This morning comes the news that Blackwater USA has been banned from Iraq after a gun battle that left 8 Iraqi civilians dead. We see this as a pivotal moment in the war, perhaps as a bookend to the company’s “Mogadishu Moment” back in March 2004, when four of its contractors’ charred bodies were hung in effigy from a Fallujah bridge, precipitating a brutal siege of the city and uptick in US aggression overall.
Hopefully this most recent incident will further shed light on the privatization of the Iraq War, in which private companies operate outside the law and even knowledge of the US government and its people (not to mention the Iraqis!). We’ve heard that 40% of the spending goes to such private firms, and that there are up to 40,000 private contractors operating in military roles, of whom around 800 have been killed (but not included in any official reports). Indeed, these private contractors are so entrenched that we are not even sure if such an order from the Iraqi government can and will be enforced.
Their founder is Erik Prince, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who is almost exactly our age (which, for the record, is “Older than Jesus®”). Along with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater has been pressing to get their “troops” installed in Darfur: noble, one would think, but since they have been pushing to get into a predominately Christian area, we fear this could become a “crusade” in the worst sense of the word.
Oh, and they were deployed in New Orleans (after Katrina) as well. Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***ers.
Much of our information was culled from Jeremy Cahill, author of the book Blackwater, who can be seen in the following clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqM4tKPDlR8
