John Paul Brammer writes at Blue Nation Review The Navajo are on a 1000-Mile March. Here's Why:
In 1864, over 8,000 Navajo men, women, and children were marched at gunpoint from their homelands to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in a journey that came to be known as the Long Walk of the Navajo.
150 years later, activists in the Navajo Nation are walking again: this time to protest fracking on tribal lands and to galvanize a people who are ready to stand up and be heard, Al Jazeera reports.
The 1,000 mile walk, dubbed the “Journey for Existence,” began at the Piñon Pipeline in New Mexico last January. The journey also includes Huerfano, NM, a major site for the Navajo that is threatened by fracking.
According to the Western Environmental Law Center, the Piñon Pipeline would destroy cultural heritage and sacred sites, disturbing about 10,500 square miles of land surface.
The journey will be completed over the course of multiple months in different segments.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—$4.5 Billion For Mercenaries In Iraq:
The New York Times has an extensive report on the scope, costs and problems of the military's use of mercenaries in Iraq.
With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias—by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000 on top of an American military presence of 130,000...
The price of this partnership is soaring. By some recent government estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants, electric lines and oil refineries...
The authority initially estimated that security costs would eat up about 10 percent of the $18 billion in reconstruction money approved by Congress, said Capt. Bruce A. Cole of the Navy, a spokesman for the authority's program management office.
But after months of sabotage and insurgency, some officials now say a much higher percentage will go to security companies that unblushingly charge $500 to $1,500 a day for their most skilled operators...
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