Saturday, May 3, 2008

Oh Blackwater, Keep On Rollin'...


With all due respect to Buckwheat and the Doobies...did you know that one of North Carolina's most profitable corporations is expanding? Hiring even! It's great to see this kind of entrepreneurial activity, especially in such tough economic times.

Mercenary, smershenary, any kind of private sector expansion is OTAY with us. Where do we go to fill out an application?

Ah, Blackwater Worldwide. They've got it goin' on in Otay Mesa, California. But don't ya know, they may be undone by the same government bureaucracy that they say is so harmful to the interests of business. Seems that when Blackwater filled out their application to build a 61,000 square foot facility on the U.S.-Mexican border, that they used the names of two of their subsidiaries--instead of the Blackwater Worldwide corporate name.

Here's an interview with Amy Goodman and Raymond Lutz, a San Diego resident:
...Blackwater received approval for the 61,000 square-foot indoor facility in Otay Mesa, California, by filing for permits using the names of two subsidiaries. It was only last week when San Diego officials learned Blackwater was behind the project.

The news comes just two months after local residents successfully blocked Blackwater from opening an 824-acre military complex known as Blackwater West in the rural hamlet of Potrero, California.

...

RAYMOND LUTZ: Well, I got the tip from an anonymous like yahoo.com email address person who said he was an ex-friend of a former Blackwater employee. He told me that this site was being put in and was ready to open. I drove down to check it out, and indeed I could see the ventilation equipment out the back of the building, which is apparently necessary for the indoor shooting range that they’re intending to put in. I went down to—and I checked all the news media at the time and everyone I could find. No one had heard anything about this.

They had secretly started this last September, about a month before our big rally out in Potrero. So the rally really had an effect. In other words, at that time, they were saying, “We’re throwing in the towel” on this other thing, but they weren’t letting the cat out of the bag, when in the process of filing these permits under the names Raven Development and Southwest Law Enforcement. And then, I understand that’s under a shell company out in Puerto Rico.

They went in calling this a vocational school. None of the permits, which I just saw last—yesterday at the Department of Planning of the City of San Diego, had any real notation on it about the fact that this is going to be—have an indoor shooting range and have firearms and so forth inside.

...

Anyway, this new facility that went in was absolutely under the radar. If we hadn’t been told about it, we wouldn’t have found out about it. I don’t know how many other places are going into across the nation, because it’s very hard to track them. They’re not using their real name.
Full transcript here. Somehow we just don't feel like singing any James Taylor tunes right now.

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