This video starts off with a Fox News interview in which a couple of apologists for Blackwater explain an incident in Iraq in which mercenaries “neutralized a threat” at an intersection, a very bland and seemingly everyday event in an occupied country. After seeing Fox misrepresenting the whole affair and calling the mercenaries heroes, the video reveals that this was the Nisour Square Massacre, in which a group of unprofessional gun-toting American assholes went on a murder spree, killing 17 civilians and blowing up vehicles left and right. Fox avoided mentioning the victims and was shockingly dishonest in their misrepresentation; this report pulls no punches and describes their murder.
Fox News is a criminal propaganda front, and we might as call it what it is, the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda of the Republican Party. Erik Prince is pure evil, and the use of trigger-happy hirelings to run rampant in a country we ought to be trying to reconstruct is unconscionable and self-destructive. Iraqis are justified in regarding Americans as unforgivable villains.
Privatizing your armed forces is another one of those downward steps in a failing empire.
The damage that Murdoch has done to the whole world probably now exceeds the damage done by any other single human being in history. He must be so proud.
Rats. Phillip Jones is going to hate me even more.
@ PZ Myers
#3
I’d be more worried if he liked me.
Dr Myers, if somebody as erudite, articulate and charming as Philip Jones hates you, you must be doing something right.
Gee, if only there had been a Democratic President who ran on a platform of ending our wars and had 4 years of Congressional majority to back them up, who would have had the authority to end this. How sad that that never happened.
The blackwater goons killed Iraqi cops too. Funny Fox is all against the “thin blue lone” all of a sudden.
Threat-wise what started it was an old lady whose car stalled and she didn’t move fast enough. Machine-gun fire in her windshield was totally proportional.
OT: This post made me realize how badly we need a Volksaur klärungi.
@6, Blackwater killed a lot more folks than Iraqis. They also killed employees that were planning to testify against the company in court.
They also threatened auditors for the State Department, in front of witnesses!
@5 The Vicar:
One of my biggest sources of despair and disappointment was how after the 2008 election the anti-war movement in the US basically disappeared overnight. It was extremely revealing to me how many people only cared about war crimes, torture, military overspending, security state overreach, etc when it wasn’t “their guy” in office. The only reason I have even an iota of enthusiasm about the current election cycle is that Sanders actually has a long track record of voting against sanctions, torture, invasions, bombings, and the expansion of the security state (he still has voted for some hideous war crime related stuff, but still has possibly the most anti-imperialist track record of any sitting congressperson, so it’s an improvement).
No worries folks. The coming asteroid will end this little Natural experiment soon enough. And then the cephalopods shall shall reign. (Hope springs eternal)
thanks for that I do like three arrows
uncle frogy
“Iraqis are justified in regarding Americans as unforgivable villains.”
I was with you up to this point. Bigotry towards Americans is not okay. Are Muslims Unforgivable villains because a minority of them are terrorists? No.
Some Blackwater goons have been convicted for some of the many many crimes. Hair furor now has an established history of pardoning military war criminals, and is known to take cues from Fox. Therefore, I suspect Fox’s dishonest reporting is the start(?) of signalling hair furor to pardon some of the Blackwater goons.
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Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater (and is Betsy DeVos’s brother), has a relatively new company, Frontier Services Group (FSG), based in Hong Kong with mainland Chinese state-owned backers, which is doing what Blackwater did — and supposedly more: It seems to be offering to run your entire war for you (rather than just being contractors for specific services like Blackwater was). FSG is known to be operating in Iraq, and may also be operating in Xinjiang. In both cases, it is unknown what they are up to.
He also has a history of shenanigans in UAE, albeit he’s now apparently been kicked out for corruption. He had(?) a private military in Somalia, unanswerable to anyone, supposedly doing “anti sea piracy” work, and apparently financed by the UAE. This collection of goons engaged in massive corruption and human rights violations (possibly including executions?), and was supposedly shutdown when the UAE stopped the money.
Prince is a business partner with Steve Bannon, and apparently has connections with Mike Pence. He also shows up in the Mueller report as attempting to set up a back-channel with Putin / Russia. However, apparently, the Russians recognised him as (and/or already knew that he was (due to previous incidents?)) a corrupt incompetent fraud and it’s possible nothing came of the attempt (albeit he did apparently lie about the affair to various investigators).
Just stopping by to link the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes on Erik Prince for interested parties: Part 1, Part 2.
@ booberry
There’s a pretty important difference though: The vast majority of Muslims aren’t donating money to al-Qaida or ISIS, but if you’re an American, your tax money funded the Nisour Square massacre.
@booberry
Around a million Iraqis died because of the US invasion and occupation of their country. They’ve got every reason the hate USAians, especially when the vast majority of USAians hardly give a shit and act as apologists for the politicians, general and corporations that effectively conspired to destroy Iraq and plunder its resources. The “War on Terror” has been a monstrous parade of one horrible atrocity after another and the fact that many USAians barely even notice is a great reason to think people from the United States are unforgivably evil.
All this hiding behind the fig leaf of contractors is a massive problem for society in general at the moment. If you perform work that is required for regular functioning of the entity paying you then you are an employee and they should be forced to give you all rights and benefits that come with that.
If that entity is the government then you are a government employee and should be subject to the same benefits and requirements as any other government employee and any budget allocated to the role should be publicly available and audited.
This should be made a requirement of market access. Want to trade in our market? Prove that you treat all of your payed workers as employees within the standards of that market, not within the standards of the financially desperate and ethically flexible employment market you have started to drain of its life since the last one started asking too much.
The other problem is FOX itself, again, a more general problem than just this case. It needs to be acknowledged that they are a problem and harmful to society and democracy. Regulation then needs to work backwards to plug that leak. To allow them to continue to operate in the way they do is irresponsible and the context of climate change, it is actually dangerous to the human race.
@booberry #12
The US Constitution starts with “we the people” because, at least nominally, what the State does is legitimised my its citizens.
The Iraqi war was decided and implemented by elected representative, whose job is to implement the will of the US people.
This is not bigotry, it’s, again literally, how democracy is supposed to work.
We can argue that a lot of USians opposed the war, but many, many, many supported it wholeheartedly, to the point where Bush was re-elected.
there are two perceptions here
1. the perception of the citizens of the U.S. as manipulated by the media in this case fox, and the politicians
2. the perceptions of the rest of the world who often are the recipients of U.S. foreign policy ask for or not.
it does seem that the better place to be is within the U.S. boarder then outside it as far as personal outcome is concerned.
uncle frogy
unclefrogy@29, “it does seem that the better place to be is within the U.S. boarder then outside it as far as personal outcome is concerned.”
As a (long-time) expat, I’m not so sure. Tonight, I met a recent expat (who does not — yet — call themselves that) who broadly seems to agree, it’s better outside the TFR (hair furor’s fascist reich), albeit they do not have my protection of a second passport, The point they and I both made was not being in the TFR (both of us are in France) is the society here isn’t dysfunctional and saturated with guns & goons. There are certainly problems (the Le Penazies, and discrimination against the Roma, as two examples), but nothing like the concentration camps or massively corrupt and evil high administration — or, the point that perhaps worries me the most, the filling of judicial positions (federal judges) with utterly incompetent and profoundly evil nazis.
@booberry, #12:
While there are certainly oppressed people within American society, Americans are not an oppressed people relative to any other nationality on the planet, so talk of “bigotry toward Americans” amounts to a limp soufflé.
@blf, #20:
I suppose it depends a lot on your identity and what part of the US you come from. Reading the news from where I sit (Japan), things certainly seem dire. But every time I talk to my parents or visit home (central coast of California), things are mostly as I remember them and people seem to be getting on with their lives as usual.
On the other hand, I feel like I should go back to the US to help fix things.
@20
true enough the biggest benefit of living within the U.S. that I was referring to are those of us within are not always directly effected by U. S. foreign policies though there are individuals who are. The eventual blow back does reach here however and is often blamed on foreign countries thus perpetuating the absurdity of the difference between the perception of the rest of the world from within the U.S.
uncle frogy
it is better to be behind the guns then in front of them
uncle frogy