We’ve really got to stop using the term “mercenaries” for Blackwater, and start using the term “Christianist
mercenaries.” Because it’s true:
Erik Prince is 37 years old. He founded Blackwater in 1997 with money he inherited from his father, Edgar Prince, the head of Prince Automative. The elder Prince and his wife were major Republican and conservative activists and funders. And Prince himself co-founded The Family Research Council with Gary Bauer and apparently provided the key early funding for the group.
According to Bauer, “I can say without hesitation that, without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.”
Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is married is the former Chair of the Michigan Republican Party and her husband is Dick DeVos, failed candidate for governor of Michigan and scion of the DeVos family, founders of Amway and major funders of Republican and conservative causes.
Amway is privately owned by the DeVos and van Andel families. And to give some sense of the scale of their political giving, according to a 2005 Center for Public Integrity study, Dick & Betsy DeVos were the fifth largest political givers in the country during the 2004 election cycle. Richard DeVos Sr. & his wife were ranked third. And Jay Van Andel was ranked second.
In addition to running Blackwater Prince also serves on the board of Christian Freedom International [Blackwater’s marketing arm].
Well, great. The winger billionaires, the Christianists, and the Republican Party have a private army under their control. But don’t worry! I’m sure they’ll never use it here! (Not. And not.)
And what an army it is! So many lovely details, but this is one is my favorite:
In a case involving a drunken Blackwater employee who killed a security guard to one of Iraq’s vice presidents last Christmas Eve [nice!], U.S. government personnel helped negotiate a financial settlement and allowed the employee to depart Iraq.
An incident report by a different U.S.-contracted security firm, Triple Canopy, described the Blackwater employee’s killing of the vice president’s security aide as “murder.” In its own assessment, Blackwater cited its employee for violating rules against handling weapons while drinking. Assessing his punishment, the company determined that “given the egregious nature of his violation, he should be prohibited from further affiliation with Blackwater and petition be made for the revocation of his security clearance.”
Yeah, The God(ess)(e)(s) Of Your Choice, If Any forbid that Christianist mercenaries should be prosecuted! Why, that would imply they were subject to earthly laws when they’re doing God’s work!
They’re typical Christianists:
In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy’s collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.
Wrong place, wrong time:
A Blackwater security detail in the city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, shot a civilian man standing at the side of the street as the contractors drove by.
And the best part? Christianist mercenaries Blackwater can pay for murder out of petty cash:
Although a senior embassy official first suggested that the company pay between $100,000 and $250,000 to the victim’s family, the committee memo reported, a diplomatic security official called those sums “crazy” and suggested that they could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed so as to set up their family financially.” Blackwater eventually paid $15,000, which the State Department helped deliver to the family.
Classic case of projection, right? Being mercenaries, they think money is the prime driver for everyone. It would be sad if it weren’t completely fucked.
Of course, all this is crazy behavior, right?
Well, maybe not. If your goal is to inculcate a sense of “shock and awe” wherever Blackwater appears, and to demonstrate that Christianist mercenaries have complete impunity from the rule of law, then acts of murder and random violence seem completely rational.
Just good marketing, in fact.
NOTE No doubt the Dems will end up condemning Blackwater for its “excesses”—producing a kinder, gentler Christianist mercenary army with complete impunity to the rule of law. What they ought to be doing is giving Blackwater the corporate death penalty for murder.
Front page
Blackwater = Brownshirts
As you’ve noted, we’ve already seen ’em in the streets. How long until we see a few “overzealous contractors” respond with deadly force when they’re called in to “provide security” at, say, an Iran war protest?
How long until we’re told that there’s “no controlling legal authority” even in the US?
But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!
no controlling legal authority other than "private security"
Strangle the government in the bath tub and the nation becomes a rent-a-cop ruled toilet.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
Waxman is framing this as privatization as such
Not just Blackwater. Excellent!
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
Issa brings in MoveOn to defend Blackwater!!
It’s just unbelievable. Except, believe it.
“I’m not here to defend Blackwater. I’m here to support General Petraeus.”
What a tool.
When are the Dems going to decide this crap isn’t comity, and start calling them on it?!
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
My God, Erik Prince Looks Like One
Smug bastard, isn’t he.
In answering questions pointed toward exculpating Blackwater, posed by Dan whatishisname, who shot a pumpkin in his back yard to prove that Vince Foster was murdered - Prince had the nerve to say that their mission was to protect contractors and others who were there to help rebuild Iraq.
Well, they sure as hell failed. Like every administration official or private corporate spawn, Blackwater has not given Iraqis any kind of fundamental security. Wasn’t that what everyone has admitted from the fall off Saddam’s statue to, well now, that what needed to happen was for the occupation forces to establish some kind of fundamental civil order. Instead the entire country has devolved into chaos.
Oh, but that’s all the fault of the insurgency, and we know which country is responsible for that - Iran, of course.
Petty Cash
And of course their petty cash coffers are full to overflowing when your tax dollars pay them $1,222 per day for each “security contractor”.
TPM Muckraker.
When are the Dems going to decide this crap isn’t comity,...
nagahapun…
who might some day actually CONFRONT the Powers…
the dems will ’cave’ on this too, cuz they see the need, if not now then in future, to use unaccountable forces to control the unruly masses of DFHs
A Quick Study, But A Slow Learner
Petty Cash
the $1,222 is what the company bills for; the killers themselvesonly make around $350-500/day, depending, plus boun…er, I mean “bonuses”…the ears of dead iraqis are just lagniappe…
A Quick Study, But A Slow Learner
Yes, yes...
I’m just trying to reframe ’comity,’ eh? Hasn’t been done, so far as I know.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
The army vs. the mercs
Price—sorry, Prince—just argued that the role of mercenaries is to act in insurgencies becaue the Army is designed for large scale conventional warfare. So that’s the “public policy” perspective we’re dealing with here.
And he may be right, arguendo, but, if so, what an indication of a completely malfunctioning ruling class:
1. The so-called “long war” is all about insurgencies, get the military hasn’t been designed to deal with logistically and only recently wrote a doctrine for.
2. So we’ve already spent—or, rather, become indebted for—trillions of dollars on a military that these guys, by their own admission, have designed to fight the wrong war.
3. And having designed the public military for the wrong war, we’re now going to invent a whole new privatized military of mercenaries to fight the right war.
Excuse me while I go bang my head. Trillions wasted, millions dead, lost wars, no accountability, and more of the same for everybody.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
You can't drown gov't in a bathtub if you don't 1st destroy
it’s competent, professional, citizen-based soldiery.
There are parallels in the future to the past.
I may live to see the day when Reconstruction reappears in the United States, courtesy of the dominionists.
I fear this.
In history, wars were accompanied by plagues.
In Iraq today cholera follows the battles.
Under Saddam Hussein — who was, indubitably, a very bad man; but in Reagan’s time he was OUR very bad man — Iraq had a secular state.
Today the nation, bereft of ~ 1 million dead citizens and ~3 million refugees, features a very different life: roving hordes of religion-based fundamentalist fighting gangs, bombs buried under every street and every road, complete lack of working infrastructure, and flight of those whose education and skills make them most vulnerable to thuggery — doctors, dentists, lawyers, women in general.
Everything — absolutely everything, including the government of the State of Texas — that George W. Bush touches disintegrates.
We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
Price--oops, I mean Prince--is just disgusting
Whenever the Dems ask him about financials, he says, in essence, “We’re at war and we keep losing helicopters!”, as if he were the military.
And whenever the Dems ask him about accountability, he says, “We’re a private company, and we don’t have any.”
Just another example of a Republican having it both ways while picking our pockets too.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
To Reiterate My Private Epiphany:
It occurred to me that the Busheviks are using Iraq (and Iran, if Iraq is not enough) to destroy the Army and the Marines as potential bulwarks FOR THE PEOPLE against the in-roads, private and public, of the fascists and CorpoRats in undoing the Constitution enough to drown the Govt in Grover Norquist’s bathtub (the Air Force is reliably xianist, at least in the officer corps, and the navy is ALWAYS the repository of the aristocracy)… With the official US Military paralyzed by personnel and supply problems, budget and recruitment shortfalls, etc, the members of the IPOA (International Peace Operations Association), the private ’security’ forces will cooperate with the now-militarized cops and become the defacto Army of the Interior.
This is part and parcel with the whole trajectory of the Bushevik regime agenda to as much as possible reduce to impotence and ruin any public instrument or institution that might interfere with the final, wholesale appropriation of the USer ’Commons” by the Corporat State.
We should never indulge in the conceit that they’re stupid, or clueless, or bumblers, or incompetents. They’re none of those things.
What they are is “Untouchables.”
Me? A Quick Study, But A Slow Learner
Ah. It's exactly like the enclosure movements
Well seen.
Anybody on this thread read Stephensen’s Snow Crash?
I think the word we want is not “untouchable” (TV connotation) but “impunity” (Latin American dictator connotation).
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
raises hand on "snow crash"
but it’s been a long time and the fine details are funny. heh, i was focused more on the sumerian the first few times around.
anyhoo- i’m with woody, what he’s laid out is about how i’d have put it. i’ll add: there is a decided desperate element of racism in all this; practice killing of millions of brown Others in anticipation of supressing the majority “minority” US demographic reality in the near future. Sure there are nonwhites in the New FreiKorps, but there will be an ideological pedigree requirement and within the organization itself leadership will be reserved to those of the right color. what i find most interesting is how well they work with various religious sects (although my friend rmj wouldn’t call those folks religious). The Dominionists, most broadly understood, include crazies in every fundie variety, from papists to the dreaded 1st baptists to the mormons to the nutbag orthodoxians from the First Monotheism, and a whole lot more. I wonder how that works for the troops? the book i’m thinking of is by ken macleod, who posits that future corporate/christian theocracies will trade globally by producing “approved for people of the book” goods. burkhas and educational materials and suchlike, which get used in fundie communities around the world.
…right now, this is the bunch that scares me the most, the mercenary quasi-military organizations that gird the bushist movement. what’s icky is that price- i mean pince- no, gosh, i mean Prince, (with the capital P, o little person) came up so quickly. he was just another winger trustafarian with a hard on for playing tough guy. he didn’t decide to stick it out and harness his wealth and power in service to his country. he decided to get in on the Gravy Train, and have a little bloody, racisit, authoritarian fun while at it. and other stuff, but we won’t talk about that here. that’s Patriotism(tm)! this the amerikan way!
it sickens me, and tells you not a little about them, that they are willing to grind up and destroy people who are truly trying to serve, however misguided their motivations may be/have been. it’s not just the money, it’s the risk. the contractors have the option at any time to walk away, transfer to something less stressful, get the less mundanely dangerous assignment. i still recall all the cowboy porn imagery in the early days of the bush admn, the kind of stuff only people who had no real concern for the safety of the troops would show. war! so glorious!
no less than wilkerson himself told me that the politicization of the military leadership/officer class is a serious problem, and when you add in the problem of private mercenaries, it seems hard to imagine how we avoid “police state.” actually, it’s here, the question is just how brutal it will decide to be on citizens.
Yeah, I read Snow Crash
I could see lots of New South Africa franchises popping up soon, sure.
But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!
Not Just Mercenary Armies: Mercenary Secret Police
There are spies in the private sector, and worse.
These aren’t just the people listening in on your phones and reading your email for the DoJ and the RNC.
These will be the people that crash in your door in the middle of the night and take you to those KBR Kamps they’ve been building for when the time is right.
If they aren’t stopped first, that is.
Sarah, WGG, you are absolutely right, because a really patriotic military would definitely cramp their style.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
There will never be burkhas here
At least until the RFID chips are implanted.
Burkhas cause the facial recognition software big problems, don’t you know.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
tell it to the boys in the pointy white hoods
although that may be where toe-tapping as a means of recognition originated…
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
oooh, snap!
perhaps we should get the toe-tappers to switch to burkhas. no, wait…
heh. well, at least we will all share some funny jokes between waterboarding at gitmo.