There have been rumors and reports of Blackwater mercenaries operating in New Orleans for some time now, but I'm disturbed the openness of
this MSNBC article, which suggests that even local communities are starting to hire these trained military killers.
ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. - Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.
Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.
"You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between us and them," said Tufaro, who developed the proposal.
Except of course there is a huge difference. These are not cops. They don't know the communities, they're not attuned to the sensitivities that police work requires, they're not trained policemen. Their experiences are in Iraq and Afghanistan-- they're wartime mercenaries. To me, this seems like an incredible time bomb waiting to go off. How are people who are trained to simply kill "the enemy" going to handle the investigation, evidence-collection, and trust-building that policing requires?
This also raises a VERY SERIOUS question about the existence of posse comitatus in my mind. The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in the wake of Reconstruction to keep military troops from being used for policing functions. Since 1878, the law has been in place to keep the military from operating on US soil-- a very reasonable objective, as the gap between military police and a military government isn't very wide. But the act has eroded in the past 20 years, as this analysis from the government-funded "Homeland Security Institute" details:
While the act appears to prohibit active participation in law enforcement by the military, the reality in application has become quite different. The act is a statutory creation, not a constitutional prohibition. Accordingly, the act can and has been repeatedly circumvented by subsequent legislation. Since 1980, Congress and the president have significantly eroded the prohibitions of the act in order to meet a variety of law enforcement challenges.
One of the most controversial uses of the military during the past 20 years has been to involve the Navy and Air Force in the "war on drugs." Recognizing the inability of civilian law enforcement agencies to interdict the smuggling of drugs into the United States by air and sea, the Reagan Administration directed the Department of Defense to use naval and air assets to reach out beyond the borders of the United States to preempt drug smuggling. This use of the military in antidrug law enforcement was approved by Congress in 10 U.S.C., sections 371-381. This same legislation permitted the use of military forces in other traditionally civilian areas--immigration control and tariff enforcement.
...
The weakness of the analysis of passive versus direct involvement in law enforcement was most graphically demonstrated in the tragic 1999 shooting of a shepherd by marines who had been assigned a mission to interdict smuggling and illegal immigration in the remote Southwest. An investigation revealed that for some inexplicable reason the 16-year-old shepherd fired his weapon in the direction of the marines. Return fire killed the boy. This tragedy demonstrates that when armed troops are placed in a position where they are being asked to counter potential criminal activity, it is a mere semantic exercise to argue that the military is being used in a passive support role. The fact that armed military troops were placed in a position with the mere possibility that they would have to use force to subdue civilian criminal activity reflects a significant policy shift by the executive branch away from the posse comitatus doctrine.
So posse comitatus is already weak. But this is something new. There is no particularly new threat here-- the MSNBC article only mentions crowd control and street gangs as major problems. Using Blackwater doesn't even make economic sense for the parish:
But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn "significantly more" than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer.
For DynCorp and other private security companies, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, like Iraq, is a land of opportunity. Hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals, its first domestic security job, the Texas firm has earned about $14 million from work in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, not all of which has involved security.
One could make the case that these mercenaries aren't really "military". It's true that they are not uniformed troops of the United States military. But they're men whose whole experience comes from fighting America's wars. Functionally, these guys differ from regular military in only one way: they're better paid. If St. Bernard Parish can use these military mercenaries for regular domestic police powers (albeit in extraordinary times), what's to stop the Chicago Police Department, or the Federal Department of Homeland Security, from doing the same?