Your tax dollars at work

Want to know where your tax dollars are going? Check out this 2005 "trophy video", from Aegis, a mercenary gang on the US payroll in Iraq. Fair warning: You'll see mercenaries, on your payroll and officially immune from all military and legal oversight, cruising along the highway casually machine-gunning cars and their occupants completely at random to the cheerful accompaniment of American rock music.

"Why do they hate us?" Oh, yes, I forgot. "Because they hate our freedoms," right?

It's almost as shocking that, despite following Iraq-related news fairly closely, I neverheard of this video until now. It appears that the Christian Science Monitor carried the story, but so far as I can tell it was the only US major media outlet to have considered video evidence of US mercenaries casually murdering Iraqi civilians at random to be newsworthy. A little digging in online databases reveals that UPI and the New York Times carried short squibs about it, but they were apparently inconspicuous enough that I didn't see them. (UPI NewsTrack (Nov 27, 2005); "Shots on Web Draw Inquiry." The New York Times (Dec 10, 2005): A10(L).)

But, hey, you're far more interested in some dimwitted, drug-addled Hollywood pop-tart's latest hair malfunction than in documentary proof that your nation is committing acts of random terrorism against civilians, aren't you? Ooh! Ooh! OJ Simpson!!! And.. and.. there's a cute woman missing somewhere! Look, we have her college yearbook photo! And a cute puppy-dog video! Look! Look!

You're a good American. You watch TV obediently. Are you doing your part in the everlasting, ever-expanding "War On Terra" by going shopping? And watching what you say?

Meanwhile, while the corporate media spew out a steady stream of distraction and disinformation, billions of your tax dollars are funding the development of murderous paramilitary mercenary gangs that answer to no one but their paycheck and blithely slaughter civilians whenever they feel like it. They're already been employed as substitutes for Iraq-assigned National Guardsmen in the aftermath of Katrina, and further deployments to the United States are planned. Meanwhile the Bush administration keeps the military and the National Guard, which are at least nominally sworn to respect the Constitution and the rule of law, tied up in a distant overseas quagmire. (As noted in the New York Times, Bush is demanding a larger 2008 budget for his ongoing adventure in Iraq than in any previous year. So much for any talk about troop withdrawals, as favored by the majority of the population in our purported democracy.)

Naomi Wolf has a theory about this. But of course it would an irresponsible conspiracy theorizing to propose that there could be any connection between these events. Nah, that sort of thing never happens. La la la.

UPDATE: a summary of the federal tax dollars shoveled out to Blackwater USA during the Bush Administration can be found here.