Bravo! No, wait.BRAVO! O brother, my Brother Jeremy!
"We need protection for our people." He nails it! A perfectly introverted system of priorities.
The Commons becomes a Holy War Battlefield when we conceive of our kin as our enemies. That mentality is all about Divide, Fragment, Diminish, and Conquer. That mentality is the legacy of our evolution.
Choosing Western Science is not a solution; this mentality is precisely the Western scientific mind's home turf. We assume our own Source to be a god-forsaken machine, then act upon it as such; we are pimping Mother earth for all she's worth, not husbanding her.
O brother, my Brother Jeremy! Thanks for your Campbellian heroism.
AMY GOODMAN:And then, within forty-eight hours of this confrontation, the State Department extended the contract for Blackwater in Iraq.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, I mean, like much of US policy now, the Bush administration is sort of pushing everything for the next president to deal with. And the reality is that this is outraging the Iraqi government. As I was coming in here today, I was reading the comments of the puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. I mean, let’s be clear here. He’s not really the prime minister of Iraq. There’s not really a sovereign Iraqi government. But even the puppet leader of Iraq is coming forward and saying this is a company that’s engaged in a massacre, and Iraq is saying that this was not done with the approval of the Iraqi government. I mean, this shows, though, how central this company has become to the US occupation.
The reality is that when Gregory Starr, the Assistant Secretary of State, made the announcement that Blackwater’s contract was going to continue, he actually said, we could terminate the contract if we wanted to, and at this time, we’ve reviewed the needs of US policy in Iraq—not the needs of the Iraqi civilians who come near Blackwater, not the will of the US-backed Iraqi government, but we reviewed our policy goals in Iraq and determined that Blackwater needs to stay on. We need protection for our people. And so, the odds are that Blackwater is going to continue on in Iraq for the foreseeable future, certainly for the next year. It would take the administration actually actively canceling the contract at this point. That seems very unlikely.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, at about the same time, for the first time since—well, in forty years, since ’68, the Pentagon announced a charging of a civilian contractor under military law. This is what you write about in “Contract Justice.”
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. And, of course, it’s not one of the contractors who was one of the, what Blackwater calls "shooters” on September 17 in Nisour Square. It wasn’t the Blackwater contractor who was alleged to have shot and killed a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president on Christmas Eve 2006. These men are allowed to run around freely. Some of them return to the Middle East and work for other companies. No, the first prosecution under the court-martial system is apparently going to be a dual citizen of Iraq and Canada. I mean, the grotesque irony at play here is quite stark.
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