More information as to our Government and its' interests,as opposed to Citizens
ARTICLE EXCERPT BEGINS

The Privatization of War and Peace
by Richard Reeves


October 21, 2003 | "PMC" is about to become a household acronym.
The letters stand for "private military company."

One PMC called DynCorp -- you can see its building and sign on
the Virginia side of the Potomac River on the road out to Dulles
Airport -- was the employer of the three security guards killed
by a bomb as they guarded American diplomats in the Gaza Strip
on Wednesday. When you call to ask questions about DynCorp, you
are referred to the State Department, which does not discuss
the trade secrets of private companies.

In other words, private companies doing the public's business
are not accountable to the public. It is a big business now.
DynCorp alone, with 23,000 employees, had at least $2 billion
in federal contracts last year. Two more facts: PMCs are a
$100 billion industry, most of that money coming from taxpayers;
one in 10 Americans doing military work and occupation duty in
Iraq are actually civilians working for PMCs. They are called
contract employees now -- flying and maintaining military heli-
copters around the world, among other things. Once upon a time
they would have been called mercenaries.

A month ago, a DynCorp pilot was shot down and killed by ground
fire in Colombia. What was he doing? None of your business.
More than a dozen of DynCorp's employees have been killed in
Colombia, and even their families can't find out what they
were doing there. Employees of another PMC, Aviation Develop-
ment Corp., were involved in the accidental 2001 killing of
a missionary and her infant daughter when the missionary's
plane was misidentified as belonging to cocaine traffickers.

Three Northrop Grumman employees whose plane crashed or was
shot down are being held hostage somewhere in Colombia.
What were they doing? None of your business. But it must
have been interesting stuff, because our State Department
is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to
their rescue.

Nine employees of Vinnell Corp. (a Virginia subsidiary of
Northrop Grumman), training Saudi Arabian soldiers, were
the people killed last May by a bomb in Riyadh.

PMCs are one face, a veiled one, of the accelerated privatizing
of the government of the United States. The idea, of course,
is to save money -- Dick Cheney was the first to push the idea
when he was secretary of defense during the first Gulf War --
and to avoid accountability. Corporate executives are not
answerable to congressional oversight committees or to reporters
babbling about the public's right to know. Under this system,
the public has no rights.

Another face of the new privatization was revealed briefly
last week on the Maryland side of the Potomac. It was not
Page One news that the U.S. Navy, under a White House
"competitive sourcing" program, was deciding whether a
private contractor could take over the work of 21 kitchen
workers at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

That was on Page 21 of The Washington Post last Tuesday in
a story by Christopher Lee. The 21 people, some of whom have
been there for more than 20 years, are officially "disabled."
They are mentally retarded. The U.S. government has given them
a life. They live in group homes or have managed to buy their
own homes, living with their parents or other relatives --
productive lives made possible by government policy.
They are among 1,734 mentally retarded people making between
$9.42 and $12.80 an hour under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
Face it, most of them are not really employable in the private
sector, and it would be no surprise if a contractor could hire
fewer people making less money to clean the silverware and pick
up kitchen trash.

But that's not the point, is it? Lee put it this way after talking
to the workers and their supporters: "The administration's require-
ment that they compete for their job misses the point that government
employment has always been about more than the bottom line. Through
various policies and laws, federal agencies for decades have gone
out of their way to hire members of certain populations, from
veterans to disabled people to welfare mothers and students."

In the Bethesda case, the Navy is following the classic conservative
mandate of government doing for people only what they cannot do for
themselves. Private business, in war and peace, is in it just for
the money. Your money -- but what they do with it is still none of
your business.