by Starman » Wed Aug 17, 2005 10:28 pm
Dreams End said:<br><br>"Starman, we have outsourced agencies guarding our military troops in Iraq. And what's worse, they make a ton more than the soldiers the are guarding."<br><br>***<br>Righto -- as we've outsourced a lot of jobs typically done by US forces, like KP, doctors/medical and technicians, truck-drivers, mechanics, engineers, laborers, carpenters, hvy. equipment operators, communication and data-systems specialists, transport pilots, airplane techies, and what-not. A lot of menial and semi-skilled jobs are being contracted thru big western Corporations, filled by Turks, Pakis, Indians, ie., cheap-labour immigrants, while Iraq's unemployment is what, like 60 to 70 percent? I've read that US civilian drivers earn something like $5 K a month, plus found. I've seen estimates that there may be up to 20-30,000 mercenaries in Iraq, hired by firms like Blackwater and Wackenhut. A similiar trend is evident with oil, mining and other resource-extraction industries in third-world settings with conflict increasingly hiring mercenaries as their own private armies, to guard installations, pipelines, ports, terminals, executives and workers, etc., from guerrillas or hostile locals protesting exploitation or labour-disputes, pollution or corruption, etc.<br><br><br>From:<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.deeperwants.com/cul1/homeworlds/journal/archives/002796.html">www.deeperwants.com/cul1/...02796.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>--excerpt--<br>The modern US volunteer army has been been stripped to the bone in terms of being a lean, mean fighting machine. While that's good for moderate and short term engagements, it cannot hope to prevail over the long haul or when having to police a huge area such as they are expected to do now in Iraq. The result is that the US government has made it legal for PMCs, whose workers or "contracters", to do a lot of the "work" on their own without oversight from the US military. Because there are no real international or even national regulations governing the responsibilities or activities of these companies there have been situations not unlike Abu Ghraib that go unaccounted for. In fact some of the interrogators and translators, including one that is accused of raping a boy detainee, have never been charged because mercenaries in Iraq have complete immunity from Iraqi law under an edict issued by the US Coalition Provisional Authority.<br><br>What using these companies in Iraq has amounted to is a form of war profiteering on a huge scale completely out of sight and accountibility of the American public. There are estimates that these 'security contractors", who patrol out of uniform in unmarked vehicles and armed with machines guns, account for as much as 20% of the US miltary presence in Iraq. <br><br>An article on the activities of PMCs in Iraq in the Washington Post commented: <br><br>“Far more than in any other conflict in United States history, the Pentagon is relying on private security companies to perform crucial jobs once entrusted to the military. In addition to guarding innumerable reconstruction projects, private companies are being asked to provide security for the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer III, and other senior officials; to escort supply convoys through hostile territory; and to defend key locations, including 15 regional authority headquarters and even the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, the centre of American power in Iraq.”<br><br>The money to be made by these is enormous. It has been estimated that 25% of the $18.6 billion allocated by the Bush administration for Iraq’s “reconstruction,” is to pay for these private companies. Aside from that, the Bush administration does not count these hired troops in their causualty counts. Remember the four soldiers burned and mutilated and publicly hung from the bridge in Fallujah? Those were men hired by a secretive company called Blackwater that has about 450 personnel in Iraq doing various "security jobs" for US government. Americans reacted to the killings with outrage believing that these were American soldiers in our military, when in fact they were hired mercenaries who could have come from any nation and might have been perpetrating any sorts of horrors on the locals for they were killed. We simply don't know. Most of these companies are extreme tight-lipped about their personnel and most often do not even publicly report it when they are killed.<br><br>The problem is the lack of accountibility and secrecy under which these firm operate. Mercenaries can provide an occupying nation with a supply of hired killers carrying out the dirtiest aspects of the occupation, from torture to assassination. To my mind, this is a serious situation that has been intensifying for some time now and needs intense public scrutiny.<br>--unquote--<br><br><br>Sounds to me like another massive below-the-radar scam, if the mercs are receiving the 4.5 billion dollars indicated in the article above, which for all the hoopla about Iraq's oil money being used for reconstruction just isn't happening -- these 'costs' will just be added onto the bill the US taxpayers will be footing (for generations).<br><br>Mercenaries in the employ of transnational oil and mining companies are essentially corporate armies, which have greatly inflamed violence and human rights abuses around the world, for the most part completely beyond accountability.<br><br>Also: Another insightful article by Fisk:<br>--excerpt--<br>Private army of security men in Iraq<br>Occupiers spend millions on private army of security men<br><br>By Robert Fisk in Baghdad and Severin Carrell in London<br>28 March 2004<br><br>An army of thousands of mercenaries has appeared in Iraq's major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who fear for the lives of their employees.<br><br>Many of the armed Britons are former SAS soldiers and heavily armed South Africans are also working for the occupation. "My people know how to use weapons and they're all SAS," said the British leader of one security team in southern Baghdad. "But there are people running around with guns now who are just cowboys. We always conceal our weapons, but these guys think they're in a Hollywood film."<br><br>There are serious doubts even within the occupying power about America's choice to send Chilean mercenaries, many trained during General Pinochet's vicious dictatorship, to guard Baghdad airport. Many South Africans are in Iraq illegally - they are breaking new laws, passed by the government in Pretoria, to control South Africa's booming export of mercenaries. Many have been arrested on their return home because they are do not have the licence now required by private soldiers.<br><br>Casualties among the mercenaries are not included in the regular body count put out by the occupation authorities, which may account for the persistent suspicion among Iraqis that the US is underestimating its figures of military dead and wounded. Some British experts claim that private policing is now the UK's biggest export to Iraq - a growth fueled by the surge in bomb attacks on coalition forces, aid agencies and UN buildings since the official end of the war in May last year.<br><br>Many companies operate from villas in middle-class areas of Baghdad with no name on the door. Some security men claim they can earn more than £80,000 a year; but short-term, high-risk mercenary work can bring much higher rewards. Security personnel working a seven-day contract in cities like Fallujah, can make $1,000 a day.<br><br>Continued: <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=505772">news.independent.co.uk/wo...ory=505772</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br>****<br><br>Ah, and so it goes ...<br>Regrdz;<br>Starman <p></p><i></i>
