Blackwater hasn't gone away

It's yet another piece of the right wing quilt, that one of their own seems to believe he is a law unto himself, that he is living out a higher calling, that he is on a sacred mission to rid the world of people who aren't like him. Jeremy Scahill's latest piece on Blackwater and it's founder, Prince Erik, is downright scary.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

The allegations are being made by two former Blackwater employees who are referred to as John Doe #1 and John Doe #2, mainly because they don't want to have an "unexpected accident" at the hands of one of Prince's followers. One of the more disturbing allegations involves Prince's intentionally selecting and deploying persons who shared his white Christian supremacist bent, which often meant those who were mentally ill.

Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, "were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department." Doe #2 adds that "Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis." Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy "unfit men" and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were "the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to 'kill ragheads' or achieve 'kills' or 'body counts,'" as well as "excessive drinking" and "steroid use." However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, "Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to 'stop costing the company money.'"

Doe #2 also says Prince "repeatedly ignored the assessments done by mental health professionals, and instead terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men." He says Prince and then-company president Gary Jackson "hid from Department of State the fact that they were deploying men to Iraq over the objections of mental health professionals and security professionals in the field," saying they "knew the men being deployed were not suitable candidates for carrying lethal weaponry, but did not care because deployments meant more money."

Fanaticism of any stripe is frightening and dangerous, and white Christian fanaticism, based as it is on the narrow-minded notion that for me to be right you have to be wrong, is no exception. And the realization that the Republican party has pretty much decided to fall back on their "white voter strategy"—appealing particularly to dissatisfied whites of "low and moderate income," many of whom would probably agree with Prince Erik's divine mission—doesn't help. Indeed, as a white Christian (or at least a Beige-Buddhist-Existential-Christian-Agnostic), these people and the social wave they represent both angers me and scares the hell out of me. These are the people for whom the end will always justify the means, the kinds of people who strap on explosives and blow up market-places because their god tells them to, the kinds of people who murder abortion doctors with no sense of guilt or remorse (the clinical definition of that is "sociopath") because their god tells them to. These are people, like Erik Prince, who believe they are "tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe."

And they are our neighbors.

Stoking the embers of racial and cultural hatred and intolerance, whether it's done by the Christian jihadist Erik Prince or by Hannity-Limbaugh-Beck or by Foxx-Boehner-DeMint or even (dare I make the leap) by the brown-shirt tactics of the latest town hall protestors, all leaves me with the feeling that we're in transitional times. Now more than ever dialog needs to take the place of sound bytes. Now more than ever the more we know the better off we'll be.