Blackwater/Xe is getting off, again, of doing illegal shit. Obama says he won’t charge them with violating Sudan sanctions. Instead they are going to face a fine.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20100627/wl_mcclatchy/3548656
Now these are the same guys who stole 500 AK47 meant for the Afghanistan militia, by signing for them ‘Eric Cartman’.
Blackwater has done a ton of shit we know about, and most likely a ton of shit we don’t know. Iraq kicked all Blackwater/Xe employees out of the country because of the amount of shit they were doing, and the US never held them to task for it. Letting them get away with it seems to be the US’s MO right now. In fact not only letting them get away with it, but profiting from it as well, they just got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new contracts.
Now this gets me to thinking why are they doing this? Well one of the things they have been doing is a lot of hush hush shit for the CIA, stuff the US probably does not want to get out into teh public. So will Blackwater/Xe EVER face criminal charges? Probably not. They could set off a nuke and get away with it because they are in a position to hold the US government over a barrel.
This is why privatizing your national security is a bad idea.
There's also the fact that if you shut them down, who picks up the gauntlet in terms of filling all the roles the US has been using them for for 10 years?
ReplyDeleteNot saying I agree with them, but they're filling the roles of hundreds, if not thousands, of troops right now. And you can't just magically replace that.
No, but you can replace them with troops, which ends up being cheaper too. Plus troops are held accountable to their actions.
ReplyDeleteI completely disagree with the notion of privatizing national security. Leaving it up to for profit companies ends up costing more in more ways than one.
And where are you planning to find those troops? The ones you don't currently have serving overseas are just back from serving overseas.
ReplyDeletePrivatizing it is and was a bad thing, but you can't just put the genie back in the bottle over night and magically replace these guys with manpower that doesn't exist. Especially when you start looking at how many non-front line jobs have been sold off to private companies. Virtually the entire support arm of the military is now in private hands...where are you going to conjure up all of those replacements?
Well you are assuming I am saying that we just 'create' more troops overnight. I fully understand its going to take a while to put things back the way they should be, however I don't think we need to keep hiring the same company that is continuing to do criminal behaviour. Sure Blackwater/Xe is massively huge, but so what? Just because its easier to hire one company to do something doesn't mean we can't hire 50 smaller companies to do the same thing. Those smaller companies will then grow into bigger companies and will be able to do more. This is called capitalism. Something the US is supposed to be good at.
ReplyDeleteBut that's just it...they keep getting hired BECAUSE they're big. They have the manpower. Not just in terms of numbers, but the guys that they have who ARE good (and that isn't all of them...not even close) are the best guys. The ex spec ops guys. The dudes with intel experience. They pay more than any other contractor.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why its costing far more than if we had been using troops in the first place, this is also a drain on our regular military. Guys know they get a ton of training in the military and then go private because the pay is at a minimum twice as good. That's also not good for morale when some private is doing the exact same job as someone next to them, but getting paid far less.
ReplyDeleteHowever, we'll never get weened off private contractors, and criminal contractors to boot, if we keep going back to the same company. Somethings gotta change. Do I have faith that it is gonna change? Hell no. This government is far too messed up to actually make sensible changes.
But like I said, that company is the best equipped company to do the job. Your alternative is to split a contract up among 6 smaller firms...does that make more sense?
ReplyDeleteYou yourself said earlier in this discussion that this is about something called capitalism. And that means going with a company that can actually do the job...and in this case, it IS these guys.
Doesn't let em off the hook for past crimes and screwups, and doesn't make privatizing military ops in the first place the right thing to do...but they are the best company for the job.
I disagree that they are the best company for the job. They just happen to be the biggest, so its much easier to keep hiring them. I think the negative aspects of Blackwater/XE far outweigh the benefits. So yes, I do think splitting it up into smaller firms makes more sense.
ReplyDelete