This is Blackwater USA....

www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20070330_jeremy_scahill_on_soldiers_of_fortune

[an excerpt]

I think is the key point right now is that we need to start seriously looking in this country at the privatization of war as part of the bigger privatization agenda. Look at the prison system in this country right now. Not only do we have private corporations running prisons, but we also have faith-based prisons.

One of Eric Prince’s, the founder of Blackwater, one of his close political allies, Chuck Colson, was Nixon’s hatchet man. One of the first people that went to jail for the Watergate conspiracy. Chuck Colson has now reinvented himself as this evangelical leader. He runs a faith-based prison in Sugar Land, Texas, the former district of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. And he runs the lives of 200 prisoners and they are running it as a Christian missionary operation. And Chuck Colson speaks openly about how we need to bring the Christian word into the prisons to battle the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in prisons.

And so we see it in the prisons, we see it in law enforcement. Right now in this country there are more private law enforcement agents than there are official law enforcement agents. That’s incredible! That should disturb people. Because it’s not just about “is the private sector more efficient than the government?” It’s about accountability and oversight. Where are the laws that govern these privatized forces? We’ve seen that in Iraq there’s no laws that govern them, and in a way it’s the same at home here. If your kid gets killed by a private security guard outside of a Best Buy, what happens? How do you get justice for your son? I mean, I have a friend whose son was killed by a security guard. He’s gotten nowhere with it. What laws govern these people?

Harris:
Do you think it’s apathy? This is public information. Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman—pick a liberal journalist. They’ve all talked about the privatization and how it is overtaking our American citizenship. Jeremy, I’d be interested to know, what do you think has us so paralyzed that we’re not responding? We’re not up in arms about this, as I think we should be.

Scahill:
Well, I think you’re cutting at something really important here. I do agree with you that a lot of this stuff is in the public sphere, but I don’t think people understand how deep it has cut at this point. I was surprised, I wrote an Op-Ed for the L.A. Times [Jan. 25, 2007] and basically stated a bunch of things that we already know. There are 100,000 contractors in Iraq; the war has been greatly privatized. And I got so much mail from people who said “I had no idea about this,” including from congressional offices. And so I think that as much as we may think that this stuff is in the public sphere, that we may think people know about this, I don’t know that that’s so true.

And I think that this is something that’s really going to come back to bite us and is coming back to bite us very fast. And the fact of the matter is that Blackwater is expanding to California. They’re looking to open a new facility in San Diego. They’re expanding to Illinois. They’ve applied for operating licenses in all coastal states in the U.S. Their representatives met recently with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to discuss doing disaster response in California after earthquakes. This is all part of that privatization agenda, and the companies that benefit from it are well-connected companies, and that sort of embodies everything that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address when he talked about unchecked corporate power with the rise of the military-industrial complex...

[cont reading..click link above]

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