Simpson Toes the Line

Is party-line voting more important than military readiness?  Apparently so for Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson.  He sits on the House Appropriations Committee where last week they debated the Emergency War Supplemental which contains provisions that would require a certain level of readiness for any unit being sent into harm's way.  This includes things like proper armor, training and equipment — routine and ordinary provisions for those being asked to risk their lives.  And the readiness standards aren't excessive, unreasonable or arbitrary — they are the standards set by the Department of Defense.  Then why, according to Red State Rebels, did every Republican on the Committee vote to scrap that language?  Maybe you should ask Mike Simpson.

Comments

[be]

incredible - this guy's gotta go... you think he even read the bill?

[MountainGoat]

Obviously a partisan vote but replacing him won't be easy. That's why shedding light on this sort of thing is so important.

[Joki]

One angle of this issue is: who are the troops we are supposed to support with our billions of taxpayer funds? I personally do not support these privatized actors in our Iraq war, and see them as a means for continuing the war. The Dems inCongress are now dealing with Bush's Iraq budget with nary a reservation about mercenaries. They should force Bush to provide an itemized budget instead of the vague junk he sends them that they are reviewing right now!

Read about the role of privatized mercenary soldiers and contractors in Iraq:
http://gdaeman.blogspot.com/2007/02/privatizing-war-in-iraq.html
[This site is the most recent information on Blackwater mercenaries dawing down billions from our treasury, that I can find so far.)
"...Currently in Iraq, more than 40 percent of the total occupying force comprises private contractors. For President Bush and his political allies, war has become just another industry to be outsourced, with contractors providing a backdoor means of expanding the occupation through the deployment of private armies.
In his State of the Union address in last month, Bush mentioned a major new initiative in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps. Bush said: “Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.” But this is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input. Private contractors constitute the second-largest force in Iraq, about 100,000 strong, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

...The problem is that firms such as Blackwater rely primarily on large, taxpayer-funded U.S. government contracts to stay in business, not on the business of private sector customers or clients. Blackwater has a $300-million, no-bid contract (from 2003) with the State Department to guard diplomats in Iraq. Thus, tax dollars are used first to pay to train the troops, then to pay them a lot more to do basically the same job with a private contracting firm, and finally to pay hefty profits to the contracting firm.

...Many of the 48,000 U.S.-funded mercenaries in Iraq are not Americans, and their deaths are not tracked by the Labor Department.
Blackwater and other U.S.-based military contractors have created a private military melting pot by hiring not only Americans, but also mercenaries from Bosnia, Chile, Colombia, the Filipeans, and South Africa. Many of these soldiers-for-hire are veterans of repressive military regimes, including that of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and South Africa’s former apartheid government. Other recruits are impoverished former military personnel desperate for a paying job (Blackwater has a recruitment center in the Philippines)."