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:
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 .
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.
Meanwhile I'll be getting around to your Xanga sites and leaving my pithy little comments every once in a while.
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