Profile of Vinnell corp. Targeted in Saudi Arabia.

nolympics submits

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.

Read the rest at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0513-06.htm"