BOOKSHELF

BLACKWATER

BOING BOING - Jeremy Scahill's brave and outraged "Blackwater: The Rise
of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" renders the story of the
Blackwater mercenary group, and other mercenary groups that have seized
the economic opportunities opened by the Bush regime's willingness to
offer no-bid contracts and no-liability opportunities to fight America's
wars. Backwater -- founded by ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives
-- hires Pinochet-era Chilean war-criminals, ex-law-enforcement types
and former military, and others to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan -- and in
America. They can and do murder civilians with impunity, they line their
pockets with cost-plus multi-billion-dollar military expenditures, and
they kill their own men -- and the American soldiers they are supposed
to be helping -- through corner-cutting profiteering.

Scarier still is their deployment on US soil, as with the Katrina
disaster, where Blackwater took in millions for shoveling armed men and
automatic weapons into the stricken city of New Orleans, where food and
health care were impossible to come by but where there was no shortage
of ammunition. Scahill's book is incredibly, even mind-numbingly
well-researched and documented.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/11/blackwater_superbly_.html

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