Cool War Profiteering, Robber Barons!

[Trigger warning for torture.]

Remember when the Iraq War started—SHOCK AND AWE! USA!—and all the dirty hippies were saying things like, "This is a war of choice being justified by invented intel with no purpose except to allow the friends of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld at firms like Halliburton and Blackwater to make shitloads of money from bloated defense contracts doing profoundly unethical things," and everyone else was like, "Shut up, dirty hippies! You are wrong about everything and you smell like patchouli!" and then it turned out the dirty hippies were totally right, and then everyone on the left pretended that what the dirty hippies had been saying was so totally self-evident no doy and everyone had known it all along and everyone on the right pretended that no one, not even the dirty hippies, had correctly predicted all of the things and no one could have foreseen any of the things? Remember that? Good times.

Anyway! I just want to cast your minds back to that glorious time in America when the dirty hippies were talking about war profiteering, and the government of their country was literally calling them traitors for even daring to suggest such a thing, and even Democratic presidential candidates were all, "Whoa, let's not get carried away there, hippies!" as if it was an incredible accusation and everyone knows that nothing could ever go wrong with no-bid contracts to megacorps with ties to the White House.

Because—and I know you're shocked—it turns out that the Bush administration was rewarding war profiteers of all descriptions, including the private companies chartered to fly terrorism suspects around the world to deposit them in one of the CIA's network of secret jails all over the globe. Yep, that's right: The Bush administration even turned extraordinary rendition into a for-profit enterprise.

The invisible hand belongs not just to a thief and a bully, but a torturer.