American mercenaries

[babylonsister]

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=0dce2a73-a6cf-49f1-ba0d-01917f6746a2&k=0

American mercenaries
Jeff Lee, The Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, April 05, 2007

snip//

In 2000, President George W. Bush’s advisers, including then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, embarked on a plan to overhaul the cumbersome U.S. defence system, including “outsourcing” their military needs to private mercenary firms.

Doing so achieved a key goal: to bypass Congressional oversight.

At the top of their list is a highly secretive not-so-little army called Blackwater USA, based on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, which the State Department hired to protect Bremer and other U.S. officials and CPA regional offices in Iraq.

How is it that the United States, with more than 130,000 soldiers in Iraq, came to rely on hired guns? Just who was this company? And how is it that the U.S., that self-appointed defender of democracy, thought it would be all right to turn to paid soldiers to do the things it wouldn’t or couldn’t do?

Author Scahill reveals answers to those questions in a disturbing and well-researched examination of how the Bush administration’s outsourcing propelled Blackwater USA into a powerful instrument of American foreign policy. In the simply-titled Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Scahill opens with one of two seminal events that occurred a year after Bush declared the war over.


more...

[derby378]

1. Maybe it's just me, but weren't our Armed Forces self-sufficient once upon a time?

Oh, sure, they worked with the civilian sector (and still do) to outfit the troops - Propper for uniforms, Springfield and Colt for rifles, various grocers for MREs and other foodstuffs, etc.

But it seems that the very reason the Army even has a Corps of Engineers in the first place is so that they wouldn't have to rely on the likes of Halliburton. I think that has decayed dramatically over the past 10 years.

Our troops need to be made self-sufficient again. Sure, I'd love for our soldiers to enjoy Pizza Hut pizza whenever they wanted, but I'd rather they be supplied with the tools they need to complete legitimate missions instead. Y'know, decent body armor, reliable firearms, maybe some Trophy anti-RPG systems from Israel, that sort of thing.

[Uncle Joe]

2. And here is the gist of it

"Why should anyone care that the U.S. is using a mercenary army to do its work? Scahill has an answer for that too.

“There is no effective law that governs these private contractors. Their deaths don’t get reported in the official death toll. But more importantly, their crimes go unreported, undocumented, unprosecuted and ultimately unpunished,” he said in an interview this week.

“Blackwater is at the vanguard of the Iraq occupation, guarding the senior U.S. officials, yet the company’s operations are totally shrouded in secrecy, kept away from the American people and American congress. To have this kind of unaccountable force at the front lines of the premier foreign policy issue of the president is a very disturbing development in the history of not just warfare, but American democracy."


I totally agree with the author's analysis.

Thanks for the thread babylonsister

Kicked and recommended

[whistle]

3. There is a reason for everything and Blackwater has become the

....noeconservative private army

<snip>
Blackwater: Bush’s Shadow Army
Mar 18th, 2007 by Sanity For Sale

Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration’s growing dependence on private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).

<link to video>

http://sanityforsale.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/blackwater-bushs-shadow-army/



...and we are not far from this:

<snip>
Hitler's Private Army

In 1921 Adolf Hitler formed his own private army called Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section). The SA (also known as stormtroopers or brownshirts) were instructed to disrupt the meetings of political opponents and to protect Hitler from revenge attacks. Captain Ernst Roehm of the Bavarian Army played an important role in recruiting these men, and became the SA's first leader.

Hitler's stormtroopers were often former members of the Freikorps (right-wing private armies who flourished during the period that followed the First World War) and had considerable experience in using violence against their rivals.

The SA wore grey jackets, brown shirts (khaki shirts originally intended for soldiers in Africa but purchased in bulk from the German Army by the Nazi Party), swastika armbands, ski-caps, knee-breeches, thick woolen socks and combat boots. Accompanied by bands of musicians and carrying swastika flags, they would parade through the streets of Munich. At the end of the march Hitler would make one of his passionate speeches that encouraged his supporters to carry out acts of violence against Jews and his left-wing political opponents.

When Ernst Roehm left Germany to work in Bolivia in 1925, Heinrich Himmler took over the leadership of the SA. However, in 1931 Hitler recalled Roehm to Germany and asked him to head the SA. In just over a year Roehm expanded it from 70,000 to 170,000 members. By 1934 the SA had grown to 4,500,000 men.

In 1933, General Werner von Blomberg, Hitler's minister of war, and Walther von Reichenau, chief liaison officer between the German Army and the Nazi Party, became increasingly concerned about the growing power of the SA. Ernst Roehm had been given a seat on the National Defence Council and began to demand more say over military matters. On 2nd October 1933, Roehm sent a letter to Reichenau that said: "I regard the Reichswehr now only as a training school for the German people. The conduct of war, and therefore of mobilization as well, in the future is the task of the SA.

Werner von Blomberg and Walther von Reichenau began to conspire with Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler against Roehm and the SA. Himmler asked Reinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Roehm. Heydrich, who also feared him, manufactured evidence that suggested that Roehm had been paid 12 million marks by the French to overthrow Hitler.
<MORE>

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERsa.htm

[jwirr]

5. History has long shown us why private armies are dangerous.

This is one of the most dangerous aspects of the *ss administration. Hopefully someone in congress is looking into exactly how much taxpayer's money is going to outsourced military and for what.

During the Iran/Contra hearings some of this came out as the planes that were flying things in and out of that little incident were owned by private companies.

When we get our troops home we will still be supporting the private army. They will be headquartered in that HUGE palace we are building over there and in Dubai with Haliburtin.

[ClayZ]

4. K&R