Blackwater, as part of the State Department's Worldwide Personal Protective Service, is protecting Barack Obama on his current trip to Afghanistan according to Jeremy Scahill, speaking today at the Gitmo panel at Netroots Nation.  Jeremy was vehement in a way I haven't heard him before in exhorting us to let Obama know what we think about his attitude towards these contractors. He's pressing on us to make our voices heard now, when Obama most needs us--before the election, not after.  

Update:AllisonInSeattle said it just as I stopped myself from climbing into bed to come back and say it myself.  It is NOT a good thing to have OUR candidate being protected by right wing Bush-supported forces!  Think about it.

Update 2:  I can see that many of us don't know about Blackwater and who they really are.  Maybe some Blackwater 101 diaries are in order.

By now I'm sure many of you have heard that San Diego's Republican mayor has halted Blackwater's permit to open its Navy training facility in Otay Mesa until the plan goes through the city's public review process.  Blackwater's response?  Sue.

Outcome below the break.

Join many others online, or if in New York city at the event, tomorrow evening:

On Tuesday, June 3, join the Center for Constitutional Rights for an exciting live webcast of the event "True Crimes: The Untold Story Behind the Devastation of Iraq."

Was this kept on the down low around here?

Obviously, Maher's show tonight was vastly superior to the Kingston/Frum atrocity.  Adam Goldberg was neurotically entertaining; Jeremy Scahill was a non-smirking, serious version of Matt Taibi, who effectively called Scarborough on his bullshit, and Farai Chediya was quite good, when she was finally able to shout down Scarborough.

But a low point came, when Maher asked "Whom would you ideally like answering the phone at 3:00 am? and Scar said Colin Powell, and proceeded to launch into a ridiculous paean to Powell that speculated that he would not have gone to war in Iraq and would have followed the "Powell Doctrine" if he had.  Sadly, no one disagreed! (Maher even agreed.)

Powell perverted his legitimacy by making the false case for war, and not speaking out until he left office.  He's as great a villain as the rest.  To see him skate was disgusting.

Jeremy Scahill reports Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will not "rule out" using private military companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq. Obama also has no plans to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009. Despite their antiwar rhetoric, both Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton have adopted the congressional Democratic position that would leave open the option of keeping tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq for many years.

via Democracy Now [transcript, video/audio links]

Book Review

I just finished "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" by Jeremy Scahill. Scahill is an award-winning investigative journalist, who's reported from Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Nigeria. He writes a very compelling, very well researched book (the reference index is 45 pages long, citing articles and materials from all over the world.)

Folks, everyone here who's been reading this week about the gassing by Blackwater should read this book.  Check it out from the library (what I did) or buy it on Amazon (link: http://www.amazon.com/... or Powell's (link: http://www.powells.com/...

 So your an Iraqi and you and your family are driving down a one way road, it is fairly crowded and you just want to get home safely.Suddenly you see a colossal Humvee bearing straight down on you,driving into the opposite direction of traffic and your immediately expected to get the hell out of the way and you want to oblige.You know the way you react in the next twenty seconds could determine you and your families fate.Some drivers know the rules of escalation, some do not. Then blasting forward flies the infamous water bottle,it hits your car if your familiar with the rules of escalation you know the next step is shooting into the engine,you want to comply,your frantic mind is overwhelmed by thoughts of stray bullets.You may also know that the next step is shooting directly into the car. The problem is that a path  has to be cleared for the aggressors. You don't know what to do.If you completely stop you run the risk of being rammed.  

This is one show that you don't want to miss!
interviews  Jeremy Scahill who reports on Blackwater in  details no other media has matched.
He wrote the book on it.

Jeremy Scahill

is an independent investigative journalist who wrote this recent bestselling book: Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Jeremy Scahill is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. He's reported from Iraq, the Balkans and Nigeria, among other places, he's a co-winner of the George Polk Award For Investigative Reporting.

Bill Moyers invites us to ask questions  at the Companion Blog to his weekly "Bill Moyers Journal" broadcast.

Updated #1 to change the name
Updated #2 to change the name back
More below the fold

Erik Prince does NOT get really challenged by Congress.  

Michael Mukasey says the president is not bound by some laws and yet will be confirmed overwhelmingly

Despite Dodd's noble threat to filibuster, the horrid bill agreed to by the likes of Jay Rockefellar will probably be approved

The Treasury Department intervenes to bail out Citibank's multibillion dollar exposure because of really bad decisions

The FCC is moving to give media conglomerates even more ability to concentrate ownership

And all that is the tip of the iceberg, because EVERYTHING is being privatized.  You should have watched Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers last night.  I did, and hence this diary.

Today is Iraq War Moratorium Day. It is a day of national individualized action observed the third Friday of every month. Take the pledge.

It's hard for me to believe that it's already been four weeks since the first Iraq War Moratorium Day. The time flew by for me. And perhaps for some of you.

Unfortunately, since then, time has just came to a halt, real and metaphorical, for more victims--civilian and military--of the continued occupation of Iraq and their loved ones .

What Rummy was doing on the day before September 11, 2001. Commentary lifted from Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the first pages of the introduction.

Today on Democracy Now! Jeremy Scahill author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" debated Doug Brooks the president of International Peace Operations Association, a trade group for the private security industry of which Blackwater is a founding member. In the wake of the recent revelations that the Iraqi government wants to throw out Blackwater and take a closer look at all of the contractors in Iraq Scahill does an excellent job taking down one of these war profiteers and tears right through the rhetoric and also gets staight to the heart of just what we're doing in Iraq.

Video and some of the transcript below:

I've read some great diaries here regarding the privatization of the military which freaks the widgets out of me.  Jeremy Scahill’s recent article in the August 15th issue of the Indypendent  delves deeper into the surreal world of mercenaries and the Bush administration’s growing reliance on this revolutionary and unaccountable ( surprise surprise) outsourcing of the war all paid for by you.  It’s scarier than Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Read the article in it’s entirety... and sleep with your lights on.

With all the attention Abu G's testimony got yesterday, another important hearing went virtually unnoticed, this one held by the Defense Sub-committee of the House Appropriations Committee on the subject of private contractors in Iraq.

The hearing began with testimony from John Hutton at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Joseph McDermott from the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. It then continued with Robert Greenwald, director and producer of Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers and Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

I liveblogged it HERE. My summary at Courage Campaign is HERE.

This diary is to recap and hopefully get it in front of more eyeballs now that video and partial transcripts are available.

Join me for some oversight over the flip...

The House Appropriations Defense Sub-Committee is having a hearing on private contractors in Iraq today. Finally some oversight, finally some freakin accountability. The first panel began at 10am EDT and featured John Hutton at the GAO and Joseph McDermott from the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. There were some interesting exchanges, which I'll recap over the flip. Let me just tease you with a truly disturbing quote from Hutton:

"I don't know how many contractors there are and I don't know what they're doing."

But now, is the big show. Panel 2 is beginning and it features Robert Greenwald, director and producer of Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers and Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. This should be good. Watch along with me at the WEBCAST.

Oversight over the flip...

UPDATE: w/video from The Gavel

I just got done watching a clip from the Daily Show where Jeremy Scahill talks with Jon Stewart about Blackwater.

What surprised me was Jon's take on it:  He seemed oddly undisturbed by the implications of what Jeremy was describing.  In fact, he prefaced the interview by basically saying that he was prepared for Jeremy's Book, Blackwater, to be more disturbing than he actually found it to be--That the situation describe in Scahill's book was kind of what he expected the case to be.

Which is exactly what I felt when I read the exerpt from his book, Bush's Shadow Army, published in The Nation.  Except it described exactly what I feared the case to be.

Why the difference in attitude?

(cross-posted from Courage Campaign)

Blackwater, the private contracting firm that sent its employees into the warzone of Iraq unprepared and unprotected, the very one that is currently under investigation by the Government Oversight Committee, is looking at California and seeing dollar signs.

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