Mercenaries, Methane

In Baghdad in June, in a privately guarded coalition compound in the Green Zone,.outsourced security. He put the number of armed men around 25,000. (This figure is in addition to some 50,000 to 70,000 unarmed civilians working for American interests in Iraq, the largest percentage by way of Halliburton and its subsidiaries, doing everything from servicing warplanes to driving food trucks to washing dishes.)
Triple Canopy now has about 1,000 men in Iraq, about 200 of them American and almost all the rest from Chile and Fiji
Private gunmen, according to Lawrence Peter, are now guarding four U.S. generals. Triple Canopy protects a large military base. And throughout Iraq, the defense of essential military sites like depots of captured munitions has been informally shared by private soldiers and U.S. troops.

No open policy debate took place; no executive order was publicly issued. And who is in charge of overseeing these armed men? One thing is sure: they are crucial to the war effort.

the mercenary grew more and more marginalized and disdained, and in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 it was essentially outlawed, at least in wars between nations.

Its current contracts in Iraq, mostly with the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department, are worth almost $250 million yearly. And having succeeded in Iraq -- Triple Canopy hasn't had a single worker or client killed -- it has just been named one of three companies that will divide up $1 billion annually in newly created protection work with the State Department in high-risk countries around the world.

Triple Canopy's Fijians and Chileans make between $40 and $150 dollars each week and sleep in crowded barracks at the Baghdad bas

There is no effective regulation in Iraq of whom the firms hire or how the men are trained or how they conduct themselves. ...''At worst you've got cowboys running almost unchecked, shooting at will and just plain O.T.F. (Out There Flappin').''
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12/08/2005 4:17PM
..western Sibera ..an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres ..started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago..

..largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear .. will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide..
New Scientist today.
..lakes, some more than a kilometre across.
..Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else .. a rise of some 3C in the past 40 years...Siberian peat bog could hold some 70bn tonnes of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.

..methane was bubbling to the surface of the permafrost so quickly that it was preventing the surface from freezing over.
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Seen in Harpers:
"Post Autistic Economics" - Economics as if people are people.
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Tonle Sap Al & Plastic coracles


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Bayon, that Khmer smile