Democracy for Vancouver

BushCo has figured out how to destroy the U.S. Navy by other means:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A new counterterrorism training facility operated by military security contractor Blackwater Worldwide echoed with the grunts of Navy sailors, a day after a federal judge ordered the city to let classes begin.
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Blackwater insists the warehouse was built to provide the Navy’s “ship reaction force basic” training course as part of a $400 million contract. The program is part of an initiative to train sailors in counterterrorist defense tactics after the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port.
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Bonfiglio acknowledged that Blackwater would gladly host other agencies, including the Border Patrol or Coast Guard, at the warehouse, located in an unmarked building within sight of the border fence and the Tijuana airport control tower beyond.
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“To put training in the hands of private profiteers means that you’re giving up your ability to oversee what they’re doing and when you give it up you lose control,” {Democratic activist Raymond] Lutz said. “Why doesn’t the Navy train its own people?”

Bonfiglio said his five trainers offer students a depth of counterterrorism experience the Navy couldn’t match without pulling its own experts from other duties.

The Navy was established in October 1775. Are you telling me that among all of the 331,000 sailors currently enlisted, we can’t find FIVE trainers? If that’s true, no wonder the services are falling apart.

BushCo is destroying the armed services link by link, bit by bit, even chipping away at the vaunted camaraderie among military men and women by stratifying them into the haves (those smart enough to get out and snag a lucrative Blackwater training or ops gig) and the have-nots (those too young or dumb to do anything but enlist and re-enlist, hoping their number won’t come up during their 4th or 5th tour of Iraq).

How do you think those sailors training at Blackwater’s shiny new San Diego facility feel about being instructed by guys who’ve been bought out, guys for whom actually serving and being on the hook for repeated deployments and stop-loss orders is a sucker’s bet? Guys who are making more in a year than a Petty Officer might clear in his whole enlistment?

If you were to devise a plan to destroy the armed forces of the U.S., you could not have come up with a better one than the undertakings of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal over the last 7½ years.

Maybe Bush really is an Iranian agent.