September 19, 2007

• Bad Boys, Bad Boys....

  Whatchoo gonna DO when they come for YOU???? 

  I'm sure by now most of you have heard about the student at the University of Florida who was repeatedly tased by campus cops for asking visiting speaker John Kerry some questions about the 2004 elections, and recommending a BOOK by Greg Palast.  Here are a couple of versions of the video: 

  http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/18/student.tasered.ap/index.html
  
  
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=6bVa6jn4rpE

  Note the guy's fellow students just sitting there, doing nothing, some of them even smiling, and John Kerry at the podium first offering to answer the student's questions and then making a little joke, never intervening. 

  On YouTube there are a number of video responses to the incident also, some of them quite thoughtful.  I especially like the one by a guy, apparently a U. of Florida student or former student and former member of student government, who calls himself TheRadikal and has a web site, TheRadikal.com .

  And then there's this:

  Published on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by TruthDig.com

  Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco

  by Robert Scheer

  Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some 

  other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is 

  dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected 

  government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal 

  power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 

  private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to 

  Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

  Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from 

  the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater 

  would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of 

  keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry 

  claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department 

  convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired “randomly at citizens” in 

  a crowded square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others. 

  So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country 

  after what a government spokesman called a “flagrant assault … on 

  Iraqi citizens.”

  But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to 

  control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel 

  working for the U.S. in Iraq? Don’t they know about Order 17, which 

  former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant 

  contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from 

  Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of 

  power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once 

  headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and 

  guarded by Blackwater and other “private” soldiers.

  They are “private” in the same fictional sense that our uniformed 

  military is a “volunteer” force, since both are lured by the dollars 

  offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn 

  substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and 

  an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the 

  uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in 

  the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a 

  conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by 

  now in protest.

  Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S. government purchases 

  whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private 

  contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus 

  contract to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That is 

  why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al- Maliki

  branded a “crime,” is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are 

  clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other 

  contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be 

  scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the 

  country.

  But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As 

  the Associated Press reported on Monday: “The U.S. clearly hoped the 

  Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of 

  responsibility and compensation to the victim’s families - and not 

  insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here 

  without.” Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate 

  last week: “There is simply no way at all that the State Department 

  Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time 

  personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no 

  alternative except through contracts.”

  Consider the irony of that last statement - that the U.S. experiment in 

  building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of 

  foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to 

  launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his 

  farewell address, once the American government enters into these 

  “foreign entanglements,” we lose the Republic, because public 

  accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for
  empire.

  Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue 

  from the U.S. government - much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no 

  doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by 

  company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents - its 

  operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and 

  others in this international security racket operate as independent 

  states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the 

  ones that the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed forces. 

  “We are not simply a ‘private security company,’ ” Blackwater boasts 

  on its corporate website. “We are a professional military, law 

  enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. … 

  We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting 

  the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom 

  and democracy everywhere.”

  Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

  Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for 

  The San Francisco Chronicle.

  • 6:08 pm
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