Bill Moyers had Jeremy Scahill on Friday night and it was a great interview. If you missed it, you can read the transcript or watch the video here. It was a great interview and Jeremy Scahill provides some chilling facts about the privatization of our military. He talks a little about Hurricane Katrina and the use of Blackwater in New Orleans and how Eric Prince sent his guys there before they had a contract. He also states he ran into some Israeli private security contractors at that time. James Reiss, a wealthy inhabitant of uptown New Orleans and chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority, brought in an Israeli private security company by helicopter to guard Audubon Place, the gated community in which he lives. As Scahill points out, the rich hire mercenaries and the poor suffer.

In other mercenary news:

• » Afghanistan is now cracking down on private security contractors. Echoing a growing problem in Iraq, Afghan authorities have started to crack down on lucrative but largely unregulated security firms, some of which are suspected of murder. Two private Afghan security companies were raided this week, and at least 10 more contractors - including some protecting embassies - will soon be closed, police and Western officials told The Associated Press. The government is also proposing new rules to tighten control over such companies _ including some Western contractors _ amid concerns they intimidate Afghans, disrespect local security forces and don’t cooperate with authorities, according to a policy draft document obtained by AP.
• » Tomorrow the U.S. and Mexico are to announce a counternarcotics plan that calls for increasing U.S. anti-drug aid to Mexico, now estimated at $44 million a year, to $1.4 billion over two to three years. It will probably involve U.S. private security contractors training Mexican troops.
• » Last week the U.S. rejected a U.N. report that said the use of private security guards like those involved in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians amounted to a new form of mercenary activity. Although the use of mercenaries is discouraged in international rules of conduct of war, the hiring of foreign soldiers by one country for use in a third is specifically illegal only for the 30 countries that ratified a 1989 treaty. The U.S. and Iraq are among the many countries that never signed the accord.

One of the things you have to remember here, and that Scahill pointed out, is that our use of private security firms is putting our tax dollars right back into the pockets of politicians. Primarily the Republicans. Primarily the religious whacko republicans. There’s just something very very very wrong with this.

Eric Prince is a freak. A religious nut who has his own private army and who pumps millions of dollars back into the religious right’s coffers. I don’t know about you, but that scares the shit out of me. This year the Iraqi people suffer at the hands of Eric Prince’s mercenaries. Next year, it could be us.