The Kossacks: Still Dense As Ever

Daily Kos, the liberal's largest blog on the 'Net, is nototrious for stirring the pot. Kos, himself, is notorious for being a loser--having backed Howard Dean in 2004, and Ned Lamont this year. If he keeps this up, he'll achieve Bob Shrum status in no time.

Bot amongst center-right bloggers, Kos made a serious name for himself back during the Fallujah campaign when the private security detail there was killed, and their bodies were dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge. What made Kos' infamy in this incident? When he wrote this in a post concerning that incident:

I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profits, screw them.

For the record, private firms like this are over there to literally provide security for the number of civilian workers trying to rebuild Iraq. On occasion, they will fight alongside of our troops, but they aren't there to do the fighting. Their job is security. These men are well-trained, and usually recruited from among retired Spec-Ops guys. Today, courtesy of Charles Johnson, we are shown, once again, how idiotic the moonbats can be. Charles highlights this post from the Kossacks today:

Just the latest tragedy in Iraq:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - British soldiers backed by U.S. military helicopters battled insurgents near the Kuwaiti border Friday, close to where a private security team of four Americans and an Austrian were kidnapped. A top police official said a criminal gang had snatched the men and demanded ransom.Private security team? Is that straight from the PR materials?

Let’s not mince words and call these people exactly what they are: Mercenaries.

They represent the Bush agenda of privatizing our military—a policy the Democrats must forcefully reject and reverse in the new Congress. We need to show the American people just how disgusting these profiteers—focusing especially on those who run these companies—have been, and how destructive they are to the military as a whole.

The American people will reject this and hold the Republicans to blame. No one likes a profiteer. Democrats just have to make sure they American people do find out—and we’ll be here to help out.

So what can the Dems do? Dunno. But Jack Murtha has the purse strings, I heard. Maybe we could defund the private contracts, and call them out explicitly in authorization bills. Maybe we could draft legislation specifically forbidden the current and future privatization of certain functions in the military. Let Bush veto it.

Because Americans will not support this if they know what’s going on. You don’t out source war.
The GOP likes to attack Kos for his comment saying “Screw Them”, but Kos was right then (in the comments). And he’s still right now.

What makes this post asinine is that the author (a KosKid named "pacified") obviously didn't do his homework very well. But, Dr. Rusty Shacklefored did, and he explains what these men are, and what their job is:

The five men work for The Crescent Security Group, which provide security for military, civilian, and diplomatice convoys in Iraq:

Crescent Security Group conducts convoy escort duties for an ever growing number of Coalition Militaries, Embassies, Government Contractors, Private enterprise, transport and freight forwarding companies.

Crescent operates with a minimum configuration of 3 'gun trucks' per convoy with an emphasis on the safety of life, goods under transit and vehicles in our care.

Gun trucks are civilian vehicles upgraded and in house maintained to operate in hostile and extreme climatic environments. They can be of an up-armored, semi-armored or soft skinned configuration, with each carrying all necessities to be self sufficient for extended periods of time

No offense, but that hardly sounds like these guys are doing any sort of proactive engagement of the enemy over there. They sould like a standard security company that specializes in protecting people in a combat zone. As a matter of fact, Dr. Shackleford has a photo at the top of his post that shows one of these gun trucks. It's a truck, with what looks like a .50 machine gun in the bed, and a couple of men standing next to it. Their appears to be no armor to speak of on the truck (though a conversion can be done on trucks like this as are done with Chevy Suburbans used by the federal government. The Discovery Channel touched on this subject a couple years ago. Those Suburbans can withstand a susstained assult from gunmen wielding AK-47s.) Needless to say, those trucks aren't designed to engae the enemy in a proactive role, like the one that falls to the soldiers to perform daily.

These guys are highly-trained-and-specialized security guards. I don't mean to demean them with that term (a better one escapes me at the moment), and I wouldn't do that. My uncle works for such a company here in the US. His job is not the sort these guys do, but he's assured me that these guys are no slouches. They know what they're doing, and they're perfectly capable of engaging our enemy should it come to that. But they don't go looking for them.

The Kossacks are a nice foil to the center right, but it's clear to me that we know a bit more than they do, and choose to investigate rather than simply opine opinions out of our butts. But, are we to expect anything less of the kiddies over there around the "Kosfather?"

Publius II