Tag: Blackwater

Dystopia 9: The Blackwaters

Dystopia 2: Dinnertime

   

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943

Bear Butte, Blackwater, & Helicopter Rides…

“Mommy, I wanna see some real Indians praying! Can we take a helicopter ride, pleeeeaasse?” Johnny’s mother, pleased, replied “Yes sweetie, why Blackwater, the greatest homegrown American terrorist organization –


Blackwater Down

The frightening — and possibly illegal — presence of heavily armed private forces in New Orleans only demonstrates what everyone already feared: the utter breakdown of the government.

– has helicopter rides going over Bear Butte.”

Photobucket

More Than 1 in 3 The Stunning Reality of The Iraq War

This is a compilation of information contained in my previous Iraq diaries, updated whenever possible.

The most difficult number to validate is the real population of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Population figures have been an educated guess, in part determined by the amount of food purchased and historic birth rates, trying to take into account the 500,000 or more who died each year because of the embargo. From the various sources, the UN and international aid agencies the population is estimated between 22 and 25 million. The number most frequently quoted is 24 million on the eve of the war, this is the figure I will use.

The information contained here is gathered from UNICEF, the United Nations, WHO, various medical journals, relief organizations, governments of Syria and Jordan and eye witness reports. Whenever possible they have been verified with muiltiple sources.

Follow me below the fold for a clearer look at how we have literally destroyed the cradle of civilization.

Blackwater Dropping Security

Well, well, Blackwater, after ripping off the United States people with their extremely high priced Mercenary Forces, and getting U.S. troops killed from the blowback of their actions are now dropping their security details, apparently because it’s bad for their business bottom line!!

Bush worried about Security Pact with Iraq? Looks like it.

On June 14th, President Bush while discussing a “status of forces” agreement said that he is confident the United States can reach a long term security agreement with Iraq, one that will not establish permanent U.S. bases there.

That is the first step in understanding that Bushie and his neo-con minions are sweating the Security Pact agreement with Iraq that they SO want completed in the very near future.  Prior to June 14, there was no real substantive information from the administration regarding NOT having permanent U.S. Military bases in Iraq via this agreement.  

In Bush’s exact words: “Whatever we agree to, it will not commit future presidents to troop levels, nor will it establish permanent bases.”

The second reason to believe Bush and Company are getting nervous is on that same date, an aide for Iraqi P.M. Al-Malaki said that Iraqi officials are frustrated by the lack of progress in negotiations, so they are contemplating developing legislation to dictate the shape of the American military presence in Iraq.  Al-Malaki himself stated that the first drafts of the agreement that were proposed had reached a deadlock in negotiations.

Again, ol’ never-give-in-never-say-you-were-wrong-never-take-NO-for-an-answer Bushie is giving up something that originally was very important to him (permanent bases) because the Iraqi’s aren’t rolling over and playing dead for him (unlike a certain group of Congressional Democrats who will remain nameless….)

 

Is There An Election Coming??

If so, looks like the ‘boogeyman’ will be letting our Troops follow it back to the homeland, or the scare is being germinated in the populace:

More Than 8 Million Iraqis Deserve Justice

Cross posted on KOS

Regardless of how you feel about the crimes of George W. Bush and impeachment, there are millions of innocent people asking for justice and who have no voice of their own. Follow me below the fold to hear ONE case for impeachment and justice.

Blackwater is Special

At first, it sounds like a step in the right direction. And maybe it is. A very small step. According to the New York Times:

The American military has charged a contractor with assault in a case that may emerge as a major test of the military’s legal jurisdiction over civilians who accompany the armed forces into the field, military officials and legal experts said Friday.

And it’s about time. Because, as Jeremy Scahill wrote in Salon, almost a year ago:

Before Paul Bremer, Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004, he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq, which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

And as the Washington Post reported, in November:

That ruling remains in effect.

And as reported in Time Magazine, in February, the State Department and the Pentagon are fighting over whether or not to demand that the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq extend the immunity:

Contractor immunity may be unique to Iraq and difficult to demand of Baghdad, but the Pentagon still wants it. In interagency discussions arranged in preparation for the start of negotiations, the Department of Defense has said it want to ask the Iraqis to maintain status quo. The State Department, however, has argued strongly against that position. “We are just still internally discussing this, and still haven’t really come out with a position,” says the senior Administration official. A State Department official says discussions are underway. Says Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, “Don’t confuse interagency discussions with disagreement. We’re all trying to achieve a single U.S. position on the way ahead in Iraq.”

Because nothing is greater proof of a nation’s sovereignty than allowing foreign corporations from an occupying foreign power to be immune from local laws. Laws against things like mass murder. So, it’s a good thing that a contractor is finally being charged for an act of violence. As today’s Times report continues:

The Real News About Blackwater

The New York Times story is getting the buzz:

The helicopter was hovering over a Baghdad checkpoint into the Green Zone, one typically crowded with cars, Iraqi civilians and United States military personnel.

Suddenly, on that May day in 2005, the copter dropped CS gas, a riot-control substance the American military in Iraq can use only under the strictest conditions and with the approval of top military commanders. An armored vehicle on the ground also released the gas, temporarily blinding drivers, passers-by and at least 10 American soldiers operating the checkpoint.

“This was decidedly uncool and very, very dangerous,” Capt. Kincy Clark of the Army, the senior officer at the scene, wrote later that day. “It’s not a good thing to cause soldiers who are standing guard against car bombs, snipers and suicide bombers to cover their faces, choke, cough and otherwise degrade our awareness.”

Both the helicopter and the vehicle involved in the incident at the Assassins’ Gate checkpoint were not from the United States military, but were part of a convoy operated by Blackwater Worldwide, the private security contractor that is under scrutiny for its role in a series of violent episodes in Iraq, including a September shooting in downtown Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.

Scott L. Silliman, the executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at the Duke University School of Law, points out that this once again gets into Blackwater’s legal gray areas, what I like to refer to as legal mud. As I’ve previously written, that legal mud may even get Blackwater off the hook for last year’s massacre of seventeen Iraqi civilians. As the Washington Post reported, in November:

FBI investigators have reportedly concluded that the killing of 14 of the 17 civilians was unjustified under State Department rules on the use of force. But the case is muddied by the question of what laws, if any, apply to security contractors operating under military, State Department and civilian contracts.

If massacring civilians is one of those areas of legal mud, don’t expect any legal clarity for gassing American soldiers. The question, then, was whether laws applying to private contractors working for the Defense Department also apply to contractors working for the State Department. And although the military has brought charges against numerous official service personnel, they have brought none against private security contractors. Because whether or not mass murder is legal depends on who is doing the mass murdering, and for whom they work.  

Hessians

From Wikipedia’s entry on the American Revolutionary War

Early in 1775, the British Army consisted of about 36,000 men worldwide… Additionally, over the course of the war the British hired about 30,000 soldiers from German princes, these soldiers were called “Hessians” because many of them came from Hesse-Kassel. The troops were mercenaries in the sense of professionals who were hired out by their prince. Germans made up about one-third of the British troop strength in North America.

On December 26th 1776 after being chased by the British army under Lords Howe and Cornwallis augmented by these “Hessians” led by Wilhelm von Knyphausen from Brooklyn Heights to the other side of the Delaware the fate of the Continental Army and thus the United States looked bleak.  The Continental Congress abandoned Philidephia, fleeing to Baltimore.  It was at this time Thomas Paine was inspired to write The Crisis.

The story of Washington’s re-crossing of the Delaware to successfully attack the “Hessian” garrison at Trenton is taught to every school child.

On March 31, 2004 Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA.

The four armed contractors, Scott Helvenston, Jerko Zovko, Wesley Batalona and Michael Teague, were dragged from their cars, beaten, and set ablaze. Their burned corpses were then dragged through the streets before being hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates.

Of this incident the next day prominent blogger Markos Moulitsas notoriously said-

Every death should be on the front page (2.70 / 40)

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

(From Corpses on the Cover by gregonthe28th.  This link directly to the comment doesn’t work for some reason.)

Now I think that this is a reasonable sentiment that any patriotic American with a knowledge of history might share.

Why bring up this old news again, two days from the 231st anniversary of the Battle of Trenton?

Warnings Unheeded On Guards In Iraq

Despite Shootings, Security Companies Expanded Presence

By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, December 24, 2007; A01

The U.S. government disregarded numerous warnings over the past two years about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq, expanding their presence even after a series of shooting incidents showed that the firms were operating with little regulation or oversight, according to government officials, private security firms and documents.

Last year, the Pentagon estimated that 20,000 hired guns worked in Iraq; the Government Accountability Office estimated 48,000.

The Defense Department has paid $2.7 billion for private security since 2003, according to USA Spending, a government-funded project that tracks contracting expenditures; the military said it currently employs 17 companies in Iraq under contracts worth $689.7 million. The State Department has paid $2.4 billion for private security in Iraq — including $1 billion to Blackwater — since 2003, USA Spending figures show.

The State Department’s reliance on Blackwater expanded dramatically in 2006, when together with the U.S. firms DynCorp and Triple Canopy it won a new, multiyear contract worth $3.6 billion. Blackwater’s share was $1.2 billion, up from $488 million, and the company more than doubled its staff, from 482 to 1,082. From January 2006 to April 2007, the State Department paid Blackwater at least $601 million in 38 transactions, according to government data.

The company developed a reputation for aggressive street tactics. Even inside the fortified Green Zone, Blackwater guards were known for running vehicles off the road and pointing their weapons at bystanders, according to several security company representatives and U.S. officials.

Based on insurance claims there are only 25 confirmed deaths of Blackwater employees in Iraq, including the four killed in Fallujah.  You might care to contrast that with the 17 Iraqis killed on September 16th alone.  Then there are the 3 Kurdish civilians in Kirkuk on February 7th of 2006.  And the three employees of the state-run media company and the driver for the Interior Ministry.

And then exactly one year ago today, on Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater mercenary killed the body guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi while drunk at a Christmas party (the mercenary, not the guard or Vice President Abdul-Mahdi who were both presumably observant Muslims and no more likely to drink alcohol than Mitt Romney to drink tea).

Sort of makes all those embarrassing passes you made at co-workers and the butt Xeroxes at the office party seem kind of trivial, now doesn’t it?

So that makes it even at 25 apiece except I’ve hardly begun to catalog the number of Iraqis killed by trigger happy Blackwater mercenaries.

They say irony is dead and I (and Santayana) say that the problem with history is that people who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it.

Monday Morning News Drop

Hello and welcome to the second installment on MMND.  Today we will do things a little differently, due to the Holiday there weren’t many stories released on Friday that would qualify for our regular approach.  Instead, headlines from various news sources across the country will be the focus.  The same basic question will apply however: when will the Corporate Media focus on these important stories?

As a reminder to news editors in Corporate Media establishments.  Well over 2/3rds of us Americans are paying attention.


IndyStar.com has some gut-wrenching statistics posted regarding child-poverty.

The number of Hoosier children living in poverty has increased by nearly 21 percent since 2000, a growth rate nearly twice that of the U.S. average for the period.

If these statistics do not cause a major upheaval in the way Indiana allocates it’s resources, there is little hope for Indiana in the future.


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