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pecuniumI volunteered to go to Louisiana.
I volunteered more than a week ago.
I am not, all things considered, surprised that I've not been called up. The problems (in all the states affected) are far away, logistics are complex and it won't be cheap to send a bunch of Calif. Guardsmen to the places hardest hit. The 82nd is already being paid, and they have lift, so shipping them in seems reasonable.
But this (and another hat tip to Making Light who are going gangbusters on Katrina) apalls me.
Blackwater, yes Blackwater, the contractors/mercenaries who are famous for losing four guys in Iraq, is, apparently, patrolling New Orleans.
For corroboration, all one need do is visit their web site.
An extract from the piece linked to above
How do you know that we're finally taking the situation in New Orleans seriously? We're sending in the private mercenaries -- the very same folks we've called on to do the dirty work in Iraq. Reports are beginning to surface that New Orleans and environs are crawling with armed private commandos from Blackwater USA, the North Carolina-based security firm that has risen to prominence with its highly visible role in Iraq. The slide show at the top of this entry comes from their Web site.
A Georgia-based doctor and military veteran who blogs under the name Otter has been down in the disaster zone the last few days, and he has seen the private Blackwater security forces everywhere. He wrote yesterday from a police precinct house in New Orleans:
Blackwater Security is here--clean, well-equipped, and armed to the teeth.
The New York Times has seen them too:
No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.
But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.
The company acknowledged yesterday that it has about 150 people in New Orleans so far:
I'd like to think a lot of things, that this will cost less than twice that many guardsmen from other states, that these guys are actually trained (really trained, like with POST Certification and the like) in police procedure. That they have good weapons discipline and restrictive rules of engagagement. But from what I've heard, and read, of them, I don't really have a lot of hope for that.
They actively sought this out too, and FEMA, or someone, decided they were a better fit for the job than guardsmen.
WTF?
(Edited to add) looking around it seems these are being paid privately, to protect the wealthy, and businesses. If this is the case (private money) I'm not sure how I feel about the passage which gives them the right (as civilian employees of people who are supposed to be evacuating) to stroll around with 1: guns and 2: no direct governtmental oversight. Call me funny, but being allowed to hire one's private army, a la the barons of medieval Europe (with liveried servants) strikes me as a less than ideal circumstance.
I volunteered more than a week ago.
I am not, all things considered, surprised that I've not been called up. The problems (in all the states affected) are far away, logistics are complex and it won't be cheap to send a bunch of Calif. Guardsmen to the places hardest hit. The 82nd is already being paid, and they have lift, so shipping them in seems reasonable.
But this (and another hat tip to Making Light who are going gangbusters on Katrina) apalls me.
Blackwater, yes Blackwater, the contractors/mercenaries who are famous for losing four guys in Iraq, is, apparently, patrolling New Orleans.
For corroboration, all one need do is visit their web site.
An extract from the piece linked to above
How do you know that we're finally taking the situation in New Orleans seriously? We're sending in the private mercenaries -- the very same folks we've called on to do the dirty work in Iraq. Reports are beginning to surface that New Orleans and environs are crawling with armed private commandos from Blackwater USA, the North Carolina-based security firm that has risen to prominence with its highly visible role in Iraq. The slide show at the top of this entry comes from their Web site.
A Georgia-based doctor and military veteran who blogs under the name Otter has been down in the disaster zone the last few days, and he has seen the private Blackwater security forces everywhere. He wrote yesterday from a police precinct house in New Orleans:
Blackwater Security is here--clean, well-equipped, and armed to the teeth.
The New York Times has seen them too:
No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.
But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.
The company acknowledged yesterday that it has about 150 people in New Orleans so far:
I'd like to think a lot of things, that this will cost less than twice that many guardsmen from other states, that these guys are actually trained (really trained, like with POST Certification and the like) in police procedure. That they have good weapons discipline and restrictive rules of engagagement. But from what I've heard, and read, of them, I don't really have a lot of hope for that.
They actively sought this out too, and FEMA, or someone, decided they were a better fit for the job than guardsmen.
WTF?
(Edited to add) looking around it seems these are being paid privately, to protect the wealthy, and businesses. If this is the case (private money) I'm not sure how I feel about the passage which gives them the right (as civilian employees of people who are supposed to be evacuating) to stroll around with 1: guns and 2: no direct governtmental oversight. Call me funny, but being allowed to hire one's private army, a la the barons of medieval Europe (with liveried servants) strikes me as a less than ideal circumstance.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 05:38 am (UTC)TK
Surprised? Not...
Date: 2005-09-09 06:24 am (UTC)It's just like Bush's idea of health care: If you can afford to pay you have the right to be sick.
Need rescuing? Well, dammit, ya'll should've saved yer petra' dollars like the rest of us. Think Trent Lott sat on his ass waitin' for FEMA? Hell, even mah momma knows them poor folks is better off now, anyhow. The Superdome is like a Hilton to 'em. Heh-heh-heh.
The "Daily Show" has been spot on this week.
So this rumor too is confirmed.
Date: 2005-09-09 07:49 am (UTC)But I had no doubt of it, any more than I had any more doubt of what sort of "contracters" the Fallujah Four were and what sort of wetwork they had been up to in Iraq, the instant I heard the vague and shifting news on NPR, the telegraphed reports from our Raj of a savage mob of natives attacking innocent relief workers and hanging them high -- and I was right.
As right as I was on September 12, 2005, when the FBI, CIA, and MI5 did not want to hear any of the links of circumstantial geopolitical evidence that it was Osama, not Saddam, who had committed the atrocities, which I had gathered (yes, I tried to contact the British as well) and that we - or rather, our leaders were determined we were to go to war with Iraq on a pretext - as my contention
--Why would they want them in Orleans so promptly?
--At a guess, because there are probably more snipers in Blackwater than in your average NG unit.
Where do you think the snipers - now confirmed - who drove the hospital workers inside when they tried to evacuate came from?
When I first heard the talk of "sniper fire" I was skeptical, because of reading WWI after-action reports on Louvain and WWII reports in the Pacific, and how these things get when people are jumpy and convinced that the citizens of a city are willing to fire on them, with or without good reason. And did not trust that most people who have not seen combat would know real sniper fire from gunshots down the block, or a car backfire.
But now, if the EMTs were driven inside yet no one was killed by it - then this says to me that yes, it was snipers, and this was deliberate, the UnEvacuation as Echidne calls it was being very efficient, and creating Atrocity stories for the media death machine - and why would, and where would they come from, but mostly again why would New Orleans citizens be snipers sniping at their own hospitals?
Looked at that way, it makes no sense. Therefore there must be another explanation: either you say that the [blacks] poor NOLAs are evil and insane, or someone else was in the city laying down suppressing fire around the hospital.
The conclusion is left as an excercise to the historically-informed reader.
My repeated offer of my skills as a civilian geopolitical analyst, through several parallel channels, was never taken up by our govt or the UK's, despite the fact that I was proven right in my contention that the assassins who killed Massoud thereby making it difficult for the US to respond at once, if we had wanted to, (which we clearly didn't, and why I at least wasn't surprised that we would fail the Reconstruction of Afghanistan again) when Taliban materials were captured, talking about the plot; this lede was buried deep, the only mention in the SLCM a throwaway with no context or drawing-out of chronology on NPR.
Remember all the rumored allegations that our side was held back from capturing Bin Laden in the fights along Pakistan, in strategies and actions that made no sense to those on the ground? Any internal connections to reexamine that with? If the PTB are playing both ends against middle, and Bin Ladin "never left," just like the protagonist of Ronin, then the pieces do make sense, just evil sense.
[cont]
Date: 2005-09-09 07:55 am (UTC)The one I was able to reach with and convince of this happening, in 2002, withdrew their unhappy-but-persuaded support for us to attack Saddam - when my careful logistical arguments showing how Iraq had not the capacity to attack us in any conventional way, and how a conventional war against them would not protect us from another 9/11-style attack, did not convince.
Why did they not convince? Because those I was trying to convince had no confidence in my assessment of logistical and tactical let alone strategic matters, because I was not in the military; but when they saw that Bush's purported strong moral character was a broken reed, they both ceased to trust him and took my own authority more seriously.
It is not that the American peasants are stupid and long for war, or that they are incapable of rational thought.
It is that it all boils down in the end to a matter of trust.
There is nothing harder than believing that your world is not as you had thought it - it took me years to be willing to consider the evidence that the Asteroid Theory of Extinction might be valid, because the connotations of that were too horrible, too dreadful to accept: if a single head-on collision with a falling space rock could wipe out all life bigger than a squirrel, because it did, then it could happen to us without warning or possibility of escape.
Who can bear this?
Who can bear the thought that our own provincial and imperial leadres have betrayed us, sold us all "down the River" together, and laughed as they did so?
The Senate and the People of Rome have been kept in the dark and fed lies for so long that they do not know how to believe the truth when the door of the Cave is smashed open by the winds and the daylight pours in, blinding them.
Rome fell from within, because the plutocracy took all the land and bribed the senate to make/enforce the rules in their favor, one law for rich another for poor, and took the jobs away from the freedmen [who had now nothing to do except live on government-subsidized cheap food and fuel in the cities, who were killed by the massive army for daring to protest in the streets, who were allowed to play at voting for this plutocrat-owned Senator or that, while the few aristos who took their obligations seriously came to sticky ends, death or disgrace] and gave them to slaves ["insourcing"] and then towards the end to foreign immigrants, encouraged to come in and settle when economic hardship drove them out of their own original homelands - and then put them in the military to maintain the empire, and treated their families like such dirt that they eventually rebelled - and while rebelling, did so because they still believed, like Ricimer, like the provincials who kept up the traditions even after the center had not held, in the Ideals that their leaders had preached without practicing or even believing.
The plutocracy has Minitrued this story over the centuries into its opposite: lazy free citizens chose to sit around on their asses eating free food and watching reality TV instead of exercising their power as members of a democracy, and didn't have the guts to join the military that was so needed to protect them and the Peace of the Empire - so their leaders were forced to bring in foreigners to do the day-to-day work and fight in the army, but the foreigners were treacherous and deadly and like a cancer took over the empire from the selfish and unvigilant citizens, who deserved their fate for allowing this.
[cont again]
Date: 2005-09-09 07:58 am (UTC)Here is the operative question, for someone who is not a poor sick mill girl who must put in a full day's work and has not the leisure to reasearch nor the strenght to stay up all night now - when were the levees defunded, and in what order? Does it correspond to the increased insurgency and the growing revelation that their ideologues with bags of cash couldn't turn Iraq into a Corpo paradise? Or does it predate that?
IOW, did they only turn to Gulf Coast oil when it became clear that the flowers and oil-barrels werent forthcoming and that KBR wasn't to be able to rebuild, nor the empire to suppress the rebels, help of Blackwater or not, even if Washington ordered a city sacked in retaliation for the death of four mercenaries they would not be intimidated--?
Or was this whole thing a sleight-of-hand from the start, the aim all along from the start, set into gear with the dismantling of Clinton's anti-terrorist intel units under Clarke and reconfiguring into study teams, and the ignoring of every warning up to and including the Aug. 6 PDB, LIHOP I, and then 9/11 and the resisted investigation which turned into a coverup - all of it, a camouflage to cover the real aims all along, of annexing the neighboring province's adjacent, rich, but inefficient-due-to-aging-infrastructure oil wells to supplement the failing ones in TX and OK?
And that itself the secondary aim, the primary one being the overthrow of the New Deal, of all socialist helps for the working poor, and consolidation of power into an effective one-party state, in a state of Forever War to occupy the hoi polloi--?
I do not know. I don't have that level of access, and I can't do the digging and dates right now or hunt for the names/connections, in the state I am in.
This is the successful conclusion of the Corpo coup that General Smedley Butler thwarted, and which Congress covered up, the names of the principal conspirators that he gave in closed-door testimony that has never been released yet. Then, the servile, kool kids press dismissed him as a wild-eyed conspiracist, because the idea of bankers and captains of industry working with the American Legion to effect a fascist take over here, in America, was too incredible, or too horrible, to contemplate. --Butler ended up writing for socialist magazines, because the mainstream media who had fawned on him as a bemedaled hero, would not listen.
CIA-CACI-Caesar crosses the Rubicon, and the educated, wealthy, superior Senators dither and yammer unable to believe their lying eyes, revealing their hermetically-sealed Beltway mindset and the utter uselessness of Lawful Good, which stands idly by obeying orders to not go in and rescue the victims while the Chaotic Paladins steal and forge IDs and do what they can with what little they have, and rescue a few from the Rape of Gondor.
High crimes and misdemeanors - what is higher than betraying a nation for the good of the ruling elite?
[concluded]
Date: 2005-09-09 08:04 am (UTC)Yesterday morning there was talk on NPR of whether the Games should go on - the Saints to play in this season, and how passionate the survivors were in saying yes, and how to the astonishment of the media mouths they were buoyed by the appearance of their gladiator-heroes, who always lose, and are more loved for that, in their camps to bring aid and comfort. The Saints have connections in Texas, where their owner is from, as well.
--I now understand why Blue and Green were fighting words, in the Eastern Empire, and a horse race the occasion for a political rally and a massacre by government troops.
I pray whatever powers there may be above or on or under, that it does not come to that. But we who have seen bear witness: there is nothing new under the sun.
The senatorial class of Texas may well have brought its doom in through the front gate, as one rabble of barbaroi is united with the disorganized - deliberately disorganized, disenfranchised, kept paraliterate with generations of minitrued schoolbooks - population of freedmen and citizens and virtual-slaves, already there.
Rome did not Fall in a day.
Re: So this rumor too is confirmed.
Date: 2005-09-09 08:24 am (UTC)I can easily imagine newspaper and television reporters calling this "sniper fire."
K.
Yes, that was a *very* plausible explanation
Date: 2005-09-09 12:18 pm (UTC)Only it turned out that the plausible explanations, while valuable for challenging the propaganda monster, were irrelevant because he had only been wearing a denim jacket and not running at all.
The possibilities were, in order of probability (as I thought then) w/r/t the "gunfire at rescue helicopters/hospitals" 1) not really anyone shooting, a made up atrocity story at worst, stupid nerves at best, 2) distant gunshots being mistook for firing at, 3) people shooting to draw attention for rescue, not having flare guns, 4) people really shooting at the hospital/rescue vehicles on purpose.
But now there are reports of medics saying they were driven inside by suppressing fire. Which means that since 4 is not the most probable, there has to be some motivaton. Leaving with 1) Evil Insane NOLans, and 2) somebody else evil doing it for a non-insane tho' still evil reason.
Given that the CIA has a history of inserting agents disguised as locals to wreak havoc (see Cuba, and the coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953) theory 4:2 now becomes the most plausible, with motive of Kirkuk-Sudeten-Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing, leaving NOLA for the rich white supporters of the Hegemony and paving the way for endless plutocratic domination.
Re: So this rumor too is confirmed.
Date: 2005-09-09 04:03 pm (UTC)The implication being they wanted things to stay crappy so they could steal more stuff.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 08:34 am (UTC)Or something.
Crazy(out of this dross, I hope someone can make gold)Soph
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 05:03 pm (UTC)This is because they see it as a corporate right, and so the state reducing the individual right isn't, as they see it, an infringement.
Me, I see it as an individual right, which combined with the right to peaceably assemble creates a militia. I can't see it being any other way, because if it's a right of the state, it doesn't need to be in the Bill of Rights, since there are other clauses which allow for armies.
Which means, IMO, that the attempts to infringe the other amendments are easier to pull off, because that one has already shown it can be done.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 12:12 pm (UTC)I think this disaster just sped up things that were leading in that direction. I think we are heading back to the dark ages. i can't explain it, but that's how I feel.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 03:31 pm (UTC)(Ob Bujold reference)
Blackwater Mercs
Date: 2005-09-09 06:01 pm (UTC)And with the exception to the conspiracy stuff being passed around here (you guys give the secret government to much credit), I cannot disagree. I have been sleepless as of late, hoping that we could go and help out in whatever way we are able.
I am cheap. I take three hots and a cot, plus salary to do my duties. So does Terry. I have no idea how much BW operatives are getting paid here, but I know they were making a killing over there (as in the stupid show "Over There").
So yes, I cannot believe these guys are operating on US Soil. If they are protecting water pumps, oil processing plants, maybe the banks, then I get it, but patrolling the inner city... I am not sure they are the best suited outfit as far as my experience dictates.
Anyway, I am off to check their website. Maybe they're hiring... LOL
Re: Blackwater Mercs
Date: 2005-09-09 06:06 pm (UTC)I wish the Blackwater guys were doing the inner city (say E. LA, or Watts), but they aren't. They are patrolling Brentwood.
My bags are packed.
I don't really agree with
TK
Re: Re: Blawater Mercs
Date: 2005-09-09 06:36 pm (UTC)