It's the tail end of the long Thanksgiving weekend and I'm having great fun catching up on on all the t.v. shows I never have time to watch. Since so many of my faves have a political bent it was only a matter of time before I came across blogworthy fodder. And boy, did I ever.
Enter Jeremy Scahill, a journalist at The Nation who appeared a couple of weeks ago on "Real Time with Bill Maher" and his new book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
While most of us are appalled at the activities Blackwater has been engaged in during their tenure in Iraq, it's their activites in the U.S. which I find downright chilling. Not only was the company founded by Eric Prince, an Evangelical Christian supremacist, but they have, in essence, assembled a shadow military - both in Iraq and here in the U.S. - with better paid troops, better technology and better weaponry than our own military.
While most of us are appalled at the activities Blackwater has been engaged in during their tenure in Iraq, it's their activites in the U.S. which I find downright chilling. Not only was the company founded by Eric Prince, an Evangelical Christian supremacist, but they have, in essence, assembled a shadow military - both in Iraq and here in the U.S. - with better paid troops, better technology and better weaponry than our own military.
Not to sound too much like the conspiracy theorist I am but when you have a firm with as many troops as Blackwater, expanding as fast as Blackwater is (their headquarters is in North Carolina but they are set to open bases in Illinois and California) and with a sense of religious superiority that they use to justify their activities, including murder, you have a situation where the freedom and liberty of the populace of our country are in serious jeopardy.
And we wonder why those militia guys in Montana and Idaho hole up in cabins with arsenals. Maybe they know something we don't?
J.
1 comment:
You have a blog! :-)
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