{"id":1337,"date":"2016-03-20T22:09:05","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T02:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/brd\/wp\/?p=1337"},"modified":"2016-03-20T22:09:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T02:09:05","slug":"reading-blackwater-the-rise-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-mercenary-army","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/2016\/03\/20\/reading-blackwater-the-rise-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-mercenary-army\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading: Blackwater : The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Blackwater\"<\/a><\/div>\n
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful mercenary Army<\/a><\/div>\n
Jeremy Scahill<\/a>; Blackstone Audio, Inc. 2007<\/div>\n
WorldCat<\/a>\u2022LibraryThing<\/a>\u2022Google Books<\/a>\u2022BookFinder<\/a><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a significant amount of detail that I don’t know regarding nearly everything in the known universe. As Silent Bob once said:<\/p>\n

“Bitch, what you don’t know about me I can just about squeeze in the Grand fucking Canyon. Did you know I always wanted to be a dancer in Vegas?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s how I feel about Blackwater. How little I knew about them before this book.<\/p>\n

My #1 takeaway from this book:<\/h2>\n

Military contractor is the media-embraced term for a mercenary. Mercenaries are real, they are not a fantasy or only found as guards for villains in a James Bond film. Whenever I hear the terms civilian contractor or military contractor when referring to a position in a hostile space, I will replace the term in my head with the term mercenary. <\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Wikipedia definition:<\/p>\n

A mercenary<\/b>[1]<\/a><\/sup> is a person who takes part in an armed conflict<\/a> who is not a national or a party to the conflict and is “motivated to take part in the hostilities by the desire for private gain”.[2]<\/a><\/sup>[3]<\/a><\/sup> In other words, a mercenary is a person who fights for personal gains of money or other recompense instead of fighting for the ideological interests of a country, whether they be for or against the existing government. In the last century, and as reflected in the Geneva Convention<\/a>, mercenaries have increasingly come to be seen as less entitled to protections by rules of war than non-mercenaries. However, whether or not a person is a mercenary may be a matter of degree, as financial and national interests may overlap.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mercenary<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful mercenary Army Jeremy Scahill; Blackstone Audio, Inc. 2007 WorldCat\u2022LibraryThing\u2022Google Books\u2022BookFinder \u00a0 There is a significant amount of detail that I don’t know regarding nearly everything in the known universe. As Silent Bob once said: “Bitch, what you don’t know about me I can just about squeeze in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,4,147,141,10],"tags":[305,254,90],"class_list":["post-1337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-i-hate-people-but-i-love-humanity","category-non-fiction","category-politics-2","category-tech","tag-mercenary","tag-politics-2","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1337"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1340,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions\/1340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}