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Can Americans be Sent to Propaganda Prisons?
Army manual for re-education camps applies to US citizens
By RT

After reporting this week on a Pentagon-created plan for interning activists at re-education camps, questions were asked about the US Army manual that allegedly outlines the resettling of US citizens. Can Americans be sent to propaganda prisons?

Now as more and more news organizations are investigating the recently unearthed military manual, FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations, verification is coming in that the callous plans to populate military camps in the US and abroad are not only authentic, but indeed establishes blueprints for putting the country’s own citizens into guarded Army detainment centers.

An American military document just uncovered appears to detail an US Army plan that calls for detaining “political activists” at re-education camps staffed by military-hired “PSYOP officers” in both America and abroad.

The website Infowars.com has unearthed the smoking gun, a copy of a United States military manual entitled FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations, which appears to offer Defense Department insiders instructions on dealing with the imprisonment of anyone considered an enemy to the American way of life and how to go about indoctrination them with an “appreciation of US policies and actions” through psychological warfare.

The PDF made available is dated February 2010 but has only now been leaked online. A copy of the document has been uploaded to the website PublicIntelligence.net for viewing, and additionally a version appears to be hosted on the US Military’s Doctrine and Training Publications page at armypubs.us.army.mil, although access to papers published there are unavailable to those without the Pentagon’s authorization, therefore making it impossible to verify the authenticity of the manual at this time. The military site that appears to host a copy has also implemented security measures on its servers that it cautions visitors are “not for your personal benefit or privacy.”

Further, the title page of the manual warns that the material contained in its 326 pages is be distributed to US Defense Department and its contractors only, and that must be “destroy[ed] by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or construction of the document.”

“This manual addresses I/R [Internment and Resettlement] operations across the spectrum of conflict, specifically the doctrinal paradigm shift from traditional enemy prisoner of war (EPW) operations to the broader and more inclusive requirements of detainee operations,” the paper’s authors explain in the first paragraph of the documents preface. From there, it goes on to explain that the methods of psychological warfare and brainwashing of persons applies to “US military prisoners, and multiple categories of detainees (civilian internees [CIs], retained personnel [RP], and enemy combatants), while resettlement operations are focused on multiple categories of dislocated civilians (DCs).”

The manual continues by describing categories of personnel whom are certain guidelines of the manual apply. A detainee, for example, is any person captured by an armed force, but does not include personnel held for law enforcement purposes — except where the US is the occupying power. Civilian internees are described as anyone “interned during armed conflict, occupation, or other military operation for security reasons, for protection, or because he or she committed an offense against the detaining power.”

“An adaptive enemy will manipulate populations that are hostile to US intent by instigating mass civil disobedience, directing criminal activity, masking their operations in urban and other complex terrain, maintaining an indistinguishable presence through cultural anonymity and actively seeking the raditional sanctuary of protected areas as defined by the rules of land warfare,” reads the paper. “Commanders will use technology and conduct police intelligence operations to influence and control populations, evacuate detainees and, conclusively, transition rehabilitative and reconciliation operations to other functional agencies.”

On their own part, Infowars.com details the manual by writing, “We have exhaustively documented preparations for the mass internment of citizens inside America, but this is the first time that language concerning the re-education of detainees, in particular political activists, has cropped up in our research.”

Throughout the manual, the DoD outlines methods to go about detaining US military prisoners captured for both “battlefield and nonbattlefield confinement,” how to rehabilitate them to “ensure a successful return to society” and “psychological operations (PSYOP), practices and procedures to support I/R operations.”

Fifty-six pages into the manual, its authors explain the role of psychological operations officers regarding internment and resettlement, and explain that they will be responsible for developing methods designed “to pacify and acclimate detainees or DCs to accept U.S. I/R facility authority and regulations.” PSYOP officers, the manual adds, identify “malcontents, trained agitators, and political leaders within the facility who may try to organize resistance or create disturbances.”

The manual also demands that the PSYOP officers overseeing the detainment camps identify “political activists” for indoctrination.

“They always tell the media that it’s for disasters — domestically — or foreign wars and putting people in camps like Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Camp X-Ray in Cuba, but now more and more documents are coming out confirming what I’ve already had from sources and my researching into this,” radio host Alex Jones tells RT. According to Jones, he has seen the Pentagon refit old military bases into camps through the Emergency Centers Establishment Act “to prepare them for, quote, ‘emergencies,’” but there is way more than the government isn’t saying.

“I’ve been to the drills and I noticed that they were training with the role players to put American political dissidents in them,” Jones says about sending US civilians into the camps.

“I witnessed marines training to confiscate firearms on the West Coast and to put Americans both on the left and the right into camps and even segregate them according to their different political persuasions,” adds Jones.

Jones continues that Pentagon officials have informed him in the past about plans to re-educate political activists by armed enforcers, but the leaking of the elusive document confirms what he has been cautioned of in the past.

“Now we have an Army document that dovetails with huge increased spending, hiring tens of thousands of people in the military to specifically be internment camp officers.”

After combing through the 300-plus pages of 3-39.40, the website Infowars also addresses questions over whether or not the manual would make it so that the US government could send its own citizens to reeducation camps. In their own analysis, the site singles out certain sections of the manual that specifically discuss not just “The authority to approve resettlement such operations within US territories,” but how, also, “US citizens will be confined separately from detainees” by being booked and processed according to their Social Security number.

“Last time I checked, the United States Social Security Administration was not responsible for handing out social security numbers to people in Afghanistan or Iraq,” explains Infowar’s Paul Joseph Watson.

As if the text of the paper wasn’t enough, Watson breaks it down for those that are still skeptic that the American military would want to imprison its own citizens and install in them an “appreciation of US policies and actions.”

“The time for denial is over. People spent weeks arguing over the ‘indefinite detention’ provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, ignoring assertions by top scholars and legal experts that the kidnapping provisions did apply to U.S. citizens,” writes Watson. Sure enough, when US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law on December 31, he acknowledged that he had his own reservations about the provisions that provide for the indefinite detention of his own citizens without charge.

Now coupled with a leaked copy of the Internment and Resettlement Operations guide, it looks as if not only can the US imprison its own citizens that disagree with the government — but it has already laid out the rules.

“This isn’t just some contingency plan,” Alex Jones tells RT. “This is the manual.”

Border Patrol Targets Repeat Crossers
By ELLIOT SPAGAT Associated Press
SAN DIEGO May 8, 2012 (AP)

With border crossings at a 40-year low, the U.S. Border Patrol announced a new strategy Tuesday that targets repeat crossers and tries to find out why they keeping coming.

For nearly two decades, the Border Patrol has relied on a strategy that blanketed heavily trafficked corridors for illegal immigrants with agents, pushing migrants to more remote areas where they would presumably be easier to capture and discouraged from trying again.

"The jury, for me at least, is out on whether that's a solid strategy," Chief Mike Fisher told The Associated Press.

The new approach marks a more nuanced approach. Outlined in a 32-page document that took more than two years to develop, agents will now draw on intelligence to identify repeat crossers, said Fisher, who was expected to address a House subcommittee on the plan Tuesday.

"This whole risk-based approach is trying to figure out who are these people? What risk do they pose from a national security standpoint? The more we know, the better informed we are about identifying the threat and potential risk," he said in a recent interview.

Conditions on the border have changed dramatically since the last national strategy, putting pressure on the agency to adapt to a new landscape. An unprecedented hiring boom more than doubled the number of agents to 21,000 since 2004, accompanied by heavy spending on fencing, cameras, sensors and other gizmos.

At the same time, migration from Mexico has slowed significantly. Last year, the Border Patrol made 327,577 apprehensions on the Mexican border, down 80 percent from more than 1.6 million in 2000. It was the slowest year since 1971.

The Pew Hispanic Center reported last month that the largest wave of migrants from a single country in U.S. history had stopped increasing and may have reversed.

The new strategy — the Border Patrol's first in eight years — moves to halt a revolving-door policy of sending migrants back to Mexico without any punishment.

The Border Patrol now feels it has enough of a handle to begin imposing more serious consequences on almost everyone it catches from Texas' Rio Grande Valley to San Diego. In January, it expanded its "Consequence Delivery System" to the entire border, dividing border crossers into seven categories, ranging from first-time offenders to people with criminal records.

Punishments vary by region but there is a common thread: Simply turning people around after taking their fingerprints is the choice of last resort. Some, including children and the medically ill, will still get a free pass by being turned around at the nearest border crossing, but they will be few and far between.

The new strategy makes no mention of expanding fences and other physical barriers, a departure from the administration of President George W. Bush. Fisher said he not would rule out more fences but, "It's not going to be part of our mantra."

The strategy makes only brief mention of technology in the wake of a failed $1 billion program that was supposed to put a network of cameras, ground sensors and radars along the entire border. Fisher said the agency is moving more toward mobile surveillance like unmanned aerial vehicles and helicopters.

"We're still trying to understand what the capabilities are with all the technologies and the platforms," Fisher said. "I'm just trying to figure out what is the best suite on all this stuff."

The strategy makes it a top priority to ferret out corrupt agents, which has emerged as a growing threat as the agency has expanded.

It is the Border Patrol's third national strategy since 1994, when the agency poured resources into the San Diego and El Paso, Texas, areas. That effort pushed migrants to remote mountains and deserts and made Arizona the nation's busiest crossing for illegal crossings.

At the same time, migration from Mexico has slowed significantly. Last year, the Border Patrol made 327,577 apprehensions on the Mexican border, down 80 percent from more than 1.6 million in 2000. It was the slowest year since 1971.