cúisle mo chroí

Went to hear Jeremy Scahill speak at UM the day before Halloween.  I thought this would be a suitable post for the holiday, seeing as how *actually* terrifying the subject is, but I am only getting around to it now.  I have yet to read his book, Blackwater: The Rise of America’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, but it has been on my list and I will probably get to it shortly.

I referenced an article that Scahill wrote on private military corporations in August of 2007 on this site (”Have gun, will fight for paycheck”), and have discussed the murder of Peter McBride and its relationship with the Pentagon’s Iraq security contract with PMC Aegis Defence Services many times (see my August 2006 post “Justice for Peter McBride” for background information).

Scahill was on campus to talk in more depth about Blackwater, whose founder Eric Prince, incidentally, is from Holland, Michigan.  Some interesting facts from Scahill’s talk: Apparently 40% of the money spent on the war in Iraq goes to for-profit war corporations.  The US spends about $2.5 billion per week, which is the greatest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector ever.

The rise of Blackwater is an incredible story, but what makes it really alarming is not only that it is part of a larger trend of outsourcing traditional military responsibilities (which I’ve discussed before), but that there is absolutely no oversight or system of checks and balances for private military corporations at all.  The fact that 70 members of the US armed forces have been prosecuted in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not a single contractor has, shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system.  Scahill believes that for all intents and purposes, PMCs have become an armed wing of the administration outside of the military command structure–and that this was part of the plan from the first place.

Though some of this information was not new to me, it did give me pause with regard to how to continue to approach the issue of the Aegis contract in the future.

In September I met with Susan Rice, Senator Obama’s top foreign policy advisor to discuss Irish issues, and gave her a thank-you letter from Jean McBride, in which she thanked Obama for a statement he made recommending that the US reconsider the private security contract with Aegis Defence Services due to Tim Spicer’s abyssmal track record of human rights abuses around the world.  However, I believe the statement was made in 2005…

I wonder how we might diversify our efforts to make more progress on this issue?  It’s no surprise that a company like Aegis would employ convicted murderers in light of their mission on the ground in Iraq.