Worlds Meet

TV Points Finger At Contractors

When the new FOX series Nikita premiered in September, it became the sixth series to feature the idea of a contracting industry that grows uncontrollably beyond government constraints. We dare to ask if fiction writers see this threat, why many government policy people and most media continue to ignore the problem.

In the climax of the opening episode, Nikita, a former operative of the Division rescues an African leader from an assassination attempt by her former employer. Nikita told the African leader that he was the target of a rogue department created by the government, which no longer maintained that control. The Division started as a Blackwater-like secret ops organization with specialized ninja-like rangers.

Contracting firms like Blackwater, now called Xe, are hired by the government to handle protection as bodyguards, accompany convoys of trucks and even gather intelligence from areas like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nikita became the sixth series recognizing contracting firms as a threat. The CBS series Jericho (which ran from 2006 to 2008), showed the culprit of a contracting firm called J&R that could destroy US towns in order to preserve national security. The season before it ended, 24 (FOX) presented a contracting firm that decided the national interest called for smuggling nuclear material into Washington D.C. along with a seizure of the President. Both Flash Forward (ABC) and The Unit (CBS) demonstrated the ability of those rogue corporations to subvert the FBI, CIA and national security forces. This year’s The Event (NBC) casts a president kept out of the loop by such a threat.

Yet the problem of such corporations is being ignored by most people. Blackwater was temporarily banned from working in Iraq when a series of citizen killings alienated the Iraqi government. But the ban was short lived and the company was called back because the Pentagon considered its work necessary for national security. When a key writer for The Nation detailed how Blackwater’s founder was implicated in murder in an August 4, 2009 article, the warning produced little attention. One court even suggested that the black ops people were outside of any US jurisdiction. We should dare to ask if these corporations are exerting even more unseen influence and perhaps exert power to suppress information.

Blackwater or Xe, or Blackwater Worldwide, which it was before becoming Xe, lies at the tip of a threatening iceberg. The Center for Public Integrity reported that since 1994, the Defense Department entered into 3,601 contracts worth $300 billion from 12 corporations like Xe. Arguments claim these corporations are an inevitable measure to save money. However, those comments don’t explain how paying a Xe contractor $600 a day while billing the government for $900 day compares to using standard army personnel.

A recent NPR report described the death of a Taliban leader during a strike. Oddly, the report also indicated the Taliban leader code-named White, was a black ops contractor. So when we see reports like that spotlighting our supposed enemies as those we placed to protect us, maybe departments like the Division, or Jack Bauer’s foe, might not be as fictional as we think.

The threats abound. Is the cloak of protecting the country’s national security a massive cover for deciding the course of history without giving the public a voice in the decision? Dare we ask if the average Roman worried about seeing the Praetorian Guard around his leader? Did he fear that those guards might one day seize power without regard for democracy?

- Tom Pope

Image courtesy of cinemovies.fr

Worlds Meet

Jericho's Terrorist

An episode of the Jericho television series called “One Man’s Terrorist” brings us into the mind of an average person who becomes a terrorist. The scenes in the episode also offer ideas on how we can deal with a potential terrorist threat. Often we’ve heard about the strong man approach about defeating the enemy, or the language from Republicans that we can’t appear weak to the terrorist. Too often we hear that solutions of social methods fail to understand the terrorist. We are told that supplying food and shelter or jobs have nothing to do with decreasing the ranks of the terrorist community. Maybe the real question is why a person becomes so violent.

A realistic scenario of society breaking down occurs in Jericho. The series shows how a Kansas town copes with the aftermath of such a breakdown. A series of nuclear strikes has wiped out key US cities, and isolated towns are left to fend for law and order, food and power. The show viewed the ways resources are managed to help the community. Key characters such as the mayor, medical professionals, a farmer and a store owner were focused on to show how decisions about resources could affect the entire society.

In the terrorist episode, the mayor believes he can not lead his town through the winter because the numbers on the blackboard of food rationing show the people will starve. His solution is to send a group of refugees, the town recently saved, back out on the road. The refugees were staying in a makeshift shelter. The road meant certain death because of roving outlaws, the lack of animals to hunt or existence of shelter from the cold. But the mayor could not save everyone, so at least he tried to save his town.

The terrorist point of view was shown through the eyes of the refugees. Maybe they react to unusual pressure. An incident arose when one refugee tried pleading with the mayor to reconsider the forced eviction. When the mayor pulled out a gun to show his authority, a scuffle broke out that resulted in the mayor being accidentally wounded. The police then treated the refugee as a terrorist.

But we lost the real cause of why one becomes a terrorist, as the argument shifted away from the withholding of resources to one of respect for authority. The change took away key items of fact. The refugees were not just taking from the town. They were gathering wood for fire. One was even serving as a doctor in the town clinic. The refugees were quartered in a shelter even though the town housed many empty homes of people who left before the nuclear strike, probably never to return. But that was private property so it could not be shared with the refugees. The ideas of sharing and the value of property over lives presents a special philosophical view on why terrorists face unusual pressure.

The incident also addresses how to defuse a terrorist in the making. In one particular scene, a town character cries out to a group of people to share their homes with the refugees. She prods and cajoles until many in the crowd agree. This takes place after she is threatened in her home by a refugee who waves a knife at her. When she sees how he wanted glue to close a worn-out pair of shoes rather than take a pair from her son, she sees that this is an average person who desires self respect. She realizes this person has been thrown into a desperate situation, almost as desperate as the mayor who wielded the gun.

Not all terrorists are as easily placated as those in the episode, but we were seeing the images of people in the start of the process of becoming the hardened killers who strike around the world. These were glimpses of a Palestinian, a poppy farmer in Afghanistan or a Sunni…maybe a Shi'ite whose home lies in rubble.

Maybe the difference between the terrorist and victim is who is in authority. Maybe the way to defeat the terrorist is to strike at the causes of the process. Supply food, shelter and hope and the ranks of the terrorist community shrink.

"Jericho" image courtesy of Sidereel.com