Your Tax Dollars: Their Mercenaries

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BlackWater: Privatized Warfare in Iraq (1/2)

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  Created by clorenz1 | add comment

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  Created by clorenz1 | add comment

Have a read through these links. Blackwater is not necessarily a new topic or breaking news, but this is a pretty comprehensive expose on the private security company which is making headlines. No real surprise that a right wing neocon friend of the Bush Administration, with ties to Cheney & Rumsfeld, is the architect helping to realize neocon dreams, building an empire. These security forces have even been used on American soil.

"Right.
This is really the next sort of generation of privatization, is the
privatization of intelligence. And they’re marketing their services to
Fortune 500 companies. And so, it's not just Cofer Black. It's another
CIA guy who went on to work at Blackwater, Robert Richer, who was a
Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA. So those two are really the
sort of leaders behind this new initiative.

But,
really, the man behind all of it is Erik Prince, the head of
Blackwater. He's rapidly buying up, for instance, a think tank, the
Terrorism Research Center, and other intelligence entities and sort of
cobbling them together. Blackwater's big push now is not just for
government contracts, but it’s also for corporate contracts. And so,
it's part of this radical privatization agenda. And to have a man
heading this who told Congress openly, “There was a before 9/11 and an
after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off” -- this is a guy who
ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as
the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private
intelligence company."

                                                                                                        Click Here to read the story...

"Such
a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease
the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with
critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them,"
Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already
done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little
congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and
his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing
laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.

Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force"
in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq,
of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government
Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost
no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared
expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors
make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's
more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go
uncounted in the official toll."

                                                                                                       Click Here to read the story...