Conspiracy speculation swirls around FEMA camp in Oklahoma

I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp - Above Top Secret Conspiracy Community :

"Jesse Jackson was right when he said 'refugees' was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It's not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees."

I got this link from Third World County a blog recommended by a mutual friend in SC. I've read the original post and about five pages of the furious debate it has stirred up on Above Top Secret - a rather fevered website. Read the original post for yourself if you are interested. Here are some of my thoughts on it and some of the comments it has inspired.

Just because this church camp is literally in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean FEMA has something to hide. After all, they are in rather desperate need of facilities and will have to work with most any situation offered to them.

The fact that FEMA got the paperwork done and recruited state police, firefighters, paramedics, etc. in just a few days is not at all unusual. This is the thing FEMA exists to do. The agency has come under fire for not taking control of N.O., but that is not their job. Administering contracts and spending money is what they train for and what they do well.

The concern about unequal treatment leading to riots may be overdone, or not. No one seems to know if the persons slated for this camp are being brought from other temporary shelters or whether they are to be the holdouts that the mayor plans to remove by force. In the latter case, in addition to being mostly poor folks, there will be a lot of angry people and a higher than normal proportion of criminals and druggies. This is not a dig at the people of N.O., but an informed guess about the self-selection that caused these persons not to evacuate themselves before the storm.

The questioning of the quarantine business may be more serious, See my recent post headed "Mandatory evacuation - how dangerous is the water?"

For the most part, I expect the dire speculations about this to be as well founded as the scare that went around several years ago that the Post Office was setting up secure facilities to handle distribution of ration coupons. But anytime you have a system run by bureaucrats according to a rule book, you will have a lot of unhappy people. Especially the bureaucrats themselves as these are the conditions they endure four days a week for thirty years.