Jeremy Scahill, Huffington Post, October 30: Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the…
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Life (and death) above the law
My latest New Matilda column discusses the role of Blackwater in Iraq: Writer Naomi Klein calls Baghdad’s Green Zone ”˜a heavily armed Carnival Cruise ship parked in a sea of despair,’ and the tag fits. The fantasy, pushed by neo-conservatives and war profiteers alike, was that Iraq would be a free-market laboratory to spread the…
News bytes
– The “left-wing” Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega continues to expand a program that completely bans abortion. Human Rights Watch is rightly outraged. – A former US official in Iraq reveals the cowboy-attitude of Blackwater. -… Yet more evidence that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is deliberately undermining the services of Palestinians themselves to please the Israelis…
Killing in the name of us
Jeremy Scahill, author of the incendiary book Blackwater, on private military contractors in the “war on terror”, speaks about the rise of this shadowy company (and here is his recent testimony before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee):
The surge uncovered
The fragility of the surge is coming to light. While the surge has been sold as a new strategy, the failings are identical to previous efforts. In the past, the efforts of US forces to establish security have been compared to stepping on a water balloon, which highlights the futility of focusing on hot spots…
Killers for hire
How will the mercenary army survive this cruel blow? The Iraqi government announced Monday it was ordering Blackwater USA, the security firm that protects U.S. diplomats, to leave the country after what it said was the fatal shooting of eight Iraqi civilians following a car bomb attack against a State Department convoy. The order by…
Reports from the inside
Financial Times, June 4: A new map of the West Bank, 40 years after its conquest by Israel in the Six Day War, gives the most definitive picture so far of a territory in which 2.5m Palestinians are confined to dozens of enclaves separated by Israeli roads, settlements, fences and military zones. Produced by the…
More bang from the buck
Jeremy Scahill, author of the best-selling book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, testified on May 10 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defence on the impact of private military contractors on the conduct of the Iraq War:
Tom’s new plan (much better than the last one?)
If America wonders why it is increasingly hated around the world, readers should… note the introductory paragraph of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s latest feature for the paper’s Sunday magazine: One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want,…