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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MrLucky who wrote (12337)	7/28/2004 12:08:59 PM
From: Orcastraiter	Respond to of 90947

Blackwater is only one of dozens of private paramilitary firms that have sprung up in the last decade. As USA Today recounted, "After the 1991 Gulf War, the Pentagon, headed by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid a Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root Services, nearly $9 million to study how private companies could provide support in combat zones." And soon after that, as we all know, Cheney resurfaced as the CEO of Halliburton, before later becoming the Vice-President-in-hiding of an administration that seems to have no shortage of work for all the private military companies that Halliburton helped to create. These companies constitute a rapidly growing and largely unregulated industry that "reaps $100 billion a year worldwide," according to the News Observer. The elite 'security' personnel that work for these firms are paid salaries of up to $25,000 per month. According to both the LA Times and USA Today, some 15,000 of these security workers are currently at work in Iraq, employed by some three dozen private firms. USA Today noted that that makes the mercenaries "effectively the second-largest armed component of the coalition." The troops of our closest ally, the UK, are outnumbered roughly two-to-one by the soldiers-for-hire. Orca