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OB OY Le VEN? the possibility that detention centres could be used to detain a” American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the US military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration’ detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guanténamo." Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history, going back to fears in the 1970s of a national uprising by black militants. Last September, NORTHCOM conducted its highly classified Granite Shadow exercise in Washington, DC. As William Arkin reported in the Washington Post [25 September], "...Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control." (Source: by Peter Dale Scott, Pacific News, 1 Feb 2006, via http://www.ocnus.net/ artman/publish/printer_22660.shtml) Mo than four million people have died in central Africa in a war over coltan (short for columbite-tantalite), a heat- resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and other high-tech electronics. Tantalum extracted from the ore is used to make tantalum capacitors—tiny components that are essential in managing the flow of current in electronic devices. Eighty per cent of the world's coltan is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This mountainous jungle area is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed "Africa's First World War", pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighbouring countries and numerous armed factions. The victims are mostly civilians; starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands, and the fighting has displaced two million people from their homes. Often dismissed as just an ethnic war, the conflict is actually a battle over the natural resources that are sought by foreign corporations: diamonds, tin, copper, gold and, most of all, coltan. At stake for the heavily armed militias and governments is a cut of the high-tech boom of the 1990s, in which the price of coltan skyrocketed to nearly $300 per pound. (Source: Earth First! Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, Samhain/Yule 2005, website http://www. earthfirstjournal.org) PREPARING FOR MARTIAL LAW? Halliburton subsidiary has just received a US$385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to provide "temporary detention and processing capabilities". The contract—announced on 24 January by the engineering and construction firm KBR—calls for preparing for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies, such as "a natural disaster". The release offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these facilities, or when. But almost no paper so far has discussed CALL FOR PREHISTORY CHRONOLOGY TO BE REVISED an Smail, a mediaevalist who joined Harvard's history department in January, is a time revolutionary. Historians, Professor Smail says, are in thrall to a chronology of the human race that is now embarrassingly out of date. He wants to move the starting date in introductory history courses back 100,000 years or so. According to the history books, civilisation as we know it had its first stirrings in the Fertile Crescent around 4000 to 6000 BC. But as Smail points out in an article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, when you consider recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries in archaeology, anthropology and biology—the finding that all humankind can be traced to Africa, for > Cc = O wo ED ae 6 = NEXUS APRIL — MAY 2006 HIGH-TECH GENOCIDE "The oil crisis is really starting to suck." www.nexusmagazine.com