September 8, 2005 -- Some evacuees are being treated as "internees" by FEMA. Reports continue to come into WMR that evacuees from New Orleans and Acadiana who have been scattered across the United States are being treated as "internees" and not dislocated American citizens from a catastrophe. Some FEMA facilities are preventing these internees from leaving on their own. Reports of mandatory registration and the issuing of FEMA ID cards suggest that FEMA, an agency that is rife with right-wing security goons and severely lacking in humanitarian workers, has other motives in treating poor and destitute American citizens as prisoners in their own country.
Meanwhile, WMR is receiving reports that mercenary private military contractors (PMCs) are now operating in the New Orleans metropolitan area. These may include foreign nationals with questionable human rights records in their native South Africa, Israel, Colombia, El Salvador, Britain, and Australia. PMCs have been extremely active in occupied Iraq, especially under the aegis of massive Pentagon omnibus contracts awarded to Halliburton and its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary. Joseph Allbaugh, the former FEMA director under Bush and current FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown's college roommate, is currently a registered lobbyist for disaster relief business for Kellogg Brown & Root. Allbaugh's lobbying firm is called the Allbaugh Group. Halliburton has recently been awarded lucrative contracts to repair U.S. Naval bases damaged by Katrina.
The presence of PMCs is worrisome. There are unconfirmed reports of mercenaries shooting residents of New Orleans and that mercenaries are involved in burning the bodies of victims in makeshift crematoria set up throughout the city. The reported burning of bodies could be an attempt by the White House to suppress the total death count to an "acceptable," "manageable," and "spinnable" level.
FEMA is anything but a humanitarian rescue and recovery organization. It is once again a hotbed of security goons as it was under Reagan and GHW Bush. The past is prologue.
A little history on FEMA: " When Ronald Reagan took over the presidency in 1981 he named his old California National Guard chief, retired General Louis Giuffrida as his emergency czar. Giuffrida had a tainted image as California's National Guard commander. He drew up lists of 'militant negroes' who were to be rounded up in emergencies. He designed 'Operation Cable Splicer,' which kept track of political dissidents in California, especially anti-Vietnam War protestors. When Giuffrida took over at FEMA, he began to embark on similar projects. FEMA began to store some 12,000 names it had obtained from the FBI's domestic intelligence files. FBI Director William Webster was so outraged at this interference in FBI matters he forced FEMA to turn the list back to the FBI. FEMA's surveillance lists may have included at least 100,000 U.S.A. citizens that were assumed to be potential threats to security. These included the names of survivalists and tax protestors." -- Wayne Madsen, Handbook of Personal Data Protection, Stockton Press (NY) and Macmillan (London), 1992.
