Pottersville: "A Period Of Consequences" (Blackwater)

[Hissyspit]

http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/09/period-of-consequences.html

"A Period of Consequences."

That's what Al Gore would call the recent comeuppance of Blackwater USA.

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Blackwater USA is a cracker-dry tinderbox that had survived one match after another due to them being blown out by Pentagon IG’s who would later join the payroll, federal judges and neocons in the administration.

Yet we already know all this just as we already knew months beforehand that four Blackwater employees died in Fallujah in ’04 because their employers skimped on their protection to pocket an extra million and a half dollars. We knew this before the Congressional documents made this public again.

And Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, certainly knew that and a good deal more. In fact, Scahill ironically did a much better job of presenting those four victims, Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston and Michael Teague, as human beings with loving families than their own employers who viewed those living men as a potential drain on their bottom line and their deaths as mere legal liabilities to be avoided at all costs.

We know, we know, we know. And finally the full scope of the greed and perfidy of the mercenary industry has outgrown the left wing blogosphere and is spilling over into the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Congressional Record like a pool of blood.

These lessons, however, remain stubbornly lost on a Democratic majority that sees no problem in continuing to fund private war criminals, soldiers of fortune, who drive around Iraq in their SUVs like a bunch of hopped-up hillbillies on a roving turkey shoot, strafing with machine gun fire Iraqi civilians and their cars as if it was all a live-action video game.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL9) of Chicago, are virtually the only members of the 535 member Congress who seem even cognizant of the problem that is Blackwater and the “private security industry”, much less vocalizing criticism.

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