Equating Common Criminals with Terrorists

Kurt Nimmo
Oct. 18, 2005

On October 4, Bryan Bender, wrote for the Boston Globe:

The FBI’s counterterrorism unit has launched a broad investigation of US-based theft rings after discovering some vehicles used in deadly car bombings in Iraq, including attacks that killed US troops and Iraqi civilians, were probably stolen in the United States, according to senior US Government officials.

The FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Inspector John Lewis, said the investigation did not prove the vehicles were stolen specifically for car bombings in the Middle East, but there was evidence they were smuggled out of the US by organized criminal networks that included terrorists and insurgents. (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, according to the FBI, common property criminals in the United States are “terrorists and insurgents” and will be dealt with in standard Bush fashion—abducted and thrown in a stateside Gitmo gulag where the Constitution and Bill of Rights are null and void.

The new disclosures are part of a pattern, according to government officials. US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are increasingly finding links between violent Islamic extremists groups and vast criminal enterprises such as drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and car theft.

In short, not only are car thieves working in concert with terrorists, so are other non-violent criminals—in fact, considering this convoluted logic, it’s not a stretch to conclude all crime is linked to “Islamic extremists groups and vast criminal enterprises” and the government should deal with it accordingly—the same way they dealt with Jose Padilla, the American citizen kidnapped in Chicago and thrown in a military brig, denied habeas corpus, and will likely be held for the rest of his life, or until the bogus “war on terrorism” concludes, maybe in a hundred or so years, according to Dick Cheney.

If indeed the feds start abducting suspected property criminals as terrorists, this will be a great deal for the “prison industry,” otherwise known as the slave labor industry. There “are nearly 1.6 million men and women incarcerated in the United States,” writes Charles Overbeck for Parascope, citing figures from the Justice Department, “currently the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. This startling figure tops off a decade of rapid expansion of America’s prison population, fueled by a ‘war on drugs’ that is steadily undermining the rights so succinctly expressed in the Bill of Rights more than 200 years ago.” Alan Whyte and Jamie Baker note there “are presently 80,000 inmates [as of 2000] in the US employed in commercial activity, some earning as little as 21 cents an hour. The US government program Federal Prison Industries (FPI) currently employs 21,000 inmates, an increase of 14 percent in the last two years alone. FPI inmates make a wide variety of products—such as clothing, file cabinets, electronic equipment and military helmets—which are sold to federal agencies and private companies. FPI sales are $600 million annually and rising, with over $37 million in profits.”

“Ten years ago there were just five privately-run prisons in the country, housing a population of 2,000,” Ken Silverstein wrote in 1997. “Today nearly a score of private firms run more than 100 prisons with about 62,000 beds. That’s still less than five per cent of the total market but the industry is expanding fast, with the number of private prison beds expected to grow to 360,000 during the next decade.”

The private prison business is most entrenched at the state level but is expanding into the federal prison system as well. Last year Attorney General Janet Reno announced that five of seven new federal prisons being built will be run by the private sector. Almost all of the prisons run by private firms are low or medium security, but the companies are trying to break into the high-security field. They have also begun taking charge of management in INS detention centers, boot camps for juvenile offenders and substance abuse programs.

And that was before nine eleven and the “war against terrorism” excuse to violate constitutional and human rights. Now that we have al-Zarqawi and terrorist car thieves (and drug dealers and weapons smugglers) breathing down our necks, we can turn America into a massive gulag not unlike North Korea or China. In the former, according to the international human rights community, “forced laborers mine coal, make uniforms for the military, work in reprocessing factories, and farm.” Of course, turning common criminals into slaves is not restricted to Asia. The British penal colonies in Australia between 1788 and 1868 are probably the best examples of convict labor, there was penal servitude in Imperial Russia (known as “katorga”), and of course there were the Nazi and Soviet forced labor camps.

Now that Bush has legalized strappado and other horrific techniques (in the torture and rape camps at Bagram and Abu Ghraib) and it is perfectly acceptable to kidnap suspected terrorists (and soon car thieves) and “rendition” them without regard to the Third Geneva Convention and Fourth Geneva Convention, we can expect common criminals to be swept up in raids and turned into slaves for the state and the industries of their corporate overlords.