Everyone know that an American mercenary company protects the Saudi ruling family from its citizens?

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0513-06.htm

Published in the April, 1996 issue of The Progressive

Mercenaries Inc.: How a U.S. Company Props Up the House of Saud

by William D. Hartung

We were shocked and saddened to hear about the attacks in Saudi Arabia and the deaths of at least 91 people there, including ten Americans.

But the fact that one of the targets was a U.S. private military corporation called Vinnell raises serious questions about the role of "executive mercenaries," and corporations who profit from war and instability. This is the second time in eight years that Vinnell's operations in Saudi Arabia have been the target of a terrorist attack. In 1995 a car bomb blasted through an Army training program Vinnell was involved with. The following year, Bill Hartung, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute wrote this article for the Progressive magazine.

The sanitized version of American foreign policy asserts that the United States is hard at work promoting democratic values around the world in the face of attacks from totalitarian ideologies ranging from communism during the Cold War to Islamic fundamentalism today. Every once in a while an incident occurs that contradicts this reassuring rhetoric by revealing the secret underside of American policy, which is far more concerned with propping up pliable regimes that serve the interests of U.S. multinational corporations than it is with any meaningful notion of democracy. The November 13, 1995 bombing of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) headquarters and an adjacent building housing a U.S. military training mission is one such incident. snip

The story of how an obscure American company ended up becoming the Saudi monarchy's personal protection service is a case study in how the United States government has come to rely on unaccountable private companies and unrepresentative foreign governments to do its dirty work on the world stage, short-circuiting democracy at home and abroad in the process. In the wake of the Iran/contra scandal and the end of the Cold War, many observers of U.S. foreign policy have assumed that this penchant for covert policymaking has been put aside, but Vinnell's role in Saudi Arabia puts the lie to that comforting assumption.


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Notice how our media keeps mentioning the statement by Gingrich about Saudi Arabia and how oppressive that government is but no one ever mentions who keeps those thugs in power. Odd isn't it?

[JHB]

1. I'm curious as to how this is seen by Saudi radicals...

...is it a factor in ginning up anger at America and the West (interfereing in their affairs or "conrolling" the monarchy)?

Or more accurately, in what ways does this play out, since you can bet there's at least some people seeing it in every possible way. (Does Vinnell use black helicopters?)

[Hannah Bell]

2. shocker. not like the saudi monarchs were installed by the west & kept in power by the west -- or

anything like that.

[lonestarnot]

3. And I'm sure no one in Abu Dhabi is complaining about all those stolen dollars that came with Erik

Prince either.