Thought. Let's suppose there is a terrorist attack involving CBW. Or maybe not terrorist, maybe something natural along the lines of Ebola.

Now the issue is not necessarily getting the terrorists in the camp, the issue is more likely to be getting civvies in there, to somewhere surrounded by lots of heavily-armed soldiers. In mediaeval terms, think bailey wall or curtain wall - sacrifice the surrounding area to the attackers and pull the civvies inside. If they decide not to do it this way, there still is a problem of transporting contaminated people (and corpses) to somewhere so everyone else isn't infected. Camps are equally valid for both.

And the issue is not how many spaces there are, the problem is getting people there *fast*. Hence you need many distributed around the country.

And as for secrecy, think of how the IRA ran its bombing campaigns in NI. The classic move (repeated often) was to plant one bomb somewhere, and then plant several more bombs in the surrounding area in places where civvies were likely to be evacuated to, so that they'd kill as many people as possible. So the last thing you want is to evacuate people to a camp, only to find your friendly neighbourhood terrorist has planted a nice big batch of chemicals in there.

Or suppose they aren't refugee camps at all. Armies need places to train, and special forces will likely be training in small groups somewhere that's similar to where they're going. It may be easier not to shout "Hey folks, the Marines are in town!", you think?

Re the mass arrests of criminals, it takes *manpower* to go round arresting people. Most of that manpower is usually pounding the streets or on traffic patrol. But for a day, you can afford to pull people off "regular" policing to blitz the outstanding cases that they haven't had time to deal with. If there were enough police, maybe they wouldn't *have* to make arresting criminals a special event! But too many police looks like Nazi Germany, and some paranoid people start rumours going, especially on the Internet... ;-)

If you're determined to quote Nazi Germany, I'll remind you what happened there. Jews, gypsies etc were rounded up, and none of their neighbours spoke out. These people had committed no crime, they just happened to be of the wrong race. Now this has already happened in the US, during WW2, to Japanese-Americans. But until the police start rounding up Muslims in your area, things don't seem to be anything like that. Guantanamo Bay is something else, of course - very very dodgy. But not Americans in there.

Graham.