Untitled Document
The Wednesday,
September 7, 2005 broadcast of KPFA's "Flashpoints" featured a
telephone interview with Malik Rahim, who gave a gut-wrenching and shocking
firsthand account of the staggering horror of still-neglected New Orleans that
he and other survivors are facing. In stark contrast to increasingly optimistic
mainstream media coverage (cover-up) about "improving relief efforts"
and "rebuilding", Rahim exposed the fact that there is no relief.
No Red Cross, no food, no emergency medical care under a FEMA
lockdown that has kept any relief from getting into New Orleans.
Meanwhile, as the Bush administration’s combat
operations ramp up, and troops prowl the streets, no help whatsoever has
been offered to residents, according to Rahim. Rotting corpses litter the streets,
still not moved. People, heroically fending for themselves and their own, are
being left in shocking conditions to suffer and die. "Between these
disturbing [independent firsthand] reports, and accounts such as "The
People of the Dome", New Orleans is being reduced to another Fallujah."
(see L Chin at http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/090505Chin/090505chin.html)
Rahim’s account confirms this---literally. According to Rahim, mercenaries
from Blackwater USA are rumbling
through the New Orleans streets, armed to the teeth and in full battle gear.
Blackwater USA is a private mercenary firm, one of many "war outsourcing"
outfits working for the Pentagon. In the spring 2004 Fallujah assault, Blackwater
was involved with combat as well as logistics (food shipments, etc.). Four Blackwater
USA mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, raising worldwide attention. In February
2005, the former Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and the
Bush State Department’s former Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Cofer
Black, became
Blackwater USA's Vice Chairman.
In "The Mercenary
Variable: Outsourced combat in Iraq", US Army Special Forces Master
Sergeant Stan Goff describes Blackwater as follows:
"Blackwater USA is a guns-for-hire training-and-recruitment outfit
on a 6,000 acre military training compound on the northern coastal plain of
Moyock, North Carolina, a stone's throw from the Virginia border."
"What differentiates them from the crazed, ex-military flotsam
that rampaged through Congo in the 1960's is that they are (1) incorporated,
(2) they use legally recognized financial/contract instruments, and (3), they
work for recognized governments. The latter is a very finely drawn point, because
governments frequently hire these legalized mercenaries at the insistence, and
with the support, of multinational corporations who just happen – as it
turns out – to be in the same place these outfits are doing their security.
"On the combat end, Blackwater USA is mostly ex-SEALs with a few
former SWAT cops thrown in, run by a blustering hyper-macho ex-SEAL named Gary
Jackson. One of the victims of the Fallujah ambush – a WWF-looking body-builder-type
– had boasted to a reporter staying in his hotel in Baghdad that he preferred
hand-to-hand combat so he could see his quarry eye to eye. When I was running
a Special Forces A-Detachment, this kind of talk would have sent me seeking
a way to reassign you out of my team."
The infamous Halliburton-KBR
(Kellogg Brown & Root), the "classic" private military firm
connected to Dick Cheney, is already
in the area as well. Where there is oil, war, destruction and "rebuilding",
there is KBR.
What are they doing in New Orleans? What is the Bush administration and FEMA
up to, that the world is being kept from seeing? How many more Americans in
New Orleans will die?
