By Naomi Fisher
Made aware of Jessee Ventura’s video on the atrocities waged by our “Corporations-for-Hire troops” I watched it and had a hard time believing him.
Searching the web and reading so many reports I had to admit Jesse Ventura was correct.
What happened to JFK’s promise we would never again have a war like Vietnam? That’s all we seem to do. “Our Boys” keep dying and we keep paying mercenaries to be somewhere.
My Brother was a Marine. But once he came back from Nam I did not keep up with our foreign wars as much as I should have. Often I quietly raged when I heard we were in another battle in another foreign country where we keep sending our troops. But I never, in all my wildest dreams considered that our Government would hire so many mercenaries who by their sleazy viciousness would rob, rape and kill innocents!
We have some former U.S. military who joined these corporations and a lot of non-military, recruited and not well trained, from all over the world fighting under private corporations. All make profit. Some allow ungoverned cruelty. Many of those men are in love with the battle, many have no scruples. They are in it for the pay. So what makes our Government think they will be loyal to our U.S.? Should not our military leaders who hire these companies expect those fighting mercenaries to switch their loyalty to the highest bidder? Certainly they are not that naive. And if they are not that naive there can be only one explanation. One that articles in links below state: The U.S. is using more corporation troops then we have military troops over there so our Pentagon and administration can hide the number fighting these foreign wars AND can hide the amount of money spent to keep us in these foreign wars!
Some of the private “military” companies also hire sub-contractors and warlords making their activities almost invisible to our Government. I quote one that said after we pull out, “In some notable, alarming cases, they go into business for themselves, breeding mercenary markets in the wake of a U.S. intervention.”
Worse, these companies-for-hire are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So they can function unchecked. Therefore, much of the utter chaos happening in Afghanistan and Iraq might be fueled by our hired mercenaries.
It’s hard to believe, harder yet to understand, why our leaders are hiding facts to keep us in wars. The loss of life alone! The dollars spent on mercenaries could ease many of the problems here at home. Why are we even over there? All of that is so twisted and ugly it’s beyond immoral.
Most of the links are a few years old. Many of them point to Presidents Bush and Obama escalating the hiring. nonsense.
Search Links:
Jesse Ventura
https://www.rt.com/shows/the-world-according-to-jesse/480288-trump-peace-plan-palestine-controversy/
Sleeping With The Enemy
Israel, Palestine: ‘The US is proposing a war crime and calling it a peace plan’
Finding that video unsettling I searched: corporations hiring terrorists in Afghanistan
“Large corporations that had lucrative businesses in Afghanistan” paid off the Taliban through a series of subcontractors, bribing the Afghan militants in order to save money on security, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday in federal court by the families of 143 US soldiers and contractors injured and killed during the longest war….Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an Al-Qaida-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.”
America’s Addiction to Mercenaries. … My job, in collaboration with everyone sipping Cokes in the president’s living room, was to prevent this, without anyone outside the room knowing….
Searched: private company troops fighting in Afghanistan
March 14, 2019 6.38am EDT
Phillip Carter, August 08, 2017
At the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Pentagon relied so heavily on private firms that contractor personnel outnumbered troops in each country.
America’s Addiction to Mercenaries, Sean McFate, August 12, 2016
Contracting is big business, too. In the 2014 fiscal year, the Pentagon obligated $285 billion to federal contracts… That’s equal to 8 percent of federal spending, and three and a half times Britain’s entire defense budget. About 45 percent of those contracts were for services, including private military contractors….
David Francis of the Fiscal Times points out that there are now 108,000 private contractors in Afghanistan …
Searched: mercenaries from U.S. in Afghanistan
The U.S.’s Mercenaries in Afghanistan, From A World to Win News Service
The flap about President Hamid Karzai’s threat to restrict the use of mercenaries in Afghanistan sheds a bright light on what the U.S. and its allies are doing in there. “… U.S. President Barack Obama had his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ring up Karzai to make him change his mind…”
https://www.trtworld.com/americas/six-things-you-should-know-about-modern-mercenaries-of-war-20831
NEWS AMERICAS, Azaera Amza, 16 Oct 2018
…The Bush administration ramped up the use of PMCs during the Iraq invasion of 2003 as well as in Afghanistan. Reports also suggest that mercenary operatives have been involved in conflicts in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen. …
There are so many others articles – you can find them on the searches I listed above
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal
Naomi Fisher is a resident of Ventura County
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Can you provide a source for JFK’s quotation regarding Vietnam?