War Handwavium

Remember back in 2007, when Blackwater got some bad press for shooting 17 Iraqi civilians? American and Iraqi investigators had declared the shooting to be unjustified. And Blackwater was afraid they’d get thrown out of Iraq which would lose them their State Department contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Turns out, Blackwater executives authorized a million dollars in bribes to Iraqi officials to silence their criticism

Classy.

No wonder they changed their name to Xe.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/shocker-by-digby-who-could-ever-have.html

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband is multimillionaire, Richard Blum. Mr. Feinstein owns about 25% of a company called URS. URS does a lot of contracts with the US Military. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars a pop.

Charles Lewis, executive of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity watchdog group in Washington, asked “Why hasn’t she expressed outrage about some of the potential conflicts with people in or close to the Bush administration?” Dick Cheney’s connections with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was fodder for outrage over Cheney’s invasion of Iraq. Maybe Misses Feinstein didn’t object to Cheney’s conflict of interest because she had her own conflict of interest.

Glenn Greenwald highlights Feinstein’s voting record. She authorized the Iraq invasion, she funded the Iraq war without a timetable for withdrawal that her fellow Democrats wanted. She supported the Patriot Act. She helped General Hayden get confirmed as CIA director even though he presided over the illegal wiretapping program. The supported Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General even after he refused to answer basic questions about torture. And in October of 2009, she used her position as Chair of the Intelligence Committee to gut most proposed reforms to the Patriot Act.

And now Misses Feinstein is leading the charge to put public pressure on Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A war that could profit her husband with millions of dollars.

If you are a Democrat and you live in California, I suggest you write your Little Orphan Annie of a Senator and tell her that she should stop working to get her Daddy Warbucks of a husband military contracts and start working to end Bush’s wars and Bush’s Patriot Act and Bush’s wiretapping programs.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/13/afghanistan/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/04/27/BA284459.DTL

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/

A former Blackwater employee in a sworn statement alleged that CEO Erik Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

The allegations also include Blackwater killing Iraqis cooperating with a State Department investigation into Blackwater, weapon smuggling, and use of weapons outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

The US government should never have outsourced its war to a mercenary corporation. And the reason is demonstrated in Blackwater’s behaviour in Iraq.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill