KBR Gets $385 To Build Detention Centers

[RPankn]

Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Contract to Add Temporary Immigration Detention Centers

By RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: February 4, 2006

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary that has been criticized for overcharging the Pentagon for its work in Iraq.

KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house people in the event of a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, company executives said. KBR, which announced the contract last month, had a similar contract with immigration agencies from 2000 to last year.

The contract with the Corps of Engineers runs one year, with four optional one-year extensions. Officials of the corps said that they had solicited bids and that KBR was the lone responder.

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jamie Zuieback, said KBR would build the centers only in an emergency like the one when thousands of Cubans floated on rafts to the United States. She emphasized that the centers might never be built if such an emergency did not arise.

"It's the type of contract that could be used in some kind of mass migration," Ms. Zuieback said.

A spokesman for the corps, Clayton Church, said that the centers could be at unused military sites or temporary structures and that each one would hold up to 5,000 people.

"When there's a large influx of people into the United States, how are we going to feed, house and protect them?" Mr. Church asked. "That's why these kinds of contracts are there."

Mr. Church said that KBR did not end up creating immigration centers under its previous contract, but that it did build temporary shelters for Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Federal auditors rebuked the company for unsubstantiated billing in its Iraq reconstruction contracts, and it has been criticized because of accusations that Halliburton, led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, was aided by connections in obtaining contracts. Halliburton executives denied that they charged excessively for the work in Iraq.

Mr. Church said concerns about the Iraq contracts did not affect the awarding of the new contract.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, who has monitored the company, called the contract worrisome.

"With Halliburton's ever expanding track record of overcharging, it's hard to believe that the administration has decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer dollars," Mr. Waxman said. "With each new contract, the need for real oversight grows."

In recent months, the Homeland Security Department has promised to increase bed space in its detention centers to hold thousands of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. In the first quarter of the 2006 fiscal year, nearly 60 percent of the illegal immigrants apprehended from countries other than Mexico were released on their own recognizance.

Domestic security officials have promised to end the releases by increasing the number of detention beds. Last week, domestic security officials announced that they would expand detaining and swiftly deporting illegal immigrants to include those seized near the Canadian border.

Advocates for immigrants said they feared that the new contract was another indication that the government planned to expand the detention of illegal immigrants, including those seeking asylum.

"It's pretty obvious that the intent of the government is to detain more and more people and to expedite their removal," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami.

Ms. Zuieback said the KBR contract was not intended for that.

"It's not part of any day-to-day enforcement," she said.

She added that she could not provide additional information about the company's statement that the contract was also meant to support the rapid development of new programs.

Halliburton executives, who announced the contract last week, said they were pleased.

"We are especially gratified to be awarded this contract," an executive vice president, Bruce Stanski, said in a statement, "because it builds on our extremely strong track record in the arena of emergency management support."


www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/national/04halliburton.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[nana]

I keep having this terrible thought, what if these centres are not being constructed to detain people trying to get into the US .. as the US heads further and further down the road to fascism I suspect there will be less and less people trying to get into the USA.... what if they're really being built to stop a mass exodus?

[Moses]

The purpose of these detention camps is some unnamed contingency: "new programs". The fact that they are building these, rather than applying the money to known needs, is in itself very frightening.

[Moses]

Will Bush's War on Terror Bring Back Detention Camps?

Commentary, Ronald Takaki,
New America Media, Feb 06, 2006
Editor's Note: Parallels between U.S. government actions following Pearl Harbor and steps taken after 9/11 -- including a Halliburton contract for U.S. detention centers -- are troubling, the writer says.

BERKELEY, Calif.--On Jan. 24, the Halliburton subsidiary KBR announced that it had been awarded by the Department of Homeland Security a $385 million contract to build detention centers in the United States. The purpose was to prepare for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of emergencies. What lessons can we learn from the history of detention centers of an earlier war?

Like the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers, Japan's military attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was a shattering experience for Americans. Parallels between these two "days of infamy" have already been widely discussed by politicians and pundits as well as by everyday people. However, most of us today do not know what actually happened to Japanese Americans on the West Coast as well as in Hawaii in the wake of the devastating bombing.

Shortly after he inspected the still smoking ruins at Pearl Harbor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox issued a statement to the press: "I think the most effective fifth column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii, with the possible exception of Norway." At a cabinet meeting, Knox recommended the internment of all Japanese aliens in the islands.

Meanwhile, in California, Attorney General Earl Warren pressed federal authorities to remove Japanese from sensitive areas on the West Coast. The Japanese, he declared, "may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort. Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor."

Congressman Leland Ford of Los Angeles wrote to the Secretaries of War and the Navy and the FBI Director insisting that "all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in concentration camps."

Leading the campaign to do exactly that was Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command. In February, DeWitt sent Washington a recommendation for the mass evacuation of all Japanese: "In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted... It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today."

On Feb. 19, in Executive Order 9066, President Roosevelt granted General De Witt authorization for the evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were citizens by birth.

Unlike their counterparts in California, Hawaii's public officials urged restraint and reason. Congressional delegate Sam King advised the military that nothing should be done beyond apprehending known spies. Unlike General DeWitt, General Delos Emmons as the military governor of Hawaii opposed Washington's efforts to evacuate and intern Japanese Americans in Hawaii. Emmons believed that the Constitution guaranteed the right of due process of law to every person, and was determined to base his policies and actions on this principle.

In a radio address broadcast shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, General Emmons assured Japanese Americans: "There is no intention or desire on the part of the federal authorities to operate mass concentration camps. No person, be he citizen or alien, need worry, provided he is not connected with subversive elements.... While we have been subjected to a serious attack by a ruthless and treacherous enemy, we must remember that this is America and we must do things the American Way. We must distinguish between loyalty and disloyalty among our people."

Many years after the war, in 1982, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that "not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast." Six years later, the U.S. Congress passed legislation giving an apology and reparations of $20,000 to each of the survivors of the internment camps. Signing the bill into law, President Ronald Reagan admitted that the United States government had committed "a grave wrong."

Will history repeat itself today as Americans find themselves swept into the hurricane of post-9/11 fears? Engaging in racial/religious profiling, will our government continue to detain and incarcerate Muslims in the U.S. without due process of law? Will it unconstitutionally force them into detention camps to be built by Halliburton? Will our government later regret it had violated their constitutional rights and have to offer them redress and reparations? Or, like General Emmons, will federal officials remember that "this is America" and do things "the American Way"?

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PNS contributor Ronald Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of "Strangers From Another Shore: A History of Asian Americans."