Random Quotes

- Why is the United States of America using mercenaries to fight its wars in the Middle East? How did Blackwater and other "private security" firms rise to a position of seeming respectability and wealth? ~ Jeremy Scahill "Inside Blackwater, the world's most powerful mercenary army"


- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, an outspoken critic of the US administration's handling of the war in Iraq, said the report showed the National Guard was being stretched "beyond the breaking point. This report serves as a clear indication of the damage we have done to the National Guard over the last four years," Hagel said in a statement.

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Hmmm... Our army navy and marines at the breaking point. Our national guard now very close to being unable to respond.

And yet, Blackwater is ready, practiced, equiped, wealthy, powerful. Blackwater is also not responsible to the american people.

~ ~ Mercenaries ~ ~

Wealthy and powerful mercenaries in the employ of and beholden to the Bush Regime.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a little bit stinky??

UPDATE:

Scahill: The Bush administration came to power with the most radical privatization agenda in U.S. history, and we see it in our schools, we see it in prisons, we see it in healthcare, we see it in local law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement as well. And now with the so-called war on terror and the occupation of Iraq, we’ve seen the most militant privatization agenda sort of unfold before our eyes. Donald Rumsfeld, on September 10th, 2001, gave one of his first major addresses at the Pentagon, and he laid out a plan for a wholesale sort of overhaul of how the U.S. would wage its wars. And he talked about a small-footprint approach and the use of the private sector, and at one point Rumsfeld said because governments can’t die, we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve. And of course this was one day before this sort of new Pearl Harbor moment happened on September 11th and all of a sudden Rumsfeld and Cheney get this blank canvas on which to paint their privatization dreams. And so what we’ve seen is as tanks rolled in, in March of 2003, to Iraq, they brought with them the largest army of private war contractors ever deployed. Now, as you say, there’s some 100,000 contractors—I actually think there are probably more than that. That’s a strangely round number. But the fact of the matter is that we know from internal government audits that were done on the Iraq occupation that there are some 48,000 employees of private mercenary companies operating in Iraq right now. And what these companies do is they give the Bush administration extraordinary political cover. Their deaths don’t get counted, their injuries don’t get counted, their crimes don’t get reported, they don’t get investigated, they don’t get prosecuted. The fact of the matter is that with 100,000-plus contractors in Iraq, there’s only been one indictment of a contractor for a crime or violation committed in Iraq. And that contractor wasn’t even a mercenary contractor. It was a private contractor doing support work for the U.S. military. So what we see is a sort of revolving door. The mercenaries provide the Bush administration with the ability to bloat the occupation forces—effectively double the number of occupation personnel on the ground—and then in turn the Bush administration has given them almost total free-for-all environment where there’s no accountability, there’s no oversight, there’s no effective laws governing their presence there. And it’s interesting that Blackwater USA and its executives are heavy funders of the campaigns of President Bush and his Republican allies, and that these are the very individuals that have essentially created a Wild West environment for these contractors in Iraq.

HATTIP: Truthdig's interview with the author of “Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”, Jeremy Scahill