A simple swim in the Gulf of Mexico has complicated Steven Aguinaga's life in ways he could have never imagined.
In July 2010, Aguinaga, now 33-years-old, had gone on a vacation with his wife and some friends to Fort Walton Beach, Florida. After he and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming in the Gulf, they both became extremely sick from what Aguinaga believes were chemicals in BP's oil and dispersants from the largest marine oil spill in US history that began in April 2010.
The 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf continues to affect people living near the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic dispersants, which are banned by some countries, including the UK. According to many scientists, these dispersants create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil.
Aguinaga's blood has tested positive for high levels of chemicals present in BP's oil, and he described his ailments to Al Jazeera.
"I have terrible chest pain, at times I can't seem to get enough oxygen, and I'm constantly tired with pains all over my body. At times I'm pissing blood, vomiting dark brown stuff, and every pore of my body is dispensing water."
His symptoms mirror those which scores of other Gulf Coast residents have told to Al Jazeera, all of them also having had their blood tests reveal chemicals in BP's oil.
Yet Aguinaga's hardships have not ended with his health problems.
"After we got back from our vacation in Florida, Merrick went to work for a company contracted by BP to clean up oil in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Two weeks after that he dropped dead."
New battles
This Spring Aguinaga filed a lawsuit against BP in hopes of obtaining compensation for his deteriorating health.
Aguinaga's attorney encouraged him with the prospect of setting a precedent for other health-related lawsuits against BP. But instead of bringing Aguinaga relief, the process has turned his life upside down.
Within 30 days of filing the lawsuit, Aguinaga had his home in Hazelhurst, Mississippi broken into.
"I found the Norton Security alert on my laptop warning me that someone had tried to access my information, and the door to my house was left open," he explained. "I think somebody wanted me to know they could get in easily."
Aguinaga's employer, Star Services, who had placed him on workers' compensation for a work-related injury, cut off his cheques after he filed the lawsuit against BP.
According to Aguinaga, both he and his wife are being followed, while in early September a truck tried to run him off the road near a bridge.
Three of his four security dogs were recently killed, and the fourth was stabbed.
While Aguinaga's story is the fodder of conspiracy theorists, it has precedent.
Washington DC attorney Billie Garde has seen this kind of thing before.
"I've had cases where similar tactics [by the defendant] were used," Garde, whose firm Clifford and Garde often represents whistleblowers, told Al Jazeera, "I represented people in years past in a case against Wackenhut when oil companies [in Alaska] hired a bunch of people to spy on these folks."
In December 1993, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement of an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit by whistleblower Chuck Hamel and his associates, that resulted from a spying campaign that Alyeska had mounted against him. Hamel had tipped off regulators and Congress about alleged environmental wrongdoing along the Trans-Alaska pipeline.
At the time, Alyeska, which runs the pipeline for the oil companies, was owned by BP and Exxon/Mobile, among other oil companies, as it is today. Wackenhut's operation was shut down after it had run for seven months by Alyeska's owner oil companies.
Alyeska did not contest that during its campaign against Hamel, its operatives from Wackenhut security it had hired to spy on him had secretly taped his phone calls, searched his mail, garbage, phone and credit card records (and those of his associates), and even employed attractive female operatives to try to entice Hamel into admissions or actions that might have discredited him.
"Alyeska hired Wackhenhut to basically find the people who were leaking information to Congress and newspapers about the safety issues along the pipeline," Garde said. "Wackenhut at the time had a special investigations department that undertook this task with vigour, and carried out this campaign against Alyeska's critics."
The case eventually became the subject of Congressional hearings and lawsuits, and has all become public record.
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Ott added that methods used by Wackenhut operatives in the Alyeska case included "isolating the whistleblowers when they were on the job, harassing them at work, their children were harassed at school to the point of dropping out, being followed by cars, white vans outside of people's houses spying on them, stolen mail, phone records taken, and one of the pipeline whistleblowers was run off the road."
Gus Castillo, a former Wackenhut employee who was also a former FBI special agent turned Wackenhut whistle blower, recognised these tactics at the time. During the Alyeska trial, he said these were the tactics Wackenhut had instructed him to use when he worked for the company.
Documentation of the widespread spying is outlined in the US House of Representative's Report on Alyeska Covert Operation.
More recently, as Beaudo mentioned, Wackenhut was hired by BP to provide security in various ways for their operations related to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster. Wackenhut also provided security for the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command during the oil disaster. Unified Command was run jointly by BP and several US government agencies.
Wackenut is a private security company that operates both in the US and globally, and more recently became part of the giant British security contractor company G4S.
Being a large, private company with a board populated largely by former CIA, FBI and Pentagon officials, Wackenhut has been in charge of protecting nuclear-weapons facilities, nuclear reactors, the Alaskan oil pipeline, Cape Canaveral, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site.
The company has had upwards of 30,000 armed employees, and in 1966 Wackenhut admitted it had secret files on at least four million Americans listed as ‘suspected dissidents'.
G4S currently operates in more than 125 countries and have more than 625,000 employees worldwide.
Of the company's previous US government contracts, a security-firm executive told Spy magazine in 1992, "All those contracts are just another way to pay Wackenhut for their clandestine help."
When he was asked what the nature of said "help" was, retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw said, "It is known throughout the industry, that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut."
At the time of publishing, G4S had not responded to requests for comment.
