Naomi Wolf: Blackwater: "Newly Created Thug Caste"

[babylonsister]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/27472

Blackwater: "Newly Created Thug Caste"
Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2007-10-05 18:45. Media

By Naomi Wolf

Congress is finally asking questions of Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater, the private mercenary organization that massacred seventeen civilians in Iraq recently. As I mentioned before, Blackwater operates in Iraq entirely outside the rule of law and has close ties to the White House. The New York Times today reported just how close - Prince's sister-in-law is a major Bush fundraiser and ally.

What still evades the framing of this debate, though, is that the violent lawlessness perpetrated against civilians in Iraq by this newly created thug caste is a taste of what is in store for us at home - unless Congress confronts the President's and Prince's plans to bring Blackwater increasingly to a neighborhood near you. It is remarkable that the hearings focus on what Blackwater is doing in Iraq - but not on what Blackwater plans to and is legally able to do here in the US when the President determines there is a `public emergency' that requires the restoration of `public order' - a power that he arrogated more completely with the 2007 Defense Authorization Act. The second phase of the blueprint of what I have called in The End of America a `fascist shift' is what we are beginning to see now: increasing physical intimidation of civilians and increasing staging or provocation of situations in the a federalized national guard or a Blackwater paramilitary force is sent in at the behest of a leader - over the heads of the people's representatives - to `restore public order.' I note that Congress is outraged that there were plans to stage a fake scenario of a dirty bomb detonation in three US cities next week - plans that were not fully revealed to Congress. The second stage of a fascist shift on the blueprint I identified in The End of America calls for disorienting public spectacles, sudden scenes of shocking violence against civilians (see the tasering of a student in Gainesville, Florida, and the death of a woman who looks like you or me in a holding cell in the Phoenix airport) and the declaration that a situation is unstable so call for a paramilitary force in order to keep the people safe.

Congress doesn't get who Blackwater contractors are. Prince likes to wrap his people in the flag and say they are facing `bad guys.' Prince actually systematically recruits the baddest of the `bad guys': Jeremy Scahill reports that Blackwater intentionally recruits former military and paramilitary personnel from regimes that specialize in neofascist repression of their own populations and who train their paramilitary and military in the torture and subjugation of their own critics, journalists, political leaders and other civil society figures: Ecuadorans, Nigerians, Chileans, Syrians. That is who we can find ourselves facing in the streets of New York - or Kansas City - tomorrow unless Congress rolls back the horrific laws that gave the President and Prince these dark-side powers.

Remember: Italy was a parliamentary democracy - with newspapers, cinema, a wide span of political parties, dissent and a vital modern culture - when the Blackshirts began to beat selected individuals in newspaper offices, in the countryside, around voting booths. Italy was still a democracy when the Blackshirts murdered a major opposition figure, shocking a society that was still technically free into silence. Same tactic was used by the National Socialists - who studied Mussolini - before they came formally to power. In what was still a working democracy a targeted paramilitary responded to Hitler's directives - intimidating protesters, beating up critics, essentially taking ownership of the streets - even while Germany still had a working Parliament and Constitution. Remeber when TSA officials were making passengers at the airport drink their baby's milk - including human breast milk? Both the Blackshirts and the Brownshirts forced citizens to drink liquids such as emetics as anintimidation tactic.

Reports are coming in from around the US that passengers in line at airports are being told by TSA agents to `FREEZE!!' in line - for up to half an hour. A Mills College professor was taken into a holding cell (most of us don't know that US airports now have what are essentially interrogation cells - Maher Arar was kept in one for two days and prevented by US agents from calling his lawyer - then rendered to Syria for torture). She was told that if she moved she would be considered to be assaulting her interrogator. For the record, National Socialists forced their prisoners to freeze in place - sometimes until they dropped.

Immigrants are being rounded up and the men separated from the women - another chilling scene from the infamous past, and a new scene in America - then deported en masse to holding areas in another state - leaving babies and children behind. Agents rounding them up are breaking into their homes, smashing glass. A mayor in the reddest of red states, Alabama, said a predawn raid that cleared out his town was like `a Gestapo tactic'. Again in the case of the raids we see that the State begins its crackdown with people at the margins, then moves to the heart of society; but in all these cases, what is clear is that the State is habituating citizens to being moved around at gunpoint, physically intimidated or frightened by representatives of the government. Once people are scared of being hurt if they speak up democracy is more than halfway closed down; physical fear silences people that can never be quieted if they know that they are, as the Founders intended, safe in dissent - or simply while waiting in line at the airport.

Congress shouldn't just be questioning Prince about Iraq; it should be prohibiting any activity of mercenaries on our soil, and investigating the crimes committing in the course of this administration's determination to gut the Second Amendment and to give the executive his own bloody army of proven torturers, ready to train on citizens here as well as at home.

[budibudinski]

1. Our STUPID Congress Dems Should Read This..WTF is wrong w/them??

Are they part of the fascist handover of the USA? Or are they not?

[LibertyorDeath]

12. "Are they part of the fascist handover of the USA"

We'll find out soon enough.

[jaysunb]

2. " Congress doesn't get who Blackwater contractors are."

this is the most frightening part.....

[babylonsister]

3. I think they're 'getting' it now, between the news reports flowing fast

and furious, and testimony by Jeremy Scahill, I'd think they have the big picture covered.

[jaysunb]

4. I find it hard to believe how stupid

congress people appear to be.

These mercaneries have been on the loose for almost 5 years, and just like Saddams WMD, if I knew he didn't have them, what the hell were these people thinking about. They seem to be very easily bullshitted or they're complicit in the whole thing. :evilfrown:

[babylonsister]

5. It does make you wonder; I saw Scahill a year ago, and I knew how

dangerous Blackwater was. Plus there were the hearings earlier this year with the Blackwater families. I just don't know what their excuse is.

[FiveGoodMen]

8. I don't see how they CAN be that stupid, which only leaves one alternative: They want this!

The only -- slim -- hope we've got is to clean out the Dem party fast (obviously, the Pukes are past hope)!

[Donnachaidh]

6. these fundies consider themselves *knights* in a crusade

Above the law, above reproach.

When they do come back to the States, and are hired by Corporate bastards -- will we really be able to stop them *or* their bosses?

They need to be slapped off the face of the earth. If we're going to survive as a nation, Prince and his thugs need to be dis-armed and humbled. These fake GI Joe's need to go.

[tiptoe]

7. Glomming off US taxpayer monies, under guise of "fighting terrorism" in a fraud war. nt

[Duncan]

9. Exactly.

How is it even remotely OK for a privately owned for profit corporate army to exist? Blackwater and its ilk ain't no militias. What laws are in place to check and balance that sort of power? Why the fuck aren't these questions in the public discussion?

Timid little noises like "We need to begin mumbling about regulating their behavior."
WITFH?! WITGDMFH!?

[illinoisprogressive]

10. Seeing how they are in bed with mark Penn, Clinton's advisor,

if she is elected they will continue to grow and become even more out of control

[puebloknot]

11. K&R Thanks for the research, but not the message! :) Scary.

[Vidar]

13. K&R.

[JohnyCanuck]

14. "incompetence and ignorance always lead to tyranny"

America 2007 is Germany 1930

SNIP

The 2004 election revealed that many American citizens are as intellectually and morally incompetent as the Germans in 1930. Such incompetence and ignorance always lead to tyranny. The United States is exactly at the same point in national degradation as the German nation in the 1930s when Hitler assumed absolute power and began his regime of mass murder and war crimes against the people of the world.

We've been conditioned to see Germany under Hitler as an unquestionably horrible example of dictatorial tyranny and inhuman barbarity--and to see our present American culture as completely opposite to that of Nazi Germany. And we like to think that if a tyranny such as that in Germany under the Nazi regime were present and growing in America we'd unquestionably be able to see it.

So it's a shock when we realize: most people living in Nazi Germany didn't see the tyranny! They thought it was the best time of their lives!

SNIP

To the Germans in Mayer's study, each occasion of Nazi violence was worse than the last, but only a little worse. So they waited for the one shocking event, thinking that they would join with others if or when it happened. But as the violence escalated, no one rose up to condemn the concentration camps and general oppression. No one wanted to act alone, and when a mass uprising failed to occur, the common people just let events take their course. They progressively lost the ability to understand the horror of Nazism and the will to oppose it.

http://www.hermes-press.com/germany1930.htm