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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96491.Blackwater_The_Rise_of_the_World_s_Most_Powerful_Mercenary_Army?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171312592m/96491.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96491.Blackwater_The_Rise_of_the_World_s_Most_Powerful_Mercenary_Army?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/55473.Jeremy_Scahill">Jeremy Scahill</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13876587?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>Holy shit! Literally. Anyone who denies that the brutal U.S. occupation of places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Nigeria, the Congo, Azerbeijan, and NOLA is not a right-wing, racialized, Christian mercenary crusade has the evidential mountain of this book to contend with. Scahill details the rise of Blackwater, a worldwide, Christian mercenary army run by a man named Erik Prince, which, through the Bush regime, is destroying the idea of the nation-state, and has received hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster and war contracts. Many of those involved with the build-up of this military complex, such as Bremer and Schmitz and Perle and Boykin, truly believe that God put Bush in the White House (they admit that he didn't win the election) because he was divined to foster the next stage of the world-wide crusades (i.e. Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Knights of the Round Table, etc.). Save for a handful of pages in which Scahill synthesizes an analysis, most of the book is composed of quotes from various government and internal documents, and every single piece of information he presents is vastly footnoted and archived. <br/> <br/>Quick little thing that I learned.....So in the aftermath of Katrina, remember all the men (mostly) in fatigues folks you saw occupying bridges and streets in New Orleans in tanks and wielding AK-47's? They were mostly occupying soldiers hired by the following privatized militaries (groups who claimed to be in New Orleans on humanitarian grounds), and this is where U.S. government spending went: by June 2006, Blackwater made approximately 73 million (243,000 per day); Halliburton/KBR made 30 million; the Shaw Group made 700 million; Fluor made 1.4 BILLION; Bechtel made 575 million; and Instinctive Shooting International, an Israel-based mercenary company, flooded New Orleans with soldiers. So what did they do? They guarded government buildings and the private properties of industrialists, they were deputized to shoot at will (please see "When the Levees Broke"), and they were positioned to block access to the city and keep NOLA residents from returning. There might be just a little bit of oil off the coast, not far from the 9th Ward. <br/> <br/>In downtown L.A. the other day, across the street from MacArthur Park and directly in front of the Honduran restaurant I was eating at, I saw a blondish white girl walking her toy dog (strapped with a pink bow). Boldly and recklessly, like she'd always belonged there. There are massive connections to be made. <br/> <br/>And we're worried about a little presidential election! <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/801914?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>