From San Diego Union-Tribune:
Blackwater in Potrero? No way
April 19, 2007
If there is any career pursuit that we, as Americans, have come to despise, it is that of the military mercenary. Our contempt for war's hirelings has historic underpinnings. British efforts to quell the American Revolution depended heavily on thousands of smartly trained, well-paid Hessians – German-speaking troops who inflicted some of the costliest casualties on George Washington's ragtag army.
Often glamorized as “soldiers of fortune,” mercenary forces will enlist in a cause not out of patriotism but after asking, “What's in it for me?”
Many Americans have felt troubled by the Bush administration's willingness to “outsource” much of the war in Iraq to private contractors. Feeding of the troops, plus certain maintenance and supply operations traditionally undertaken by the military itself, have been consigned to commercial management. Ex-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld defended the practice as a way to foil what he called “the Pentagon bureaucracy.” When Rumsfeld resigned, the number of civilians employed in Afghanistan and Iraq had reached nearly 100,000 – roughly two-thirds the number of our uniformed troops engaged there.
More recently, the Pentagon has also entrusted a number of highly sensitive security tasks in Baghdad and elsewhere to private hands: to an 8-year-old company called Blackwater. For the first time ever, our U.S. military has relinquished high-risk operations to armed civilians who are answerable to a contract employer, not to the chain of command. Although relied upon to preserve order in specified trouble spots, or to man military prisons such as Abu Ghraib, Blackwater has thus far operated outside the military justice system, its hired hands not subject to courts-martial.
Involvement in quasi-military missions has emboldened this shadowy band to take the next step. Blackwater's original services were limited to training policemen or providing security guards for non-government clients. Now it announces itself ready to help keep or restore peace anywhere in the world.
That was the message its vice chairman, Cofer Black, delivered in February to a Special Operations Forces Exhibition in Amman, Jordan. “We are not simply a private security company,” Black asserted. “We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping and stability operations firm which provides turnkey solutions.”
[continue reading at this link:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070419/news_lz1e19vandeer.html ]
PS: Remember Cofer Black? http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602black.html
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