Blackwater Katrina Profiteering and Incidents

Chapter 3 - A Caucus Race and A Long Tale

We argued before the value of critical thinking. For those rusty on the concept, it can be defined as:

the mental process of analyzing and evaluating statements or propositions that have been offered as true. It includes a process of reflecting upon the specific meaning of statements, examining offered evidence and reasoning, in order to form a judgment.

Unfortunately, there are a fair number of people—whatever their viewpoint—who believe critical thinking means recognizing the lies spouted by ‘those evil people on the other side.’ The result: hysteria about “fascists” commanded by the current U.S. government or perhaps by strict catholic and staunch Republican Erik Prince or, in the alternative, about “yellow-coward traitors” united behind ardent atheist and strident Socialist Jeremy Scahill.

Problem is, if all your ideas—and the “facts” to support them—come from DailyKos or AnnCoulter.com, well, there’s not much analyzing and reasoning going on. The self-congratulating and troll-outing may not be dry, but it is a Caucus Race.

Critical thought is the remedy for soundbite policy debate. But it is a skill not easy to build. For example, in our last post we discussed at some length the semi-iconic picture below, which is invariably trotted out as depicting “Blackwater Mercenaries” in New Orleans.

Hopefully you sought to closely evaluate the statements and propositions that the post offered as true. But did you consider the photo itself? If you have visited pages discussing Blackwater and New Orleans, you have often seen it. There’s only one problem. They’re not Blackwater guys. They are New Orleans SWAT officers on patrol, as photographed by Rick Wilking of Reuters. Funny how the officer on the right is cropped out in all those vitriolic blog posts about mercenaries run amok.

It is not easy to separate fact from fiction in the PSC debate.

Let’s try “analyzing and evaluating” two more Katrina propositions: (1) the profiteering was obscene and (2) the fascists ran amok.

Runaway Profiteering.

The hardcore conspiracy crowd will never admit it, but there are indications that, ironically, Blackwater (and the other, smaller PSC’s who descended on Louisiana) did not set out to capture huge government bucks. Like many U.S. companies, Blackwater set out simply to do something to help. Blackwater personnel were among the first on the scene in New Orleans, donating helicopter services to assist in Coast Guard emergency relief operations (e.g., Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2005). Even Jeremy Scahill admits that “Blackwater’s men actually beat the federal government, FEMA, the Red Cross and all these organizations to the hurricane zone.” Various sources have them rescuing between 125 and 150 people and helping deliver 24,000 pounds of food and supplies.

It did not take long at all, however, for the market for private security to flourish in the wake of the storm. Private security was a need, or at least a perceived need, that had been recognized and widely broadcast in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, and it was only fueled by reports of lawlessness and societal breakdown during Katrina—reports that even those critical of PSC’s acknowledge. Further, legitimate concerns regarding looting (i.e., clearly not the theft of bread by the starving) would remain for months.

As a result, Blackwater’s first-responder work was rapidly supplemented by security work for private citizens, and by big income. Within 36 hours of storm landfall, Blackwater had about 150 people on the ground in Louisiana, and they began guarding hotels, businesses, homes and even irreplaceable artwork. (Reported in various sources, including the Post article above and Scahill items). Because most of this private security work was, well, private, little is known about the market rate for it. Mr. Scahill, ever the Blackwater watchdog/caviler (your choice), provides the only report of a price for one of the non-U.S. government projects:

Within days of their guys deploying down there, Blackwater was handed a very lucrative $409,000 contract—literally to guard a morgue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Fourteen guys, four vehicles, for 22 days—and they were paid $409,000.

Admittedly $409K is a large amount of money to anyone who does not own a private security company or have a best-selling novel. You have to be a much better businessman than I to determine that the contract was “very lucrative” without any idea of the costs involved in getting four truckloads of guys fully equipped, transported across a couple hundred miles of massive devastation and set up with lodging, meals, communication, transportation, and other support in the midst of social breakdown and widespread ruin.

The contract that is the lightning rod, however, is Blackwater’s contract with (ultimately) the Department of Homeland Security.

By September 1, 2005, the world had been watching people suffering and dying at the Superdome for the better part of three days. Public frustration with inaction, real or perceived, was beginning to boil, and the federal government finally went into a higher gear. (Interestingly, at that point in time the U.S. populace split blame fairly evenly between the Democratic local and state governments and the Republican Bush administration.)

FEMA in particular was scrambling to provide disaster services to those affected by the storm. In the wake of natural disaster, FEMA provides on-the-ground assistance via Disaster Recovery Centers that it establishes throughout the impacted area—after Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, the Agency opened nearly 100 Disaster Recovery Centers.

Even though these were temporary facilities, they were government civilian workspaces. As such, like any other civilian federal space, protection of the centers became the responsibility of the Federal Protective Service (FPS). Before you say “why does FEMA need guards?” bear in mind that the FPS protects over 8,000 other government facilities and nearly a million employees and visitors, so the question is really “does our government need security?”

Although FPS has about 2000 uniformed officers, the vast majority of its personnel—over ten thousand (yes, 10,000)—are private security guards. So when FEMA opened close to 100 Disaster Recovery Centers, Federal Protective Service private security was sure to follow.

On September 1, 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (parent to both FEMA and FPS) awarded a competitively bid contract to Blackwater. Yes, competitively bid. It was not a sole-source contract, and was of a firm fixed-price nature—no cost lines or cost plus. Oh, and did we mention that Blackwater was the low bidder?

So at bottom, we are left with a contract for tens of millions of dollars for provision of hundreds of personnel, with full equipment, lodging, berthing, communications, transportation, and so forth, in the middle of the worst natural disaster zone in recent memory.

Whether it was an outrageous price depends on how you value the difficulty of obtaining lodging where there is none, serving food where it is in short supply, arranging showers and clean clothes where they cannot be had, and so forth, all while providing services to a customer. It would seem that if the profits were so outrageous, then in a competitively bid contract, one of the other legions of private security companies would have snapped it up at a slightly lower cost, and we would now be hearing about their avarice. Also, the Inspector General for DHS reviewed the contract and determined the pricing was “reasonable.”

In the end, given the conditions at the time, there is really no way to know, so we leave it to you to decide if there were “egregious profits.” You DailyKos fanatics can claim it should have been done for pennies per person per month, the AnnCoulter crowd can argue that no price is too high for protection of our FEMA heroes.

At bottom, the only conclusion we can accurately draw from the profiteering analysis is that while FEMA may have issued mostly no-bid contracts, the security contract awarded to Blackwater was NOT the mythical no-bid cronyism cost-plus contract that is a favored charge against them.

Fascists in the Streets

Even more popular than the profiteering claim is the cry that Blackwater “thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets.”

OK. Let’s look at the “other” security that was in the region and see if they were anywhere near as vicious as the private security guys.

The largest response—50,000 men and women strong—was the National Guard, haling from every state in the Union. As seen in the last post, they arrived in full battle gear, carbines in hand. In spite of Lt. Gen. Russel Honore’s headline-making admonition to Guard troops to patrol New Orleans with their weapons down, the Guard was well prepared, and quite expected, to maintain order. As one official put it,

Three hundred of the Arkansas National Guard have landed in the city of New Orleans. These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well, trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot to kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.

And this was not a claim from some overeager Bush administration wonk. The statement is from Democratic Governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco.

The New Orleans police stationed snipers on rooftops. Even local residents took up arms.

In other words, the security effort was both massive and diverse. Beyond the local police and the Guard, 22,000 active-duty federal troops joined them, as did nearly 500 FBI special agents, over 700 ICE officers, hundreds of other federal law enforcement officers, and uncounted local law enforcement responding from all over the country.

The notion that Blackwater was patrolling the streets at will on some private agenda does not seem credible. If Blackwater was in New Orleans, though, they must have imprisoned many and had a series of ugly and violent incidents, given the fondness of all those private security company mercenaries for jackbooted oppression, right?

As previously discussed, although the media stories of rape, murder, pillaging and general lawlessness greatly exaggerated the events on the ground, there were in fact some documented incidents of extreme violence in connection with Katrina.

In addition to the fabled but perhaps hopelessly muddy Danziger Bridge incident, there were various more documented reports of shootouts and deaths. But every one of these incidents involved uniformed local law enforcement—not any of the other security forces.

Security professionals who were static security, rather than out patrolling the streets and looking for troublemakers, reportedly encountered some random gunfire, but were largely not involved in exchanges. Although the military did conduct several thousand law enforcement patrols, and assisted in 72 arrests, most of their operations were not beat patrols, and there are apparently no reported incidents of servicemembers firing on citizens, or uniformed military being shot.

The normal invective regarding Blackwater is that they brought all the fury of the military, but none of the skills of law enforcement.

In fact, according to both blackwaterusa.com and socialistparty.org webpages from the period, the employment prerequisites Blackwater established for its Katrina work included “Current Law Enforcement Officer (if not current, must have maintained credentials and been separated or retired within the last two years.)” Thus, their people on the ground would have brought the law enforcement situation-resolution mentality to their duties.

As far as the jackbooted thugs gunning down innocent (or guilty) civilians, Blackwater security professionals/mercenaries did not fire one shot during their stint on Katrina (e.g., Business North Carolina, June, 2007). Thus, their assignment as static guards would have given them a lower-risk mission similar to the military and federal law enforcement.

The primary complaint against Blackwater’s force would seem to be that they were private security. If that is the case, then 10,000 private security guards set to head off to U.S. government facilities tomorrow morning had best start perusing the help wanted ads.

Conclusion

Again, minds will differ on the opinion to form from this information, but these are the facts as best we can determine.

Two final points.

First, the fact that this post does not nuke private security will be cause for instant labeling of it as mere cheerleading for Blackwater in New Orleans. To be clear on our opinion, we do not believe that private security should be hauled in by the federal government every time there is a natural disaster. To the contrary, we believe that the federal government should have no role in natural disasters. Why should the individual who loses their home to a wildfire be treated differently than one who loses their home to a lightning strike, just because the neighbors of the first also lost their homes? Why should someone who chooses to park their car in an area that is inundated by a rain-swollen river be different than someone who ruins theirs by attempting to drive through standing water that proved deeper than expected? Why do we say “hope you have insurance,” to one and “congratulations, you’ve just won the tax-dollar jackpot” to the other. Perhaps John Adams had the answer 200 years ago: “The government turns every contingency into an excuse for enhancing power in itself.”

Second, more than a million people sought assistance from FEMA. If you speak with someone who actually went to a Katrina Disaster Recovery Center, you might just find that they confirm there were no “thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses.” In fact, she might just give you some real live pictures that she took of Blackwater mercenaries at work in the Pelican State. Not that we expect you to accept the photo that we were given, below, at face value. In fact, we would be disappointed if you did. Because you’re no longer going to just swallow whole the naked assertions people make about private security companies. You’re going to call that former roommate, that old friend, that favorite relative who lives on the Gulf Coast, and you’re going to ask them what they saw. Right?

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Update:

For those of you who can't be bothered to find other Blackwater Katrina photos, three new ones are below. The first is from natmaconjr over on Flickr (original is here), the second is from the Disaster Medical Assistance Team out of Rockland, New York (original is here), and the final is from someone whose father is an officer IN the Federal Protective Service (original is here).