Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
It's the Christian Crusader!
Time now for another great episode of the Christian Crusader in "Huntin' Ragheads!":
To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."
OK, what the hell am I talking about? That the founder of The-mercenary-army-formerly-known-as-Blackwater (now called "Xe") was more 'dirty' than you may have suspected. From The Nation:
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that 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."
Charming, eh? It gets worse, and you may want to read the whole article. After all, your tax dollars have been poured into this company, have made this man rich, for his "service" in Iraq and elsewhere.
Jim Downey
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Unsurprised
Given what I know about human nature, I'm always annoyed when I read a story about some company developing new non-lethal weapons for military or police use. Because, as I know, it's absolutely inevitable that the things will be misused. If you lower the bar on violence (I'm thinking specifically of tasers as a f'rinstance), you make it more acceptable to assault people so that, in the statistical field of humans handed the new gadget, there WILL be some who see the thing as just perfect for pacifying an agitated granny, a disrespectful 7-year-old, or a concerned citizen standing on a corner with a sign protesting an injustice ... in situations where they wouldn't have dared use a gun.
(Heh. If the only weapons police were issued not only killed the person they were aimed at but produced a smoking crater three feet deep, with attendant shrapnel, you’d have a whole different mindset throughout the system.)
The trick is, if you lower the bar on violence, you have to RAISE the bar on responsibility. But we never seem to manage that well. A city councilman might eagerly vote to buy tasers for the local police, but the idea of simultaneously voting to enact severe penalties for their misuse, he'd find that unnecessary, unworkable and offensive.
Given an anything-goes war zone, you drop a collection of happy-horseshit corporate mercenary yahoos with guns into the middle of it – unrestrained by military codes of conduct and training worked out over generations – and I'd be shocked out of my shoes if there WASN’T a hidden history of killings and torture.
Take a modern corporate culture that already couches its goals and actions in terms of war, add in an apocalyptic Christianist element and then transplant it into an actual war zone where the gloves are off ... interesting things must happen. Hell, the right-wing political atmosphere alone sort of guarantees that a certain number of the guys deploying would assume that Rule One started “Don’t get CAUGHT doing any of the following ...”
Did this particular guy do the things he's accused of? No idea. But that someone did such things, that's hard for me to doubt.
I'm a little skeptical
Blackwater is almost certainly dirty, and perhaps all of these allegations are true (and as Kentucky Boy said, it certainly wouldn't be surprising), but don't you wonder why someone who'd been in management for four years would use the term "semi-automatic machine gun"? And why would you saw one off and put a silencer on it?
Maybe someone in management at Blackwater wouldn't necessarily be expected to know much about weapons, and considering the clandestine nature of their smuggling them in (if, indeed, it's true) that might not be far off base. Still, I'm using one grain of salt on this story until more details come out.
Unfortunately, even if their allegations are true, it sounds like they are going to have a hard time proving anything. From what I read of the article, they have no evidence of what they claim to have witnessed, and unless there is evidence of what they say others claim to have witnessed, they are making themselves targets with little chance of proving anything.
Maybe they are hoping the preponderance of allegations will make up for the lack of evidence.
Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.
Skepticism is appropriate.
All in all I agree Rob, but as to the detail of shortening the barrel on a sub-gun (and adding a silencer), that actually might make some sense. I don't know if the military has restrictions on the barrel length of weapons - either their own, or according to the Geneva conventions - but it is possible that Blackwater was restricted by their contract to either those standards or possibly even US civilian ones. And it turns out that the optimal barrel length for a lot of pistol calibers used in sub-machine guns is shorter than you might think, according to our research. Some of those stop gaining significant advantages at about 9 or 10 inches, some actually start losing velocity after 12 or 14.
And silencers? I don't think those are allowed, either.
And who knows about the "semi-automatic machine gun" thing. People are always using gun terms loosely, and there is a great deal of misunderstanding about what is what in the popular mind. The error could have happened with the manager, the transcriptionist, the federal investigator, the reporter, or the editor.
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Innocent until proven guilty
But if these allegations are true, its not terribly surprising. Right wing Xian message boards are full of paranoid anti-islamic propaganda warning that Islam is taking over and all muslims are committed to either converting or killing unbelievers. Apparently Blackwater may simply be the Xian version of Hezbollah.
I envision a Mussolini solution
Give Prince's corpse to the Iraqis to do with as they see fit.
So that would make it . . .
. . . the corpse-formerly-known-as-Prince?
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
What's important
That all might be true but his heart was in the right place, and that's what's really important.