Blackwater

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, the private military force, has been implicated in a scheme involving murder, prostitution, and the ultimate goal of destruction of the Islamic world. These are allegations included in a post by Jeremy Scahill, on thenation.com. Scahill has made his journalistic career documenting the bizarre paramilitary world of Blackwater, which you might recall, changed its name to Xe after the shootout in Baghdad that left seventeen Iraqis dead.

The allegations are contained in affidavits filed in a courtcase filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights claiming that Blackwater engaged in war crimes.

It's a horrifying glimpse into the world of privitization. It's why the trend towards taking essential roles from government and making them into profit centers is dangerous and wrong. Take the time to read Scahill's piece. He knows Blackwater and knows Prince.

Distraction

Are the Republicans distracting us on the issue of torture by claiming that because two Democrats were in the know as to what the CIA was doing that no one is entitled to really know what happened?

What is the difference between authorizing a technique after reading one of Jay Bybee's or John Yoo's Office of Legal Counsel memos where the means of "enhanced interrogation" were laid out, let's face it, it was torture, and being told in a meeting under wraps of security clearances that "enhanced interrogation" techniques were being used?

Frankly, we all knew that someone was torturing in the name of the American people. Information was leaked to the press, the Washington Post specifically, in 2004. Does that mean we are all complicit and therefore, we aren't entitled to full investigation, disclosure, and prosecutions, if appropriate?

This week in testimony before Congress, a former military interrogator, Ali Soufan, claimed that it was the private contractors who came in and without the experience or the understanding upped the ante on how to get information out of detainees.

He considered them thugs. That makes this entire mess even more compelling. Now we have to know, because if it was the privatizing of intelligence work that destroyed the system, we have a lot of cleaning up to do, by getting contractors out of the business of keeping us safe for democracy. Like everything under the Bush administration, private trumped public, and with it all of the rules of the constitution and decency. Leon Panetti, Obama's head of the CIA, has already announced that only CIA agents are allowed to interrogate detainees now. However, Congress immunized private contractors from liability!

I can understand why Obama is saying no to the release of the images of what really happened, claiming they would merely inflame sentiments, provide more recruiting materials for young radicals, and consequently, harm the troops. He is commander in chief.

But watch Jon Stewart's take on the complexity of transparency and truth from last night's show. Especially with regard to the discharge from the military of yet another Arabic translator, Dan Choi, because he is gay. That's 54 discharges of Arabic translators because they are admittedly gay. As Stewart reminds us, at least Dan Choi and the other translators would understand what someone was saying after being waterboarded!

For Profit Prisons Suck

In yet another fraud, this time involving at least two judges in Pennsylvania, we are learning more about how corrupting the transformation of essential government functions into private businesses for profit can be. This seems to have been one of the chief objectives of ideological Republican law making.

This time, however, the corruption becomes sickening, because it involves our children.

Operating under the rather benign name "Western PA Child Care" and "PA Child Care," these companies operate juvenile facilities for wayward teens. But the companies were wayward, kicking back $2.6 million to two judges to reward the jurists for sentencing kids to time rather than compel participation in programs that would keep families intact. The real pity is that the children sentenced to time in Child Care come from some of the most economically devoured communities in Western Pennsylvania.

As if Halliburton in Iraq and Blackwater, aka Xe, anywhere it operated, didn't provide enough evidence to warn us about the dangers of removing essential functions out of government into profit companies, especially companies whose stock might not be publicly traded and therefore shrouded in secrecy. Accountability, remember? Xe will now be shifting its work from providing security to training governments in security. And we know how much Blackwater aka Xe, appreciates those rules contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Remember New Orleans post Katrina? Remember Baghdad?

War As Corruption

No matter who ends up writing the history of the American invasion of Iraq, no matter whether it's five, ten, or one hundred years from now, it will necessarily include the lust for oil, the grab for Iraqi oil reserves, no matter how much "democracy" icing Bush and his cohorts wanted to put on the story back in 2003 or ever.

Here's a new fact to get angry over: According to Harper's Index for November 2008, the US government has paid Blackwater, the private security firm, $110,000,000 from federal small business contract funds!!!

According to its own website, Blackwater has operations domestically in: Moyock, North Carolina; Mt. Carroll, Illinois; San Diego, California; and Tampa, Florida. Internationally, Blackwater has offices in East Africa; Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; and UAE. Blackwater claims to operate in nine countries.

Blackwater hardly qualifies as a small business, although it remains privately held and therefore not subject to many transparency requirements. But as we have seen time after time, this Bush administration doesn't understand the rule of law.

I'm currently reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." If the Bush administration hadn't been in a delusional state about global warming and not quite so greedy to fill its own pockets with the proceeds of the sale of the last of the planet's oil reserves, we might not be in this global financial crisis. Instead the US could have shown real leadership, opening the doors to new sustainable technologies, recycling everything the consumer uses, finding alternative fuels, which translates into good jobs at home and abroad, trade with other nations, and a quieter planet. By sending all of our money to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, we have succeeded in funding the very source of anti-modernist, misogynistic fundamentalism. We didn't need the Patriot Act to try to stop the flow of money to support terrorism, that's all we had to do was trade in our SUVs for hybrids.