And, Here's Obama's Gobbly-Gook, Mumble-Jumble, "What the H*ll Is He Talking About?"

[Wardogs]

And, Here's Obama's Gobbly-Gook, Mumble-Jumble, "What the H*ll Is He Talking About?" -Video Clip of the Day
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/

Bang-Bang!

Here's the latest nutty Obama interview of the day...
Barack Obama talks about private security contractors (code for "The evil Blackwater mercenaries"):

Even his facial expressions are telling in this interview-- He doesn't have the slightest clue on what he's talking about... It is amazing.
Here are a couple of notable lines:

--Private security contractors put our troops in harm's way(?)
--If you start building a military premised on the use of private contractors and you start making decisions on armed engagement based on the availability of private contractors to fill holes and gaps that over time you are, I believe, eroding the core of our military’s relationship to the nation(?)
--I think you are privatizing something that is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence(?)

Huh?

Edmond Jenks at Power Line Forum offered this analysis on Obama's latest Far Left mumble jumble on private security contractors in Iraq:
http://www.plnewsforum.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/35798/
video at link

Somebody please ask junior Senator Barack Obama what he means when he says that contract worker support of our war effort should be just used for kitchenwork and automobile repair. Does Barack Obama actually know what kind of invaluable service outfits like Blackwater perform in the support of our efforts in ferreting out zeolots who want to do harm to the Iraqi citizens we are trying to liberate?

This is what Barack said to The Military Times, July 2, 2008:

There is room for private contractors to work in the mess hall, providing basic supplies and doing some logistical work that might have been done in-house in the past. I am troubled by the use of private contractors when it comes to potential armed engagements… I think it creates some difficult morale issues when you’ve got private contractors getting paid 10 times what an Army private’s getting paid for work that carries similar risks...

Does Barck even understand what Blackwater does ... they are NOT mercenaries. They do not replace the activity of our armed forces but actually complement the effort through special tasks best left to security professionals.
But Barack continued:

...When it comes to our special forces, what we’ve seen is that it’s a potential drain of some of our best-trained special forces, and you can’t blame them if they can make so much more working for Blackwater than they can working as a master sergeant. That, I think is a problem.

Q: Blackwater would argue that they’re a bargain: that you get a higher level of ability, that they can put people there, they can keep top-level talent there perpetually.

A: I am not arguing that there are never going to be uses for private contractors in some circumstances. What I am saying is if you start building a military premised on the use of private contractors and you start making decisions on armed engagement based on the availability of private contractors to fill holes and gaps that over time you are, I believe, eroding the core of our military’s relationship to the nation and how accountability is structured. I think you are privatizing something that is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence. And to set those kinds of precedents, I think, will lead us over the long term into some troubled waters.

Barack Obama doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
What does he mean when he says I think you are privatizing something that is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence. WHAT?!

War is war and to be truthful, there is no monopoly of violence when bullets start flying or when people are strapping bombs to themselves to blow innocent citizens up. What does exist is an environment where specialized talents are placed into use to enable our effort to push back and win more efficiently and effectively. This is not much different than how American Rules football is put together, where specialized talent helps to move the ball down the field.

The same interview showed that Barack also does not understand the difference between an ally and an enemy.

He continued:

And if you look at costs and benefits and if you look at the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, overall I think it was a bad decision on the part of our commander in chief.
----
Those are the kinds of decisions that are going to be coming up in the future.

We’re going to have to make decisions about Iran, we’re going to have to make decisions about Pakistan.

The capacity of the next commander in chief to forge alliances so that we can, when we act militarily, act in the ways that we did during the first Gulf War, a war in which, not only were our casualties kept low, but it effectively cost us almost nothing in terms of taxpayer dollars...

Our ability to engage the Muslim world in a serious way so that we are tamping down anti-American sentiment even as we recognize that there is always going to be an element of extremism that can only be dealt with militarily.

Here's are a few more comments:

-- There have been few casualties in this Iraq War (only 2 so far this month). In fact, although Obama believes the Far Left drivel, the casualties per month are lower in this war than in the first Gulf War.

-- And forgive me for calling Obama an appeaser. We all know how sensitive the Left is when you call them out on the carpet. But, appeasing radical Islamic fundamentalists is not a way to "tamp down on anti-American sentiment." In case he did not notice, it hasn't worked so well in Pakistan lately.

It is frightening to think Obama is one step away from being Commander in Chief.

UPDATE: Astute Bloggers has more on Obama's Far Left attitude on Blackwater employees.
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2008/07/obama-regurgitates-another-favorite.html

 

[Richard]

he's worse than Bush at mangling the English Language, wonder what his Spanish is like

 

[night driver]

He appears CLEARLY unaware that we FEED our troops with contractors, PX's in country are run by CONTRACTORS, sanitation on some FOB's is CONTRACTED. MANY logistical operations are CONTRACTED.....


He needs to be better briefed....MUCH better briefed.

 

[bw]

He appears CLEARLY unaware that we FEED our troops with contractors, PX's in country are run by CONTRACTORS, sanitation on some FOB's is CONTRACTED. MANY logistical operations are CONTRACTED.....

It might seem clear to you, but it's equally clear to me that he acknowledged all that. What he doesn't want is those contractors engaging in firefights, and taking on police powers. He said that if your military readiness, your ability to confront the enemy, is based on squads of mercenaries replacing squads of American soldiers, then you're in trouble.

If the strength of your response depends on private contractors who have no legal standing as opposed to young men and women who are sworn soldiers with a clear legal stance, you have opened Pandora's box. We are putting civilian combatants on the field under contract, no different from those we are holding at Gitmo because they are civilian combatants.

 

[G-Man]

--Private security contractors put our troops in harm's way(?)
--If you start building a military premised on the use of private contractors and you start making decisions on armed engagement based on the availability of private contractors to fill holes and gaps that over time you are, I believe, eroding the core of our military’s relationship to the nation(?)
--I think you are privatizing something that is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence(?)

Huh?

Not supporting Obama mind you, but his thinking on this subject is correct Blackwater and other private security companies caused the Abu Ghraib scandal.

There was no official WAR, the invasion of Iraq was done by a private contracted "army" of over 100,000 (ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND +) outside contracted employees that ended up making our REAL military service people look BAD!

 

[LONEWOLF]

G-Man,

Could you fill in the missing details here re: contractors being the problem at Abu Grahib? Seesm to me it was being run by the US Army, a one-Star General, and the photo takers and "handlers" of the prisoners, the ones court martialled and convicted were *all* US Army.

 

[G-Man]

LONEWOLF G-Man,

Could you fill in the missing details here re: contractors being the problem at Abu Grahib? Seesm to me it was being run by the US Army, a one-Star General, and the photo takers and "handlers" of the prisoners, the ones court martialled and convicted were *all* US Army.

I know, I know! a couple of "bad apples" we were told.

With over 100,000 Blackwater hired guns, and more than 60,000 from other private contract firms - just who do you think is really in Iraq? I mean, do the math.

http://rwor.org/a/087/blackwater-review-en.html

 

[night driver]

G-Man,

Could you fill in the missing details here re: contractors being the problem at Abu Grahib? Seesm to me it was being run by the US Army, a one-Star General, and the photo takers and "handlers" of the prisoners, the ones court martialled and convicted were *all* US Army.

AH yes n no.

The interrogators were CIA/CIA Contractors....I'm unaware of ANY BW contractors at AG but there WERE Agency contractors there doing interrogations.

c

 

[G-Man]

Abu Ghraib prisoners sue US army "contractors" over torture

July 01, 2008

FOUR Iraqis are suing two US firms and their employees for allegedly torturing them at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad five years ago.
Their lawsuit is against private security contractor CACI International and two of its interrogators, Daniel Johnson and Tim Dugan, and the translation agency L-3 (formerly Titan Corp) and its interpreter, Abel Nakhla, lawyer William Gould said.

Their complaint was to be lodged at courts in Maryland, Ohio, and Washington - the US states where the alleged torturers live - as well as Michigan, where L-3 recruited most of its interpreters, said Gould in Istanbul, where he met with his clients from Iraq.

He said the court cases would show that the accused were in Abu Ghraib and involved in a conspiracy that included the torture of the plaintiffs.

Abu Ghraib prison became infamous after the publication in 2004 of photographs showing Iraqi detainees being humiliated and abused by their US guards.

The scandal led to the sentencing of 11 soldiers to up to 10 years in prison.

The majority of the abuse took place at the end of 2003, when CACI and Titan employees were working in the prison,

US military courts have said.

This the second set of lawsuits against CACI and L-3.

Another group of former Abu Ghraib prisoners filed complaints against the two firms last year in the states of Washington and California.

One of the current plaintiffs, Suhail Najim Abdullah Al-Shimari, 49, was taken from his Bagdad home in November 2003 and spent more than a year at Abu Ghraib, where he claims to have been subjected to electroshock and night-long cold showers in the winter.

"We think there will be people there in the United States who will want to give us back our dignity ... by bringing these people to justice," he said via an interpreter.

Sa'adon Ali Hameed Al-Ogaidi, 39, said he was repeatedly beaten at Abu Ghraib and tied to door handles.

"At times, it seemed they were torturing people to have fun," said the former prisoner, who claims to have witnessed guards sodomising prisoners.

Taxi driver Mohammed Abdwihed Towfek Al-Taee, 39, was taken to Abu Ghraib in 2003.

He has scars on his leg and head that he said came from beatings with an iron rod. He also said he was forced to drink litres of water while his penis was tied to prevent him from urinating.

"I wish I would be the last person to be detained and to be tortured," he said.

Abu Ghraib was closed in 2006.
http://www.privateforces.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2184&Itemid=1

 

[G-Man]

Outsourcing the Iraq War: Mercenary Recruiters Turn to Latin America

Source: NACLA Report on the Americas

In October, Erik Prince, the 39-year-old CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, a leading private security company operating in Iraq, went into damage-control mode. Blackwater employees in Baghdad’s Nisour Square had killed 17 Iraqi civilians the previous month, causing an uproar and the suspension of official diplomatic convoys throughout the country for four days. Making the rounds with the media and testifying before Congress, Prince repeatedly said that his employees are not mercenaries, as critics contend. Citing the definition of a mercenary as “a professional soldier working for a foreign government,” Prince told the House Oversight Committee that in contrast, Blackwater’s employees are “Americans working for America, protecting Americans.”

This statement would come as a surprise—and a slap in the face—to the

thousands of Latin Americans and others from outside the United States whom the company has hired to fill its contracts in Iraq since the war began. Greystone Limited, a Blackwater affiliate set up in 2004 in the tax haven of Barbados, has recruited Iraq security guards from countries throughout Latin America, including Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama,

as journalist Jeremy Scahill has reported.

But Blackwater is far from the only such company hiring “third-country nationals,” or employees who are not from the United States or Iraq. In the interest of improving profit margins, private military firms in Iraq are increasingly turning to the developing world for armed guards. Peter Singer, a leading expert on the private security industry at the Brookings Institution, has estimated that there are citizens from 30 countries employed as security contractors in Iraq. While ex-soldiers from the Balkans, Fiji, Nepal, the Philippines, South Africa, and Uganda are all common in Iraq, Latin America has proven to be a particularly fertile recruiting ground for these companies.

Latin America, says Adam Isacson, director of programs at the Center for International Policy, is a predictable site for U.S. mercenary companies to recruit personnel. In “what other region of the world are you going to find reasonably westernized people with military experience, in some cases with combat experience, who will work for low wages, who speak a language that a lot of our own military personnel speak,” he asks, noting that the U.S. Army is about a quarter Latino and that Latin America accounts for about 40% of U.S. military training programs worldwide. “It’s their natural ground to find people with military experience for whom $1,000 a month is a lot of money.”

One of the first people to recognize the role that Latin America could play in the booming new mercenary industry was José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, a former arms broker. Indeed, it was Pizarro who “opened the door” for these firms to recruit in the region, as José Luis Gómez del Prado, head of the United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, told Mother Jones magazine. A dual citizen of Chile and the United States, Pizarro served in the militaries of both countries and to this day defends the Pinochet dictatorship. After leaving the Marines as a translator for the U.S. Southern Command in 1999, Pizarro decided to cash in on his unique connections and began facilitating arms deals between Latin American militaries and U.S. manufacturers. Shortly after the United States invaded Iraq, he set his eyes on a new lucrative business opportunity: the provision of Chileans to mercenary companies.

In October 2003, Pizarro traveled to Blackwater’s headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, to pitch the idea. Prince was receptive during their meeting and gave him the go-ahead. Pizarro returned immediately to Chile and placed a discreet ad in El Mercurio, the Santiago daily, looking for former military officers for “work abroad.” More than 1,000 applicants quickly responded, and by February 2004, Blackwater’s first batch of Chilean commandos, 77 of them, was on its way to Iraq. Offering the unusually high salary of about $3,000 per month, Blackwater began hiring a steady stream of Pizarro’s men for the “static protection” of State Department and Coalition Provisional Authority buildings. The Chileans were still a relative bargain, considering that former U.S. or British special forces can be paid as much as $1,000 per day in Iraq, according to The New York Times.

Pizarro soon branched out and began providing Chileans to Triple Canopy, another large private military company in Iraq, offering salaries of only $1,000 per month. This paltry sum—though an enormous amount for many Latin Americans—has since become the going rate for recruits throughout the region. All told, Pizarro says he contracted 756 Chileans for the two companies, and possibly others, while he was in business, Scahill reported. The actual number of Chileans in Iraq is undoubtedly higher, since mercenary firms also operate there clandestinely. Chilean senator Alejandro Navarro, an outspoken critic of the private war industry, has estimated that about 2,200 Chileans have been to Iraq and that 1,000 remain there, according to the Buenos Aires–based newspaper Página 12 and Chile’s Santiago Times.

The money may have been good for Pizarro, but controversy was never far behind. In order to skirt Chilean law, which prohibits “the act of providing or offering the services of private armed guards, in any form or designation, by any natural or artificial person,” Pizarro hired Chileans for Blackwater through Neskowin, a firm he set up in Uruguay, while using a different company called Global Guards, registered in Panama, for his business with Triple Canopy. And since paramilitary activity is also banned in Chile, the limited training that recruits received often took place either in Amman, Jordan, or in Iraq, once the Chileans arrived, as the UN Working Group found.

Reports surfaced shortly after this paramilitary pipeline between Chile and Iraq began flowing that Pizarro was posting flyers on military bases and using e-mail to lure active-duty military personnel to the private sector. One Chilean contractor who went to Iraq through one of Pizarro’s companies told the UN Working Group that 17 of his fellow active-duty soldiers “had requested leave to be recruited.”

Given the recent history of repressive regimes throughout the region, it is likely that many Latin Americans working for private military firms in Iraq have been responsible for human rights abuses in their home countries. For instance, Louis E. V. Nevaer reported in 2004: “Newspapers in Chile have estimated that approximately 37 Chileans in Iraq are seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.” Some argue that this is merely a result of poor vetting, while others do not see it as an accident. As Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under the dictatorship in Chile, told Scahill, the Chileans working for these firms in Iraq “are valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing, and killing defenseless civilians.”

“What should be a national shame,” Tricot added, “turns into a market asset due to the privatization of the Iraq war.” In the end, Pizarro was fined and sentenced to 61 days in jail for his recruitment activity, a punishment that is not likely to dissuade many from following in his shoes. Nonetheless, he has appealed the sentence and is currently walking free. Meanwhile, Triple Canopy, which according to State Department figures relies far more on foreign hiring than Blackwater, filled its contract to protect the U.S. Embassy and other sites in Baghdad’s Green Zone by hiring recruits almost exclusively from Latin America (especially El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Honduras), as Foreign Policy magazine noted. In 2005, a local subsidiary of Chicago-based Your Solutions began recruiting for the company in Honduras.

The company trained its recruits—including a group of Chileans who entered the country with tourist visas—at the former military base in Lepaterique. Located just outside Tegucigalpa, the base is a notorious legacy of the Contra war, having been used by Washington in the 1980s to train Nicaraguan counter-insurgents, as well as Honduras’s infamous Battalion 316 death squad. Echoing this gruesome past, one Triple Canopy trainee explained that he and his fellow recruits were instructed “to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even if it was a child,” Agence France-Presse reported. After only several months in operation, the Honduran government fined Your Solutions and kicked the company out of the country for violating the law, which prohibits the training of foreign soldiers on its soil. Nevertheless, before the ax fell, Triple Canopy trained and sent at least 189 Hondurans and 105 Chileans to Iraq, according to the UN Working Group.

*

In the spring of 2003, public opinion in Latin America was vehemently, and overwhelmingly, opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Despite significant pressure from the Bush administration, only a handful of countries in the region joined the so-called Coalition of the Willing, contributing a combined total of slightly more than 1,000 soldiers to the U.S.-led war effort. While Latin America government officials’ recalcitrance on the war may have dealt a diplomatic blow to the United States, it did not stop thousands of poor ex-soldiers and former police officers throughout the region from performing essentially military functions in Iraq—under a corporate logo rather than their country’s flag.

The unprecedented privatization of the war in Iraq has given rise to a private military industry that was all but nonexistent 20 years ago. In the 1991 Gulf War, for example, there was one contractor for every 60 soldiers on the ground. While the exact number of private personnel in Iraq today is likely higher than official estimates, at least 180,000 private contractors are working there, according to recent government figures cited in the Los Angeles Times. As Scahill noted in congressional testimony, this makes the U.S. military—with roughly 160,000 troops in the country—the “junior partner in the coalition that’s occupying Iraq.”

Not only are far more contractors operating in war zones than in the past, but they are now responsible for many tasks that used to be carried out exclusively by the military. One of the most controversial roles being outsourced is armed protection for convoys, government facilities and diplomats. According to the Private Security Company Association of Iraq there are more than 180 such companies in operation that now employ 70,000 armed private security contractors in the country, and that number is only growing.

Established in 2005 to monitor this new industry, the UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries has warned that these so-called “security guards” are “in fact private soldiers militarily armed,” and that the companies that employ them in Iraq constitute “new expressions of mercenarism in the twenty-first century.”

One of those mercenaries was Mario Urquía, a 30-year veteran of the special forces in Honduras. Hired by Triple Canopy, Urquía guarded the U.S. Embassy in Iraq for a year and claims the company promised him U.S. citizenship once he completed his contract. Not only did that prove false, but he also says that he was never paid. “Not a single penny,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune. Urquía filed a complaint against Your Solutions with the Honduran authorities, as have at least 16 others, but his case is not being pursued because he is not currently in the country. After receiving death threats for sharing his story with the Honduran press and exposing those involved in Your Solutions’ operations there, Urquía was forced to flee the country.

Another Honduran guard badly injured his foot while in Iraq. Despite signing a contract that states the employer is responsible for providing medical and hospital insurance, he was not declared unfit for work and forced to man his lookout tower on crutches. Stories like these are not unique for those in the region who have worked for private security companies. According to the UN Working Group, the Hondurans who went to Iraq with Triple Canopy reported “irregularities in contracts, harsh working conditions with excessive working hours, wages partially paid or unpaid, ill-treatment and isolation, and lack of basic necessities such as medical treatment and sanitation.”

In a recent statement, Triple Canopy said it no longer recruits from either Honduras or Chile, but “continues to hire security personnel from Latin America to work in Iraq because they are diligent workers, reliable, professional and in some instances specifically requested by our U.S. government customers.” Since 2005, when the company was booted out of Honduras, most its recruits have come from Peru. In February 2007, one of Triple Canopy’s subcontractors indicated that the company had 1,130 Peruvians working in Iraq at the time. The stories of exploitation that they bring home, however, vary little from those of Hondurans and others. One group of five guards, for example, has filed a complaint against the company for sending them to work in Baghdad’s Red Zone, despite being hired to protect the Green Zone. Another guard says that for six days he was held in custody and isolation in degrading conditions after telling his supervisors that he planned on returning home.

Peruvian contractors, much like those from other countries, have little legal recourse when something goes wrong. Their contracts stipulate that they voluntarily accept every risk “known and unknown,” and exonerate Triple Canopy from any liability even if the contractor is harmed by the company itself. Often signing their contracts in a rush on the way to the airport, the Peruvians are also likely unaware that any claims against the company must be filed in a court in Virginia, where Triple Canopy is headquartered. In fact, in some countries security contractors have said that they were given a contract to sign only once they were on the plane, at which point they realized that their salary would be much less than promised.

While private security outfits have run into trouble in some countries, many others continue with business as usual. “Not only has this phenomenon not stopped,” says Amada Benavides de Pérez, a member of the UN Working Group, but recruitment in Latin America actually “has been increasing.” To address this problem, Benavides proposes a two-pronged strategy: strengthening laws at both the national and international level, and passing a regional treaty, similar to the 1977 convention against mercenaries that exists for Africa.

In the end, however, it comes down to supply and demand. Without reversing the radical privatization agenda that has taken hold in Washington, the U.S. war machine will inevitably continue to rely on private forces. Indeed, it is in the interest of pro-war U.S. policy makers to outsource the human costs of war for as long as possible.
http://www.privateforces.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2185&Itemid=1

 

[G-Man]

US agrees to scrap immunity for security guards in Iraq

BAGHDAD (AFP) — The Iraqi foreign minister said on Tuesday that Washington has agreed to scrap immunity for foreign security guards in Iraq, moving the two countries closer to signing a long-term security pact.

"The immunity for private security guards has been removed. The US has agreed on it," Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told AFP after briefing Iraqi MPs on the controversial US-Iraq security pact which is being negotiated.

The US embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad, Mirembe Nantongo, declined to comment. "We do not comment on the contents of ongoing negotiations," she said.

The lifting of immunity for foreign private security contractors has been a longstanding demand from Iraqi lawmakers

in the deal that would govern a long-term military arrangement between Baghdad and Washington.

Without immunity foreign security contractors can be prosecuted for crimes under Iraqi law.

Foreign security workers have since the 2003 US-led invasion operated virtually outside the law, neither subject to the Iraq legal system nor to US military tribunals, a right which infuriates Iraqis.

"The Iraqis have been suffering because of this," said Mahmud Othman, an MP who attended Tuesday's closed-door session.

The increasingly common practice of outsourcing military contracts has drawn fire from critics who charge that the guards are no more than trigger-happy mercenaries.

About 100,000 private security contractors work in Iraq.

Their immunity is a sensitive issue after an incident in which security guards from the US company Blackwater shot dead 17 Iraqis in broad daylight in Baghdad last September.

Blackwater says its guards reacted in self-defence.

The firm is one of the biggest private security contractors operating in Iraq and provides security to US embassy officials in the violence-wracked country, including ambassador Ryan Crocker.

The US State Department earlier this year renewed Blackwater's licence to work in Iraq despite opposition from Iraqi leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

US President George W. Bush and Maliki agreed in principle last November to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq by the end of July.

The agreement aims to set down the ground rules for a continuing US troop presence after the UN mandate for foreign forces stationed in Iraq expires in December 2008.

The talks appeared to reach a deadlock last month amid strong opposition from Iraqi political factions and with some Shiite leaders denouncing the proposed agreement as "eternal slavery" for the country.

Othman, the MP, said that the lifting of immunity for both foreign and US troops was still under discussion.

The US military's right to capture, detain and imprison Iraqis is also a sore point, Othman said.

Other concerns surround the number of military bases which Washington will maintain in Iraq.

"Zebari said that once the negotiations are crystallised the agreement would be presented to parliament," Othman told AFP. "It is up to the parliament to accept it or reject it."

Iraqis oppose a large American troop presence on their soil, but want a guarantee from Washington that the United States will defend the country from foreign invasion.

Othman said ministers also insisted at Tuesday's session that US forces carry out security operations in "accordance with Iraqi law and not freely."

http://www.privateforces.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2186&Itemid=1

 

[mbo]

It might seem clear to you, but it's equally clear to me that he acknowledged all that. What he doesn't want is those contractors engaging in firefights, and taking on police powers. He said that if your military readiness, your ability to confront the enemy, is based on squads of mercenaries replacing squads of American soldiers, then you're in trouble.

If the strength of your response depends on private contractors who have no legal standing as opposed to young men and women who are sworn soldiers with a clear legal stance, you have opened Pandora's box. We are putting civilian combatants on the field under contract, no different from those we are holding at Gitmo because they are civilian combatants.

They're being used as security for other contractors (the ones Obama "likes"). That would be a really piss-poor use of our troops to stand guard over the cooks, electricians, etc.


.

 

[GingerN]

He appears CLEARLY unaware that we FEED our troops with contractors, PX's in country are run by CONTRACTORS, sanitation on some FOB's is CONTRACTED. MANY logistical operations are CONTRACTED.....


He needs to be better briefed....MUCH better briefed.

Dang skippy. My late mother was administrator of management at DCASR-Atlanta in the 80s. I wonder if B.O. knows what that means.
Defense Contractor Administration Southeastern Region-Atlanta. CONTRACTORS are good support for our troops!

 

[G-Man]

My late mother was administrator of management at DCASR-Atlanta in the 80s.

No disrespect, but the 80's is a long time ago, and things are VERY different now.

If the United States can not raise a real army of it's own citizens than we sure don't need to start any more fake "wars".

 

[Tisha]

GMan and Bw- it is good to see that there are some people on here that know what they're talking about. Some only want to find fault with anything Obama says even if it's the truth.

 

[bw]

They're being used as security for other contractors (the ones Obama "likes"). That would be a really piss-poor use of our troops to stand guard over the cooks, electricians, etc..

Security guards are not standing guard OVER contractors, they are standing guard FOR contractors. If someone is standing guard in a foreign country, under the flag and the auspices of the US, authorized to shoot at will, I want that person to be a sworn soldier of the US military. If we can't manage that, then we are stretched too thin.

If our national security requires mercenaries, accountable to no one but their civilian managers, we have failed as a nation. If we cannot wage even a limited war without hiring undocumented guns, and luring them in by promising them immunity from international laws, we are announcing our failure to the world.

As a veteran, I find it hard to believe that the Army has lost so much support that we must do this.

 

[bw]

GMan and Bw- it is good to see that there are some people on here that know what they're talking about. Some only want to find fault with anything Obama says even if it's the truth.

Actually I find Obama a bit scary, mostly plastic. At least with McCain I have some idea who the person is. But on this count, Obama makes sense.

 

[mbo]

Security guards are not standing guard OVER contractors, they are standing guard FOR contractors. If someone is standing guard in a foreign country, under the flag and the auspices of the US, authorized to shoot at will, I want that person to be a sworn soldier of the US military. If we can't manage that, then we are stretched too thin.

If our national security requires mercenaries, accountable to no one but their civilian managers, we have failed as a nation. If we cannot wage even a limited war without hiring undocumented guns, and luring them in by promising them immunity from international laws, we are announcing our failure to the world.

As a veteran, I find it hard to believe that the Army has lost so much support that we must do this.

Huh? So what? If contractors have their own armed guards that does not make them mercenaries.

Are you denying contractors the right to be armed and defend themselves when overseas? Gee, that's big of you.


I'm no fan of the Iraq War, but this issue is apples-ands-oranges with it. The army should not be tasked with standing guard for the contractors, and like I said, that's a piss-poor use of their time.



.