Frank Rich, (right) a NYT Op-Ed Columnist, wrote a piece last week, titled "The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us" on torture, which I was unable to blog , because it was simply too painful, too shameful....too unbelievable to even allow space in my psyche.
This week, Mr. Rich gives us yet another in-depth, put your thinking cap on story..... Read with your eyes wide open....
The corruption and the cover-up are evil, do not doubt that. The destruction and the profiteering are impoverishing our nation as well as destroying Iraq. The continued shifting of power to private entities outside the control of the American people represents an undermining of all that we hold dear. http://teacherken.blogspot.com
Below is an excerpt from Mr. Rich's Op-Ep in the NYT October 21, 2007, please link and read in its entirety.
Suicide Is Not Painless
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Last week a man you’ve never heard of Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.
Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer.
Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted by Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment.
Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. As he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares much about its security business; it is expanding into a “full spectrum” defense contractor offering a “one-stop shop” for everything from remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot.
Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.
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