A caller on C-SPAN said US was looking for recruits in Central America...

[kentuck]

and other impoverished countries, such as Honduras and Panama. Anyone else hear this call? Are we looking for "soldiers of fortune"?

[Selteri]

1. Didn't hear the caller

But I as aware of this.

See History - Rome

They hired barbarians for their army until they eventually put a barbarian in charge... he then proceeded to sack them.

[kentuck]

2. Shouldn't this be a big story?

:shrug:

[TheDebbieDee]

10. I read that these mercs are being paid up to $8,000 a month!

Enough to make a US soldier, scrounging around for scrap metal to re-inforce his/her humvee, really question why the hell he/she was sent to Iraq!

[lectrobyte]

3. Yes, a lot of our "civilian contractors" are from those countries...

I seem to recall a few media articles about this when the folks from Blackwater were killed in Iraq.

[leftchick]

4. Columbia to be exact...

There was an article posted in LBN about it. Great huh? The US is highering terrorists!

[AG78]

5. Yes

I believe Halliburton is employing 1000 mercenaries from Chile, or Colombia, or from Chile and Colombia. There was a story about it recently. Can't recall all the details, but that's the main point of it.

Aren't there something like 20,000 of them running around Iraq? Be they Chilean, Colombian, South African, Honduran, or American.

A private military for every multi-national corporation. Quite the future we in front of us.

[kentuck]

9. Our tax dollars are paying for these mercenaries ?

Our tax dollars are paying for these mercenaries !!!!

[TheDebbieDee]

11. Up to $8,000 a month!!!!!!!!!!

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

6. There are actually a lot of non-citizen U.S. soldiers from places in

Central America and Mexico. For some reason the L.A. Times often has stories about these people and their families (often in the context that they were killed in Iraq). So this has been going on for a while. Not sure what rules govern this but you better believe they are gonna be slackened up in the current environment.

Much better to have Jose from Guatemala get his leg blown off in Mosul than Susie and Jim from Indianapolis. Just like the busboys in the restaurants, get someone else to do your (dangerous) dirty work for you, and cheaper too!

The U.S. Navy has a long history of this with non-civilian Filipinos recruited as enlisted members.

[femme.democratique]

7. The recruits aren't for the military...

They're for Domestic agencies, these are the guys that will run the stormtrooper operations and the torture .....uh, I mean concentration camps. People that have no qualms about killing Americans.

[Solly Mack]

8. Negroponte n/t

[EmpireWeAre]

12. Check out Democracy Now on the subject

"Halliburton and other private military contractors have begun advertising campaigns in El Salvador, Colombia and Nicaragua to recruit ex-soldiers to work in Iraq."

Dec.23 show

http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl