It has been a half century since allied troop interrupted the Detention and Removal Operations conducted at various such facilities located in Central Europe. Those operations were conducted by private businesses as well. I.G. Farben Gesellshaft was the primary operator. We did not call them detention camps then. We had another name for them, one that our British cousins coined in their campaign against the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the last century. In South Africa and again in Central Europe the facilities used in their version of a detention and removal operation were called concentration camps. They were a mechanism by which elements of the population deemed to be enemies of the state could be isolated and ultimately removed from the scene.

We are watching today while the Bush Administration adamantly defends the Presidents extra-constitutional assertion that he has the inherent authority to suspend Americans’ rights to be free from warrantless search and seizures with his secret wiretap operation. The Attorney General of the United States has appeared before Congress defiantly claiming that the President has the power to ignore our Constitutional protections in his role as Commander in Chief. The Bush Administration has already claimed the power to exclude American citizens from Constitutional protections and guarantees of Due Process by simply labeling the individual as an “illegal combatant”.

Are we to watch while Halliburton reaps the profit from an American program to detain and remove enemies of the state from our midst?