedence for the federal government forcibly relocating large numbers of people into government run concentration camps. There is an increasing amount of rhetoric from the federal government and corporate media that Constitutionalists, gun owners and other liberty minded people might be considered potential terrorists. Would it really be a stretch to think that these facilities could be used to house people that they consider to be enemies?
Considering how much the federal government has lied to the American people in the past, you would be absolutely insane to set foot in one of these proposed national emergency centers. For anybody who believes this is conspiracy theory talk, you have to understand that nobody in the federal government is going to openly propose that they are building facilities to detain large numbers of Americans during a martial law scenario. If they did they’d be widely criticized and the legislation would go nowhere. Instead they are going to make it sound as if these facilities are to be used for a beneficial purpose in order to conceal what they could ultimately be used for which is why they are called national emergency centers instead of FEMA camps or concentration camp facilities. It is the same concept used by the power structure in George Orwell’s book 1984 where the government agency called the Ministry of Love is in reality the Ministry of Torture.
Not only that, but why do we need the federal government specifically establishing national emergency centers on closed military installations? These are places that were designed to control who can enter and who can leave. Interestingly enough, one of the limitations included in the new version of the bill is that it does not authorize any federal officer or employee to force an individual to enter a national emergency center or prevent an individual from leaving a national emergency center. This is funny because a member of the U.S. military is technically not considered a federal officer or employee. So even though a federal officer or employee wouldn’t be able to force a person into one of these facilities or prevent them from leaving, it does not necessarily prevent a member of the military from performing these functions. Considering that members of the military would most likely be the ones responsible for the security of such a facility, it makes the limitation entirely meaningless.
To summarize, it looks as if the new bill has been changed to deflect the most damning criticisms posed towards earlier versions but it still is a dangerous piece of legislation. It is no secret that the federal government already has facilities that can hold large numbers of people if they have the need to do so. The Bush 43 regime approved the refurbishment of the old Japanese internment camps and in the mid-2000s KBR was literally given a multi-million dollar contract to build detention facilities.