First off, vigilance is always a good thing. I have no doubt people exist in positions of power who would like nothing better than to execute a plan that would round up "enemies of the state" and make them disappear forever, or at the very least until they've been "reeducated." I don't totally discount what's being warned here. I do, however, find much of the current evidence involving actual locations to be, as the previous respondent said, lacking credibility.
The reason is singular. The first "camp" on the list is a trumped up non-story that *no one* who uses it as evidence has bothered, in the least, to verify. That camp is "Falls Creek."
I know something about this "camp" because people in my family visit there yearly as administrators for their own church when they use cabins at the place for their youth groups. I went there a couple times a child, which isn't entirely relevant in this context, but I note this information to indicate I'm personally familiar with the area, which will be relevant in a moment. The source for the Falls Creek location being used as a "concentration" camp in the pejorative, Holocaust-invoking sense comes from one family, more precisely one person who apparently spoke for the family, dialog included. Yes, you can find multiple links to the same information. It's all from one person. It's all from one incident. And if you read through the account carefully, the reasons for the diatribe against the Falls Creek "camp" become more clear, at least to me, based on my experience with it and the people who call the camp their own.
The following section is illustrative
He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already inquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.
My son looks at me and mumbles "Welcome to Krakow."
My mother then asked if the churches would be allowed to come to their cabin and conduct services if the occupants wanted to attend. The response was "No ma'am. You don't understand. Your church no longer owns this building. This building is now owned by FEMA and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. They have it for the next 5 months." This scares my mother who asks "Do you mean they have leased it?" The man replies, "Yes, ma'am...lock, stock and barrel. They have taken over everything that pertains to this facility for the next 5 months."
If you read through the inflammatory rhetoric and words placed in other people's mouths, what you have here is a woman irritated that residents won't be allowed to leave to visit area churches. To make matters worse, in her view, those churches can't even send people to the cabins to indoctrinate the essentially captive residents with her own version of Protestantism.
Falls Creek is a church camp, a Baptist church camp, more precisely a Southern Baptist church camp. The people who use it or who are associated with it feel a sense of entitlement about it. If you're there, you're there to receive The Word, and The Word comes from Baptist ministers. The notion that the locale could be used for any purpose that did not include religious indoctrination was (and is) a form of heresy to some people. And I might add here that this has come up before in other contexts. Usage of Falls Creek has regularly been limited to those people or groups who agree to allowing the Baptist Church to use their presence as an opportunity to spread The Word.
The individual who made this report also complains a lot about things that quite frankly made a lot of sense in the context of the circumstances. She wanted to deliver food and clothes. That, in and of itself, is a wonderful thing. But what she was in the process of doing was delivering food and clothing to specific cabins, "her" cabins, and the officials present quickly and correctly nixed that idea entirely. She even allowed them to offer a bit of truth about it through her parsing of their words, although of course she uses those words to damn them rather than point out the logic because apparently she couldn't see the logic herself. In the situation that would have been present had Katrina evacuees been taken to Falls Creek, giving one cabin steaks and bottled water while another lives off SPAM and the local, sulfurous water is idiotic. So, they told her "no," you can't pick and choose who you give stuff to.
And the bit about the residents not being allowed to leave? That too made sense under the circumstances. The residents would have been allowed to leave, but they weren't going to be allowed to come and go on a regular basis. The area is remote. There's actual dangerous wildlife in the nearby area. The nearest towns are small and would have been completely unable to support a sudden influx of people with no means of support. Campers who go there with their churches in the summer are subject to the same restrictions. They can't leave camp, and they can't go the nearest towns because the administrators can't ensure their safety once they are outside the camp itself. (This, btw, is one of the reasons Falls Creek didn't end up being used.)
I'll ask one simple question. If this person's conclusions about the camp were true, why on earth was she allowed access for an entire day, and why oh why did they let her take so many pictures?
In short, this individual's account of a "concentration camp" was mostly, imo, about her own ego. She got mad because she wasn't allowed to control the situation. She probably got snotty with officials and police, which in turn caused them to get snotty with her. And, in her anger and after being involved in an atmosphere of mutual snottiness, she went off on a rant.
What this has to do with the rest of the evidence being used is really not much, and I'll grant that. But the point, for me, is that this is the one so-called camp about which I do know quite a bit whereas I know nothing of the others. What's the real story of those other camps? The hysteria surrounding Falls Creek and the fact that so many accepted the story of one, basically unknown individual so uncritically makes me question the lot.
I do hope you accept this commentary in the spirit intended. I'm not here to be a "debunker," just a dose of reality regarding one story that seems to have achieved the status of something like an urban legend. The camps may very well being going up all around us. My point, though, is that if they are, I very much doubt we're going to be able to dig up such clear evidence of it.
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