The federal government is building ‘re-education camps’ for political dissidents and journalists according to secret FBI documents leaked to the press.

The documents show a task force between the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whose mission is to monitor American citizens it deems to be a threat to national security, political activists and members of the media in particular.

According to the documents, a member of the media is defined as one who uses “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

“The plan’s been on the books since the Nixon administration,” said a source within the FBI who wishes to remain anonymous. “It was shelved after President Nixon called it ‘too paranoid and un-American,’ but someone restarted it in the last several years.”

“The basic principle of the camps is to isolate any citizen who might cause trouble and fix them before they do anything we might regret. It’s essentially cutting off the rotten branch before it ruins the whole
tree.”

The plan calls for a large scale camp in Nevada with smaller camps in undisclosed locations.

Blueprints of the main camp show a large structure labeled ‘classrooms’ in the center with a ‘holding facility’ for the prisoners nearby and a barracks for guards. Two fences with barbed wire line the perimeter and guard towers are located at intervals of 45 feet.

An analysis of the blueprints show that the camp is similar in size and basic design as the internment camps used to imprison Japanese Americans during World War II.

The camps are scheduled to be completed in late 2012 or early 2013.

PHOTO: DonkeyHotey, Flickr Creative Commons