He is already Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, the most lethal military on this planet. So why does he also need a mercenary army? I found a link to a documentary on Blackwater everyone here may find interesting:
Brasscheck TV
Bush's Private Army
Blackwater: The Shadow Army
Coming to a city near you?
Produced by the US magazine The Nation.
"No one knows for sure, but it's believed that as much as 40% of the military budget goes to private contractors including private armies.
There are thousands of private mercenaries operating on behalf of the US in Iraq and elsewhere around the world. Nearly 1,000 have been killed in Iraq alone, but their casualties are not counted. Nor has Congress been able to discover exactly how many mercenaries the US employs there.
One of these firms, Blackwater USA, a big supporter of George Bush, is now deploying in the US. They were present in New Orleans after the levee collapses.
http://www.brasschecktv.com/...
Hold on to your hats, there's a lot more under the fold.
Yesterday, I wrote a diary asking all of my fellow kossacks to name just ONE good reason why Mister Bush should not be charged and tried for TREASON against the United States. Today, I'm going to add a new flavor and ask why does Mister Bush have his own private Army, Praetorian Guard or "SS"?
Who are these Blackwater mercenaries, and from where did they come? A little precursory history lesson is required:
"On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting–many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation–Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.
"The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America," Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff, "You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world.... [But] the adversary’s closer to home," he said. "It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself."
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757–American Airlines Flight 77–smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn’t take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war–laid out just a day before–on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the "most sweeping transformation of America’s global force posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld’s trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare–the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
http://sanityforsale.wordpress.com/...
Sounds innocent enough, and everyone here knows that no one in our government attacked us on 9/11. But the bone-chilling coincidence is enough to make anyone sit-up and take notice, and ask intelligent questions about the Rumsfeld Doctrine. So why a mercenary army, Mister Bush?
The plot thickens:
"The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq–an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department’s Total Force" as "its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors–constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors–conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, "We’re going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what’s going on with contractors. They don’t have a clear mission and they’re falling all over each other." Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, "This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey, "Wouldn’t it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
A frightening picture of Bush's "Praetorian Guard"
Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld’s statement that contractors are part of the *"Total Force"* as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation’s "warfighting capability and capacity." Invoking Rumsfeld’s designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law–entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military’s court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard.
So what and who is Blackwater?
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince–the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince’s private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training." In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party’s takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the "war on terror" that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. "I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security," Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. "The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror," winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world’s largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.
There's nothing wrong with "free enterprise" and the entrepreneural spirit. It's "the American way", right?
The only problem is Blackwater isn't the American way. It's the way to dictatorship and a police state!
This diary is a story of corruption with deep roots. It is only the tip of the iceberg. More diaries to follow in the coming days and weeks. I want you all to think about the ominous implications that Mister Bush's private mercenary army poses. How safe are we, when our POTUS feels the need for one?