Late last night, with the site down, and little to no network news on the fires in SoCal, I started reading Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater when on page XXV of the very introduction I saw:
Blackwater executives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about deploying there in the aftermath of an earthquake or another disaster.
The more I read about Blackwater, the more absolutely breath-stopping moments I have. Sometimes it's the amounts of money involved. Sometimes it's the brazenness of Erik Prince, whom I've taken to calling Evil Prince, Mordred incarnate.
They were deployed 2 days after Katrina, with no express authority:
...hundreds of heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries--some fresh from deployment in Iraq--fanned out into the disaster zone. Within a week, they were officially hired by the Department of Homeland Security to operate in the U.S. Gulf, billing the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater solder. In less than a year, the company had raked in more than $70 million in federal hurricane-related contracts--about $243,000 a day...
"Look, none of us loves the idea that devastation became a business opportunity," said the Blackwater official heading up its new domestic operations division formed after Katrina. "It's a distasteful fact, but it is what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even newspapers--they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we, because somebody's got to handle it."
Update: Navaho's link to Scahill on Katrina
Scahill quotes Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights:
These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.
Not to mention them killing innocents in Iraq and holding our own military at gunpoint. I would call them up and ask if they're here in California, but I'm too chicken. If you haven't seen Scahill's interview on Bill Moyers Journal, watch it here.
He's brilliant.