Sen. Webb Takes on the "Virtual Army" of Private Contractors in Iraq

By: Lowell
Published On: 7/8/2007 9:15:39 AM

This is yet ANOTHER great reason to celebrate the fact that Jim Webb is the junior Senator from Virginia, not George Allen:

In an interview that appeared this week in The Viginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Webb expressed frustration with a weaker decision-making process in Congress than he remembers from his days in Washington as Navy secretary and assistant Defense secretary...

For instance, supplemental appropriations bills written largely in secret.

"The most glaring example," he told the newspaper, "is this whole virtual army."

Webb is on target in questioning the legal ramifications of hiring 100,000 civilians -- actually, more than 180,000, according to the latest figures the Los Angeles Times acquired -- to support the troops in Iraq.

I'm glad to see Sen. Webb on top of this issue, and would love it even better if he were heading up a "modertn day Truman Commission" to look into the entire issue of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, now that we've got a Senator who "won't back down."

Comments



I agree (Alicia - 7/8/2007 11:40:49 AM)
and who regulates all the contractors?  180K means there are more of them than US troops.  That's just crazy and we're not getting the whole story... 

Go Webb!  I'm so glad he's our Senator.



Blackwater (WillieStark - 7/8/2007 12:14:23 PM)
These guys are fucking mercenaries. I would bet that most of them are scum whose loyalty lies with us as long as the checks from Halliburton don't bounce.

Check you Scahill's book about them. Here is a video from him.



"A shadow army" (Lowell - 7/8/2007 12:17:40 PM)
That's certainly not Democracy, not does it have any place in our constitutional system of government.  Fighting our wars with mercenaries?  Completely unacceptable.


Out-sourcing goes a lot further (Teddy - 7/8/2007 2:04:23 PM)
but extends to our intelligence-gathering--- see a very revealing story in today's Washington Post about blue (government) CIA professionals working with and sometimes under green private contractors at all levels here and abroad. And the enormous reach, like an underground root system, of political (Bush) appointees down into the lower levels of bureaucracy in every federal department, and the out-sourcing of many many government functions to private enterprise, likewise in all departments.

Private contractors who have no particular loyalty to public service but are loyal to their corporate masters and to the master's bottom line, a situation that often puts them at odds with service-oriented, Constitution-protecting loyal government employees. These private contractors are the ones primarily who employed torture in CIA black prisons. There is no accountability, and ultimately no oversight or control by representatives of the American taxpayer, who is footing the bill for these mercenaries.

And just how loyal are these private contractors, anyway? When the existing contract runs out, and their private enterprise bosses take a contract with another employer, they go with it, taking any secrets or technology they've picked up from the United States with them. And if those new employers are, say, a foreign power, or maybe a terrorist organization, then what?