Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Instead of a serious government relief operation in New Orleans, the forces that most rapidly mobilized were the Republican-connected corporations—many of the very companies making a killing off the Iraq occupation. To further aid these companies, President Bush repealed the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which required federal contractors to pay a prevailing wage to its workers 26(he was later forced to restore it). This enabled the companies to pay bottom dollar to workers while reaping massive corporate profits. In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, Vice President Dick Cheney’s “former” company Halliburton/KBR (the greatest corporate beneficiary of the Iraq War) was given $30 million to “assess pumps and infrastructure in the city and construct a facility to support recovery efforts,” 27while the Shaw Group (which was paid more than $135 million in Iraq) was given more than $700 million in Katrina contracts. 28Both companies were represented by a lobbyist named Joseph Allbaugh, who just happened to be President Bush’s former campaign manager and the former head of FEMA. 29Eventually, the government significantly raised the ceilings of its contracts to Republican-connected firms: $950 million for Shaw, $1.4 billion for Fluor, and $575 million for Bechtel. 30Fluor’s Katrina project was run by Alan Boeckmann, the same manager who was in charge of the company’s Iraq contracts. “Our rebuilding work in Iraq is slowing down,” he told Reuters. “And this has made some people available to respond to our work in Louisiana.” 31

Some began referring to New Orleans and the surrounding disaster area as “Baghdad on the Bayou.” As The Nation ’s Christian Parenti reported in a dispatch from New Orleans, “It seems the rescue effort is turning into an urban war game: An imaginary domestic version of the total victory that eludes America in Baghdad will be imposed here, on New Orleans. It’s almost as if the Tigris—rather than the Mississippi—had flooded the city. The place feels like a sick theme park—Macho World—where cops, mercenaries, journalists and weird volunteers of all sorts are playing out a relatively safe version of their militaristic fantasies about Armageddon and the cleansing iron fist.” 32With U.S. forces spread thinly across multiple war zones, the landscape was ripe for some major-league disaster profiteering by the rapidly expanding world of private security and military companies.

Blackwater was hardly the only mercenary firm to take advantage of the tremendous profit opportunity in the great disaster. As business leaders and government officials talked openly of changing the demographics of one of America’s most culturally vibrant cities, mercenaries from companies like DynCorp, American Security Group, Wackenhut, Kroll, and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) fanned out to guard private businesses and homes, as well as government projects and institutions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235 and would continue to climb as the weeks passed. Some, like Blackwater, were under federal contract. Others were hired by the wealthy elite, like F. Patrick Quinn III, who brought in private security to guard his $3 million private estate and his luxury hotels, which were under consideration for a lucrative federal contract to house FEMA workers. 33

A possibly deadly incident involving hired guns underscored the dangers of private forces policing American streets. One private security guard said that on his second night in New Orleans, where he was on contract with a wealthy business owner, he was traveling with a heavily armed security detail en route to pick up one of his boss’s associates and escort him through the chaotic city. The security guard said their convoy came under fire from “black gangbangers” on an overpass near the poor Ninth Ward neighborhood. “At the time, I was on the phone with my business partner,” he recalled. “I dropped the phone and returned fire.” The guard said he and his men were armed with AR-15s and Glocks and that they unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. “After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.”

Then, he said, “the Army showed up, yelling at us and thinking we were the enemy. We explained to them that we were security. I told them what had happened and they didn’t even care. They just left.” Five minutes later, the guard said, Louisiana state troopers arrived on the scene, inquired about the incident, and then asked him for directions on “how they could get out of the city.” The guard said that no one ever asked him for any details of the incident and no report was ever made. “One thing about security,” he said, “is that we all coordinate with each other—one family.” That coordination apparently did not include the offices of the Secretaries of State in Louisiana and Alabama, which said they had no record of his company.

A few miles away from the French Quarter, another wealthy New Orleans businessman, James Reiss, who served in Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration as chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority, brought in some heavy guns to guard the elite gated community of Audubon Place: Israeli mercenaries dressed in black and armed with M- 16s. Reiss, who flew the men in by helicopter, told the Wall Street Journal, “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out.” 34Two Israelis patrolling the gates outside Audubon said they had served as professional soldiers in the Israeli military, and one boasted of having participated in the invasion of Lebanon. “We have been fighting the Palestinians all day, every day, our whole lives,” one of them declared. “Here in New Orleans, we are not guarding from terrorists.” 35Then, tapping on his machine gun, he said, “Most Americans, when they see these things, that’s enough to scare them.”

The men said they worked for Instinctive Shooting International, which described its employees as “veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or ‘Shin Beit’), Other restricted intelligence agencies.” 36The company was formed in 1993. Its Web site profile said: “Our up-to-date services meet the challenging needs for Homeland Security preparedness and overseas combat procedures and readiness. ISI is currently an approved vendor by the US Government to supply Homeland Security services.”

As countless guns poured into New Orleans, there was a distinct absence of relief operations, food, and water distribution. The presence of the mercenaries raised another important question: given the enormous presence in New Orleans of National Guard, U.S. Army, U.S. Border Patrol, local police from around the country, and practically every other government agency with badges, why were private security companies needed, particularly to guard federal projects? “I don’t know that there are any terrorist attacks being planned against FEMA offices in the Gulf Coast,” said Illinois Senator Barack Obama. “It strikes me, with all the National Guardsmen that we’ve got down there, with a bunch of local law enforcement that are back on the job and putting their lives back together again, that that may not be the best use of money.” 37Shortly after The Nation exposed Blackwater’s operations in New Orleans, Representative Schakowsky and a handful of other Congress members raised questions about the scandal. They entered the reporting into the Congressional Record during hearings on Katrina in late September 2005 and cited it in letters to DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, who then began an inquiry. 38In letters to Congressional offices in February 2006, Skinner defended the Blackwater deal, asserting that it was “appropriate” for the government to contract with the company. Skinner admitted that “the ongoing cost of the contract… is clearly very high” and then quietly dropped a bombshell: “It is expected that FEMA will require guard services on a relatively long-term basis (two to five years).” 39