In the early days of the occupation, the Green Zone had played host to economic shock therapists from Poland and Russia; now it became a magnet for a different breed of shock experts, those specializing in the darker arts of suppressing resistance movements. The private security companies padded their ranks with veterans of the dirty wars in Colombia, South Africa and Nepal. According to journalist Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater and other private security firms hired more than seven hundred Chilean troops—many of them special forces operators—for Iraq deployment, some of whom had trained and
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