Today’s Topic: Accountability and Failure
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee had the gall to listen to families of the four Blackwater mercenaries killed in Fallujah on March 31, 2004, which caused American troops to decimate the city and use internationally banned weapons such as white phopherous.
Some Republican representatives spoke out about not arguing lawsuits in a congressional hearing, but it seems more like these same representatives don’t want to hear truth in a congressional hearing.
The four families involved with the lawsuit aren’t looking for money, but truth. It is a sad state of affairs that good America people need to file suit with a company in order to ascertain the truths about the death of their loved ones, and considering the lengths that Blackwater has been willing to go in order to deny responsibility, a congressional hearing is exactly the right place to garner the truth.
In light of the facts, one need only look to the failure of this administration to be able to discern right from wrong to understand that contracting out protection and other security situations which include the need for non-military yet armed individuals not only creates problems for the United States, but even for those of the country we have chosen to invade. Mercenaries are mercenaries, plain and simple. If they have weapons and get contracted to be in a war zone, they are indeed mercenaries.
Now as much as I dislike calling a spade a spade in this particular matter, one has to realize that these men’s families are not the victims of having mercenary spouses or family members, but are victims of a company that supposedly provides protective services in war zones without any reasonable method of holding the same contractors accountable for their actions.
In a war zone the military is still an implement of law and to that end the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) coherently describes just what actions are correct and those that aren’t. Hence, when individuals in the service are participants to crimes, there is a structure for the military to apply law.
There is no such accountability in the United States’ usage of mercenaries as contractors, and although some, like those on the republican side of the House, may say that the US didn’t contract these companies, it is long past time to make such claims. For you see, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the United States ordered some of these same armed contractors into New Orleans as duly appointed law enforcement agents with the ability to shoot to kill.
So what we need to come to terms with is not the small legalistic argument about hearing a lawsuit in congressional testimony, but perhaps Congress itself needs to learn that TRUTH is goal and the circumstances that don't present the truth to Congress need to be investigated.
And what is it that needs to be investigated and what needs to be brought into the American living room? The easy answer is the extremes that this administration has gone to in order to garner power and relegate both the Congress and the Supreme Court to backseat drivers and giving Bush the proverbial "vacation arm" which allows him to smack down any questioners in the back seat.
But the hard answer is exactly HOW this administration has used secrecy, illegal methods, no bid contracts and numerous other avenues to alleviate the requirement for the administration to be held accountable.
For you see, even though Blackwater employees died in Fallujah that day, it was the United States’ efforts in handing out no bid contracts that require accountability. And if Blackwater is allowed to stall these families from reasonable answers about the deaths of their loved ones, bolstered by their new found government supported wealth, then it becomes incumbent upon one of the co-equal branches to come forward and give air to the problems no matter where the fault lies.
The American people need to become so vocal that ALL the facts start coming out regardless of House Speaker Pelosi’s denials of holding George W. Bush responsible with the threat of impeachment.
The fact is that America needs to start impeachment proceedings against both Bush and Dick Cheney before this country is guilty of another transgression against a sovereign country. As long as George W. Bush is in office the possibility of a conflict with Iran is actually an absolute.
During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq I spoke of critical mass and the inability to back down from a military action because circumstances had gone too far. Well, in another way we are already reaching critical mass in and around Iran. For 18 months we have had special operations people on Iranian soil, defining targets and trying to contact and use opposition groups within Iran. And since that wasn’t enough from the get go, the US has been using a State Department declared terrorist group designated MEK to help sow dissent on foreign soil from the beginning of the Iraq invasion.
Now it appears that fully three carrier based battle groups have been deployed to the Red Sea in order to contain Iran’s possible responses to an attack, as well as deploying Patriot Missile systems into countries around the Mid-East. These are infrastructures of war and in themselves create that critical mass.
Least anyone forget, a modern carrier battle group houses some 5,000 men on the carrier alone, along with a large contingent of warplanes, tomahawk missiles, special ops personnel, mine sweeping ships, destroyers with 18" guns which can fire 50 miles and other WAR based weapons systems. Not one of these systems is designed for peaceful situations so one has to wonder if war isn't the idea, why weapons of war are already on target and in place.
If all options are on the table, as Bush as oft said, then why are the most obvious options ones of war? Even a cornered animal isn't likely to want to negotiate. They are likely to attack in an effort to secure their own preservation. In fact, I think America has done that more than once.
The real problem is that the United States does not have the manpower to initiate another war in the middle east or anywhere else, so one has to wonder just where does this administration think new troops are going to come from, and what about reasonable training time?
In Viet Nam we learned that sending bodies to fight without proper and intense training resulted in Viet Nam sending back a lot of those same bodies in body bags.
So just how is it that even new recruits today could play a part in an assault on Iran since it will take them about 18 months to become well trained soldiers? And if there is an 18 month gap between the beginning of an action and the deployment of reasonably trained soldiers, just who is going to step into that gap?
My guess is contracted mercenaries like those deployed in Iraq.
America is currently employing somewhere around 100,000 civilians, largely in support positions such as food preparation, cleaning services, etc., however it has been presented from numerous sources that some 40,000 of these contractor employees are involved with security and protection services who carry weapons, some who have been seen in videos opening fire on innocent civilians on Iraqi highways. As often expressed by this administration that the bad things are due to a few bad apples, one has to wonder just how many bad apples get through the vetting process of contractors and onto the battlefields where they have no levels of accountability.
Hell, we’ve had contractors supply the US in Iraq with trucks and since the contract did not specify that the trucks needed to be operational, they appear to have gotten away with stealing a few tens of millions of dollars from the American people. Remember, this is our government, not George W. Bush’s government, and our tax monies are paid in order to provide both necessary services and the appropriate accountability. We even elect two of the three branches of government to guarantee that accountability, and when such is not forthcoming we have the third branch of government to demand such accountability. And it is appropriate to understand that the third branch is nominated by the President, but given consent by the Legislative.
Then how is it that America has become used to, and possibly numbed to the idea of hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, and just how much more is this administration going to depend on mercenaries to fight these wars?
Now I’ll be the first to admit that most of these mercenaries aren’t mercenaries at heart, but mostly are out of work veterans who see an opportunity to apply their hard earned skills in an effort to gain a better living situation for their families. After all, I know of a few people that served two or three tours of Viet Nam and ended up working as mercenaries after they couldn’t reconnect with people in their normal lives.
However, this points up another divide in American society when war veterans return home and can’t find their own place again and the US government continues to cut their benefits. Where does one go then? The answer is either crazy or into a market place that should never have developed within the confines of American society. Blackwater is a culprit in a lot of this, but it’s not the only one. Since Ronald Reagan’s day we have had governmentally approved civilian training facilities that turn out armed guards, security personnel, protective services and such, all operating on American soil with license to carry concealed weapons. And they have been given differential treatment by the federal government, allowing these companies to supply armed services to corporations as protectors and even up to offering and supplying training to federal agencies.
Now one may wonder what I mean by differential treatment, and I’d have to say first that G. Gordon Liddy’s Alabama training camp is just that. A training camp for military operations used by civilians for whatever purposes those civilians have in mind. They have trained such as the white supremacy groups as well as those that eventually moved into their own contracting units like Blackwater.
The overall concept is that American businesses have essentially been training mercenaries for over 20 years, and somehow this has become a marketplace commodity rather than a threat on our own soil. Mercenaries, after all, work for the highest bidder, not for some idealistic or ideological concepts. The Bush administration seems to believe that a capitalistic idea like selling one’s services to the highest bidder isn’t a problem. My question to Bush is if you are willing to sell your soul so that the prosperous may become even more prosperous, then why should you believe differently of others?
However, within this concept of a couple of decades of allowing mercenaries to be trained for corporate use, the idea of accountability shrinks because the decision to use force is now relegated to those handling the weapons rather than a military institution like the UCMJ. The same has been seen, time and time again, in the treatment of detainees who have been interrogated by employees of these same companies. Again, no accountability and yet no one really complains. Much better to send an unassuming West Virginia girl like Lindy Englund to jail rather than find those who directed the interrogations under contract accountable.
Well, as the subject says, this blog is about accountability and failure. What we have is a government that isn’t being held accountable for their actions, and a public that has failed to pay attention and demand that accountability.
Yes, the failure isn’t George W. Bush’s drive to garner the most powerful presidency in history, nor even the government’s use of mercenaries and illegal use of it’s millitary, but rather in the American people for not paying attention and demanding that OUR America doesn’t do these things.
So the fault is yours and mine.
And the weird part is that someone is most likely going to point out that it is my fault because I don’t support this administration, for we all now know that those who don’t support this administration aren’t true Americans.
The true Americans are apparently those four Blackwater mercenaries who died in Fallujah, but screw those families who HAD TO RESORT to testimony to a House committee in order to get their stories heard.
Something is seriously fucked up in America today.
11:14:31 AM 
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