There's A Lot of Paranoid Black Helicopters Crap Floating Around

Most of the time I can pretty quickly identify serious factual or logical flaws in it. For example, during the Bush Administration, various leftists were ranting and raving about how the government was setting up enormous concentration camps in Alaska, big enough to hold 2 million people. Within a couple years of Obama getting elected, I was seeing the same ranting and raving about these to the in-person concentration camps in Alaska. My first question was: if you are with the lock up 2 million political dissidents, why would you build the camps in Alaska? The sheer cost of flying that many dissidents to Alaska would be insane, and transporting them by train across Canada has its own set of absurd problems. If our government was actually doing something like this, with some nefarious motive, the place to set up such camps would be Wyoming or Nevada. There's plenty of unused federal land, and you could transport all the political dissidents to those places in a day or two by train.

There were people here in the Boise area hollering up a storm about how FEMA was setting up concentration camps just east of Boise to hold political prisoners. My response was always this: so, why haven't you taken some pictures of these FEMA concentration camps just east of Boise? It's not that far away.  Dead silence.

Here is something pretty scary that isn't quite so easy to demolish with factual or logical flaws, and I would like to hear from my readers what I am missing on this.  It purports to be a discussion of a U.S. Army Field Manual 3– 39.40 which is titled Internment and Resettlement Operations. (And yes, there is a US Army Field Manual by this number and title that I can see at the U.S. Army's website, but for some reason I am unable to download it.)  Most of it is material that would be appropriate in any theater of war where you have refugees, enemy combatants, unlawful combatants, and other persons who would need to be either housed or at least temporarily imprisoned. What changes this from a very detailed discussion of something that would be appropriate to overseas setting is Chapter 7 "Confinement of U.S. Military Prisoners."  On page 7 – 4:

IDENTIFICATION
7-16. Individual identification photographs are taken of all prisoners. The prisoner’s last name, first name, and middle initial are placed on the first line of a name board, and the prisoner’s social security number is placed on the second line. A prisoner registration number may be added on the third line. Two front and two profile pictures are taken of the prisoner. Fingerprints are obtained according to AR 190-47.

The Social Security number tells us that these are not foreigners, but American citizens and residents. If this chapter is about confinement of US military prisoners, meaning members of the US military, then wouldn't they be using the soldiers military ID number, not a social security number?  I'm absolutely sure that all members of the US military are fingerprinted on induction. Why would they need to fingerprint them again?

UPDATE: A number of readers tell me that Social Security Number was, until 2011, the military ID number, and this manual is dated 2010.  Fingerprinting makes sense to verify identity.  Perhaps this isn't quite as bizarre as it seems.