Posted on 05/03/2004 6:32:10 PM PDT by wagglebee
Not...
Not...
And your definition of mercenary...
Leave it to the wimps to want regulate something else. Congress is one of the most protected classes of people in the world. They need to be regulated (out of office). What would they know about DANGEROUS WORK?
The man put up his own money to start the business and has worked his butt off to make it successful. We can't have any of that! /sarcasm
In addition a mercenary can be defined as one who works soley for monitary gain...if you choose to use that definition then we are all mercenaries.
The context in which 'mercenary' is thrown about in reference to the contractors hired by security companies is in the derogatory...almost as if it is a bad word. Who among you will do a job without expecting payment ?
If you define mercenaries as interested soley in monetary gain, then you will also have to label all truck drivers, all oil field workers, all engineers...etc as mercenaries...and that doesn't fit.
Companies like Blackwater are in business for profit, that is no big secret, the big difference is that they are not working for and would not work for country that is an enemy of the United States.
What Blackwater and other firms are doing is capitalism. They saw a need and filled it.
You have got to be kidding. It ain't quite DOT, but those guys have to answer for every hour they log onto their timesheets and for the damage to their trucks and cargo...to the government.
But what Constitutional authority does the government have over security contractors? Looks to me that this was contmeplated and already written about in the Constitution. Go for it, guys.
Then you responded:
oh sure. The Dems and the media would like to cripple our entire intelligence infrastructure over this - the CIA and their contractors, all of it. Next they will request that Khallid Sheik Mohammed and Zubayda be allowed to tell their stories, and perhaps be transferred to a Marriott hotel.
And then I responded:
You know oceanview sometimes its more than a party affiliation. Sometimes, just sometimes its about America has a whole. The media, nor the democratic party performed these actions, photographed them, and then gave them to the media. The media did what the media does. These actions were done by a group of selfish misguided individuals that has jeopardized things for the whole of America and our troops that are still on the ground in Iraq.
Whoever is responsible for these outlandish acts, they are also responsible for 100+ marines being killed last month. And in my judgement they need to be weeded out and held responsible.
By MATTHEW GUTMAN
BAGHDAD
April 3, 2004
Gliding his straight razor over a client's face, Ahmed Kadduri, of the Kadduri barber shop in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Adamiyeh, lifted his eyes long enough to spit out, "It was the Zionists and the foreign organizations that did it."
He was, of course, referring to Wednesday's murder of four and the mutilation of two American contractors in Fallujah.
The lynchings, referred to by many here as the "accident," remain a much-debated topic, slicing down the center of Iraq's political and ethnic divide and pitting Sunni against Shi'ite.
Despite the mutilations' denunciation of by some Fallujah clerics, over the weekend some Iraqis displayed a perplexing combination of denial and support for the attacks.
Suddenly a short man with a shiny bald pate popped up from his seat in front of Kadduri. "The Americans were mutilated because of the women detained at Abu Ghraib [a massive coalition prison complex near Fallujah that served as Saddam's depository of political dissidents and criminals].
They are kept naked and they are raped.
It was revenge for our women." Meet Col. Abdel Hadi Muhammad Ali (of the disbanded Iraqi army), said the barber, introducing the diminutive colonel.
Ali continued his harangue that "Iraqis are gracious hosts, but when you humiliate us we fight like lions." Soon the Fallujans will be called "the Lions of Fallujah" for their resistance, he said.
The others nodded. Ali said he had taken four bullets fighting the coalition's invasion last March. He proudly rolled up his sleeve to reveal two quarter-size scars, one on his forearm, the other on his biceps.
Coalition officials staunchly deny the claim of inhumane conditions in Abu Ghraib. The proliferation of rumors, it is said in coalition circles, has gotten the best of many Iraqis.
Kadduri's clients gabbed about the incident not so much stunned by the lynching's horrors but apprehensive of the American response. US administrator L. Paul Bremmer has said that those who killed the four Americans "will not go unpunished."
That a few said they saw nothing wrong with the attack highlighted the stark cleavage in culture between occupier and occupied.
Soon after the war, Ali observed that a soldier from a convoy of American armored personnel carriers "smiled and waved at a group of little girls. Had one of them been my daughter, I would have jumped on the tank and killed him."
American women might be treated "like animals or pieces of flesh, but we don't want Iraqi women to be like that."
Just above his head, a TV blared racy music videos on the Lebanese-based Zen satellite station. The hundreds of thousands of satellite dishes and receivers Iraqis have purchased since the war are jerry-rigged on rooftops, balconies, and tiny patches of grass all over this city.
Kadduri's young assistant blushed and turned from the television back to his seated client.
Dr. Gilan Mahmood Ramiz, a Princeton-trained Iraqi political scientist banished by Saddam in the early 1990s, observed that the people of Fallujah are "provincial and primitive. They are at base still a tribal society."
During an interview in his Baghdad home, he also blamed the lynching on the coalition's failure to establish a unifying provisional government.
Had it encouraged political activity among the intelligentsia and professional class, "city politics would have eliminated the tribal village politics of towns like Fallujah."
With Saddam gone and a "quisling" provisional government in his place, some Iraqis have reverted to the only mode available: arcane tribal politics guided by the principles of honor, shame, and ultimately revenge.
And on Friday, Fallujah's leaders almost admitted as much. "Fallujah is based on a tribal model which demands revenge. This led to the uncontrolled and severe reaction of the people," Muhammad al-Handani was quoted as saying by the daily Azzaman.
But support for the insurgency also depends somewhat on one's religious background. Sunnis tend to support the terrorist attacks, because with Saddam gone they feel "disenfranchised," said Ramiz. The Shi'ites, who tentatively support US efforts in Iraq and have born the brunt of the insurgency, have decried the lynchings as barbaric.
"These people give all Iraqis a bad name," said Faisal Abu Khalil, a Shi'ite physicist at al-Mustanseriyeh University of Baghdad and an occasional client of Kadduri's. The mutilation, he said, had shocked his family: "It is inhumane and simply un-Muslim."
"I wonder what the point of it all is," he asked. "Do they really feel they can defeat the Americans, to banish them, by desecrating their bodies?"
Well, some do. "In all I believe the attack on the Americans was OK," concluded Ali. "If America continues to lie to the Iraqi people, I assure you I will be first in line to join the resistance to oust the Americans."
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