in my opinion they should kill half of new orleans, point blanc on the street. Lock down the city and kill everyone that looks like a gang banger.

The truth hurts…but if the damn shoe fits, wear it!

As a result of the assumption that a mercenary is essentially motivated by money, the term “mercenary” carries negative connotations. There is a blur in the distinction between a “mercenary” and a “foreign volunteer”, when the primary motive of a soldier in a foreign army is uncertain. For instance the French Foreign Legion and the Gurkhas are not mercenaries under the laws of war, but some journalists do describe them as mercenaries.[3][4]

While the United States and many other countries are not signatories to the Protocol Additional GC 1977 (APGC77), it provides the most widely accepted international definition of a mercenary, albeit one not universally accepted. In the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977 it is stated:

Art 47. Mercenaries

1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
2. A mercenary is any person who:
(a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
(b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
(c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
(d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
(e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
(f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.”

In 2003 the french actually criminalised mercenaries..

I see nothing at all slanderous in the term mercenary being applied to his ” Employees ” Known a few years ago in my time as ” Mercs ” the term ‘ Contractor ‘ summons up the image of someone who fixes my roof or re-lays my drive way..
Slander :-
A type of defamation. Slander is an untruthful oral (spoken) statement about a person that harms the person’s reputation or standing in the community.
I SEE NO SLANDER [at any] PRICE..

My question is why can’t the U.S. Government pay our Patriot Soldiers at least $150,000 a year each (a lot less than the $950 a day plus expenses, we get billed for “Mercenary Service”) and instantly solve our recruiting problem?

I’ll bet even some Young Republicans might consider joining . . . naw, they’d have to room with knee-grows and mess-skins . . .

noun (plural mer·ce·nar·ies)

Definition:

1. soldier fighting for money: a professional soldier paid to fight for an army other than that of his or her country

2. somebody interested only in profit: an employee who works only for personal gain

Well, Prince has a point. After all, the proper definition of “mercenary” is “a soldier who fights for pay for a FOREIGN army.”
Comment by missmolly — November 6, 2007 @ 3:47 pm

And Blackwater FITS that definition precisely. Blackwater DOES fight for a foreign army, one that happens to be occupying Iraq. US soldiers are as foreign to Iraqi citizens as anyone gets. That definitively marks Blackwater employees as mercenaries, in the strictest sense.

Further, they’re paid to fight: mercenaries. They’re an ostensibly private company: mercenaries. That general, basic, common sense definition matters even more than the legalistic one you cite.

Most important, my first point gets at the nub of the problem: our nation was founded on the objection to King George III using Hessian mercenaries against our own fellow English Citizens. They were a foreign army, employed by our own leaders against his own people.

The Hessians were paid by the British Army to attack British citizens. Paid by the Crown’s own army to do it’s bidding, by your logic missmolly, it wasn’t mercenary or foreign at all.

That Blackwater is an (ostensibly) American company in the employ of the American Army, does not mean they aren’t foreign. They are most assuredly being used as mercenaries. Blackwater is obviously wreacking exactly the kind of havoc the American Revolution was fought to prevent entirely, and the Constitution designed to outlaw.

Our Constitution was designed to avoid inflicting this same fatal error on other countries! And designed to spare the country the cost of the resulting blowback.

Those folks over at the Republican Party sure are swell!

How does this malign Blackwater?

If Bush says so, then it must be!

that hits. he’s a funny guy.

Major vote switching so this is a snapshot and will change:

YEA 176, NAY 235
D – YEAS 146, NAY 75
R – YEAS 28, NAY 163

Very interesting….

In that case, the only thing that keeps Blackwater employees from technically being mercenaries is that they are Americans fighting alongside the U.S. military.

This situation (mercenaries fighting for their own country) probably doesn’t occur often enough to have spawned a term. After all, why would any leader hire his own countrymen for an obscene amount of money to fight when he could just draft them them into his army?

Oh…right…

Actually, the term “mercenaries” is very accurately applied. Hired guns. I wouldn’t say “paid assassins” because that implies competence and I haven’t seen much of that from Blackwater.

http://www.c-span.org/watch/cs_cspan_wm.asp?Cat=TV&Code=CS
.