91 - Washington, D.C.
The final count on detainees from the March was around 420,000 people. Seventy-four people taken into custody from the speakers’ platform were driven to nearby Bolling Air Force Base, near Reagan National Airport, and flown to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. The assumption was that the people on the platform were organizers who could provide information about the coordination between the March and the bombing of the Washington Monument, and about the missing atomic bomb.
On arrival at Cape Cod, they were turned over to the Echo Team interrogators.
President Quaid’s decision to detain the rest of the people who attended the March was more ephemeral, a gut reaction to the national humiliation he personally witnessed through the Oval Office windows. Control of the situation continued to slip into the hands of the terrorists, he thought. Whoever their leaders were, he believed, they were likely to be among those people who chose to ignore his warning about attending the March.
And even if the people taken into custody from the National Mall were not yet terrorists themselves, they were all what Quaid viewed as the hard core of the Jewish movement in the United States. They would likely form the core for future terrorist sleeper cells. It was too risky to let those people roam the country freely, the President concluded. They could have gone home before the March, he thought. It was their choice to remain. The ones we’ve got in custody, he concluded, are “the worst of the worst.”
His advisors agreed with him.
What to do with 420,000 detainees presented an immediate problem. The Cape Cod facility, even were it crowded far beyond its holding capacity, could take no more than 25,000 people. Neither the Federal Bureau of Prisons nor the Immigration Service, two agencies holding the majority of federal detainees, could cope with an immediate population increase of that magnitude. Although the United States held more than 1.3 million people behind bars, most were in state prisons scattered around the country. Only slightly more than 100,000 people were held in federal prisons.
Housing four times the present federal prison population was beyond the ability of the Bureau of Prisons. Besides, the President was emphatic that these people were military detainees, not civilian criminal defendants. He wanted them held by the military.
The President held a Cabinet meeting on the Monday morning following the March. The first issue was what to do with the hundreds of thousands of new enemy combatant detainees. Harry Wade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, leaped at this problem.
“We’re clearing out all our mobile home parks from the hurricanes,” he said. “Take the trailers. String some razor wire around ‘em, throw up some guard towers and you’re all set.”
The last Hurricane Jack and Jill refugees were in the process of moving out of FEMA-provided travel trailers and emergency mobile home parks throughout Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
“I can stuff 400,000 people into these trailer parks,” Wade told the President. “We’ve had more than 200,000 living in them for the past ten months, and they were comfortable. No problem doubling up. For the most part people have only been sleeping in bedrooms. Bring in a couple of hundred thousand cots - no problem finding ‘em - and we’ll have people sleeping in the living rooms, too.”
The camps were operating within days of the toppling of the Washington Monument. The last of the detainees arrived from Washington six days after they were taken into custody.
Congress responded to the President’s request for emergency legislation by the Tuesday following the March. An amendment was added to a long-debated Social Security cost-of-living increase bill, legislation considered certain to pass both houses of Congress. The amendment language was lifted virtually verbatim from what was called the Graham-Levin Amendment, which the Bush administration used to strip Guantanamo Bay detainees of their access to U.S. courts. The Amendment was straightforward: “No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of ...” and here the description of Guantanamo Bay detainees was removed and replaced with the following, “any person identified as an enemy combatant by the President, who is detained by the military authorities of the United States at the orders of the President.” As with the original legislation, the new bill stripped federal court jurisdiction of any and every claim of any kind brought “by or on behalf of an enemy combatant.” President Quaid signed the legislation in a televised ceremony late Tuesday afternoon.
The bill, he said, “unties my hands and allows me to deal firmly with the greatest threat to face the nation since the British invaded Washington and burned the White House in the War of 1812.”
With that signature, 420,000 American Jews were labeled “enemy combatants,” placed behind barbed wire and stripped of every legal right they had, or, to be strictly accurate, they retained their rights but they were barred from legal representation or any means of communicating with a judge to complain about what was being done to them. Their trailer camps might as well have been in Antarctica, or Cuba, for all the rights they had.