Friends,

Before returning to the Corleones in the garden, there was a point I wanted to make about privatization and the "revolving door" of Washington.

Like many of you I only know of an entity called Blackwater from the reporting of Jeremy Scahill. Now the Blackwater organization is called the Z Corporation, I understand. Note the attempted splitting of the Self and dissolution of the Hyde aspect of the persona, implicit in the name change.

Blackwater is a private military contractor, who first entered the American public consciousness with the massacre of four contractors at the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Sometime after that an issue came up concerning accountability in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, and so on and so forth.

A spokesman for the company produced a statement to this approximate effect: we can't be held civilly responsible for anything because we are part of the total U.S. force; but the Uniform Code of Military Justice cannot be applied to us because we're civilian contractor.

Its after midnight so we'll look at this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur