The IndyKidz tend towards high polemicism and strong rhetoric, not strong enough language or rhetoric (see: Update with excerpt below) but I still love 'em. They were Shrill before it was fashionable, and they pay attention to stories that even the progressive blogosphere often overlooks. There is another, even longer running war going on, right here in America. And its captive victims are making the parts to feed to the military machine that is gorging itself on blood overseas:

In 2005, FPI sold more than $750,000,000 worth of goods to the federal government. Sales to the Army alone put UNICOR on the Army’s list of top 50 suppliers, ahead of well-known corporations like Dell Computer, according to Wayne Woolley, Newhouse News Service.

Over the past three years, thousands of federal prisoners have been working overtime filling Pentagon contracts for everything from radio components to body armor.

Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the Army's Communication and Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., has shipped more than 200,000 radios to combat zones, most with at least some components manufactured by federal inmates working in 11 prison electronics factories around the country. Under current law, UNICOR enjoys a contracting preference known as "mandatory source," which obligates government agencies to try to buy certain goods from the prisons before allowing private companies to bid on the work. This same contracting restriction applies to state agencies. Read more…

Note: Now with Update. See bottom of post.

This name will not appear on any of the "In Memorium" lists, either the nightly one on the Jim Lehrer show, the weekly one on Stephanopoulos, or the annual one that may or may not run on Veterans Day. The news was released by the US Army, the deceased's paycheck came ultimately from the US Army, he did work that would (some would say "should") otherwise be done by members of the Army--but he worked for something called "Cochise Consultancy" so he was not technically speaking "in" the Army and does not have to be counted as a dead soldier:

Army I-Ds contractor killed in Iraqi bomb blast Read more…