Comments on Whose Side Are They On, Anyway?
Why in God's name am I laughing my ass off right now?
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Keep up the posts, COMTE! We need more of you and less of this.
I can't believe our own soldiers didn't fucking kill these guys - they allowed themselves to be forced onto the ground? I mean, all that firepower and no fire fight? Pussies.
Doesn't that technically make the Blackwater guys enemy combatants?
I appreciate Newsweek writing about this, but I am sure that they will forget all about it the second something shiny passes their eyes.
In "Babylon by Bus," the memoire of those two crazy kids who went to Iraq during the brief period of less violence after our takeover in 2003, there are interesting descriptions of the frisson felt by Green Zone denizens when, e.g., a contractor entered a disco.
It's time to bring them all home.
The soldiers should've killed the motherfuckers. I mean c'mon, were they confused by the white faces? If those Blackwater mercernaries had all been dark and swarthy, I guarantee they would not have survived that incident.
Worst of all, is that Proconsul P. Bremer and crew sactified immunity from Iraqi law for all contractors shortly after the invasion. Only NOW is anyone paying attention to it when they blatantly kill civilians with no pretext.
Most sickening is when Leerless Feeder Bush was asked last year by some college co-ed about this loophole, he played it off as the I'm-just-a-dumbfounded-4-year-old routine:
My compatriot Naomi Klein has a great essay in this month's Harper's connecting the outsourcing of the Iraq war to disaster-response-for-profit. It's from her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and it outlines the way corporations like Blackwater are gaining staggering amounts of power through what she calls 'disaster capitalism'. I just read it yesterday, and now this Newsweek story -- jeesus.
it's not your daddy's Military/ Industrial Complex anymore. they took out the slash mark and now the corporations are themselves militarizing outside any sort of oversight. pair that with the suspension of habeas corpus, flouting of the Geneva Conventions... are you scared yet? you should be.
@10: Yup. All you need now is extraterritoriality within property owned by corporations, and you've got chapter one of the Shadowrun backstory.
If outsourcing our military to Blackwater is what's necessary to usher in a new age of magic and cyberpunk set in a dystopian future, then I for one welcome our new extraterritorial corporate overlords.
11 & 12:
That was brilliant. FTW!
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