Is it Believable?

 

Natsu Taylor Saito, Indefinite Detention, Colonialism, and Settler Prerogative in the United States, in Special Issue: Genealogies of Indefinite Detention, 30(1) Social & Legal Studies 32–65 (February 2021):

Tens of thousands of civilians in northern and border states were interned and many more banished without any specific showing of disloyalty. In one Missouri county, for example, by late 1863 only 600 people remained out of a population of 10,000 (Brownlie, 1958: 126, 163). Congress subsequently authorized suspension of the writ in 1871 to help suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction South, in 1902 to facilitate the colonial conquest of the Philippines, and in 1900 to preclude threats to the annexation of Hawai‘i (Klein and Wittes, 2011: 120–122). 

Why tell us that the population was reduced from 10,000 to 600 unless the bulk of that decrease arose in connection with habeas-related, internment-related, and/or banishment-related policies? And if this meaning was intended by the author, is it believable?

Seth

Seth Barrett Tillman, Is it Believable, New Reform Club (April 5, 2021, 2:23 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2021/04/is-it-believable.html>;