Where Is Your Detention Facility?

The responses to my last post (360 as of Monday night) were certainly startling to me, especially, I have to say, the one that located my nearest detention facility between Laguna Seca and Fort Ord on the Monterey Peninsula. I immediately went to Google maps and started scanning the area looking for a center large enough to hold 20,000 people. and the best I could come up with was a gated golf course community (one way in, one way out) that sits on the hillside between the raceway and the fairgrounds. Or Tehama, Clint Eastwood's country club. Which doesn't mean that I am not taking this martial law thing seriously. So--back to you responders. I have two questions and a topic of discussion.

Question one: Do you know where your local detention facility is, and what it is currently being used for? Have you seen it? Do you know anyone who is or was employed in building it? And do you know how it is set up inside?

Question two: If, indeed, Blackwater, Titan and other military outsourcing companies are being used to train mercenaries whose ultimate job will be to subdue the American population (in other countries, these paramilitary organizations might be known as "rightwing death squads"), do you know anyone who belongs to one, has been trained to join one, or has left one? If so, what do they say about the purposes and intentions of these groups, and how do they feel about them? In other words, what do they say would be their justification for, let's say, rounding up you and your friends and family?

Many of you made a logical case for the idea that we are in the midst of the development of a military state, a fascist state, and certainly the editorial in yesterday's New York Times about the unprecedented firing of seven diligent federal prosecutors, such as Carol Lam (who busted Duke Cunningham) is worrisome in this context. The new US attorneys put in office by the Bush administration are there to take orders, so a case could be made that here we have another brick being set in place. It might be that the Bush administration is just doing a little ass-covering--seeing the handwriting on the wall, they are trying to make sure they themselves are not going to be prosecuted, but maybe something more sinister is going on.

Nevertheless, I have to say that I still don't understand what the goal is. Merely a Republican/corporate stranglehold on the three branches of government? Absolute suppression of dissent? If we recall Stalin, for example, we remember that it was extremely dangerous to criticize Stalin out loud. But criticism of the Bush administration is already out of control, entirely routine. To what end would the nation be destroyed? It's easy to say "fascist state", but the fascist states we know of were geographically on the small side, and didn't last long. How many right-wing death squads does it take to shoot out a lightbulb? to subdue Manhattan, the Bronx, AND Brooklyn? Not to mention Chicago and Los Angeles and the redwood forests and the gulfstream waters, the ribbon of highways, and the endless skyways in between. Why would they detain 20,000 in Monerey Peninsula and what would the ideal US look like in the mind of Dick Cheney?

There are lots of intelligent people who still believe that Bush and Cheney originally meant well--their goal after 9/11 was protective, and their antipathy to Hussein was idealistic and practical. If that is the case, then what sort of US do they want now? Do they really think they have something to gain (since they are already rich and more or less old) by doing away with even the semblance of America as we knew it?

Discuss.