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

[rodeodance]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20070919/cm_uc_crrscx/op_173877;_ylt=Au31N7oXWcLkboD3qjWEvEWcts8F

..........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." .......