RUSH: Beth in Schenectady, New York, welcome to Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. Well, I wanted to mention the Blackwater shooting of civilians. They still need to be brought to justice, and the issue I hear of the upper brass driving around with more armament than the average working soldier over in Iraq?
RUSH: Blackwater is an independent security force.
CALLER: Right, which means we probably shouldn’t have one over there if this is what’s happening, right?
RUSH: Shouldn’t have one?
CALLER: A private security force.
RUSH: No, they’re all over. When I toured Afghanistan, I did a troop visit in Afghanistan, it will be two years ago in February, maybe three now, and contract security was used for all of us. I went over there with a state department contingent, and stayed in the equivalent in Kabul of the green zone in Baghdad, and the security for the ambassador and for the state department people were all contract security people. I don’t know if they were Blackwater, but they are the best, and they’re former Special Forces in some ways, but they are the absolute best at what they do, they are charged with protection. When he was in Iraq and in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, who was the first appointment of President Bush to go over there and start putting things in order, was the most targeted man in the country. It was Blackwater that did his security.
CALLER: My great uncle was an air raid mechanic first class in World War II and did escort and all that stuff and I’m thinking, you know, in his little rickety plane, and I’m imagining today, as I said the second point beside the civilian killings, was my great uncle is MIA, he’s presumed to die [sic] in a plane explosion. They didn’t go look for him. But, anyway, that’s another story. He did escort; they did bombing; they did search-and-rescue; they did everything, the whole nine yards in a little rickety plane.
RUSH: I don’t get your point.
CALLER: Well, my point is that, thinking in the name of all those soldiers that don’t have armament, right, that —
RUSH: You’re living under such an illusion that they don’t have armaments. You need to watch Ken Burns’s The War on PBS, if you want to find out about having no armaments and no food. This is all a myth that you’re believing.