Blackwater

[sidecross]

What If Our Mercenaries Turn on Us?
By Chris Hedges
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sunday 03 June 2007

Armed units from the private security firm Blackwater USA opened fire in Baghdad streets twice in two days last week. It triggered a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, a reminder that the war in Iraq may be remembered mostly in our history books for empowering and building America's first modern mercenary army.

There are an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors working in Iraq, although there are no official figures and some estimates run much higher. Security contractors are not counted as part of the coalition forces. When the number of private mercenary fighters is added to other civilian military "contractors" who carry out logistical support activities such as food preparation, the number rises to about 126,000.

"We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense," said House defense appropriations subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D., Pa.). "How in the hell do you justify that?"

The privatization of war hands an incentive to American corporations, many with tremendous political clout, to keep us mired down in Iraq. But even more disturbing is the steady rise of this modern Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome was a paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse, and eventually plunged the Roman Republic into tyranny and despotism. Despotic movements need paramilitary forces that operate outside the law, forces that sow fear among potential opponents, and are capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors. And in the wrong hands, a Blackwater could well become that force.

American taxpayers have so far handed a staggering $4 billion to "armed security" companies in Iraq such as Blackwater, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.). Tens of billions more have been paid to companies that provide logistical support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.) of the House Intelligence Committee estimates that 40 cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors. It is unlikely that any of these corporations will push for an early withdrawal. The profits are too lucrative.

Mercenary forces like Blackwater operate beyond civilian and military law. They are covered by a 2004 edict passed by American occupation authorities in Iraq that immunizes all civilian contractors in Iraq from prosecution.

Blackwater, barely a decade old, has migrated from Iraq to set up operations in the United States and nine other countries. It trains Afghan security forces and has established a base a few miles from the Iranian border. The huge contracts from the war - including $750 million from the State Department since 2004 - have allowed Blackwater to amass a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. Jeremy Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, points out that Blackwater has also constructed "the world's largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina." Blackwater also recently opened a facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and, despite local opposition, is moving ahead with plans to build another huge training base near San Diego. The company recently announced it was creating a private intelligence branch called "Total Intelligence."

Erik Prince, who founded and runs Blackwater, is a man who appears to have little time for the niceties of democracy. He has close ties with the radical Christian Right and the Bush White House. He champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is dishonest, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. But what he and his allies have built is a mercenary army, paid for with government money, which operates outside the law and without constitutional constraint.

Mercenary units are a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built rogue paramilitary forces. And the appearance of Blackwater fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, may be a grim taste of the future. In New Orleans Blackwater charged the government $240,000 a day.

" 'It cannot happen here' is always wrong," the philosopher Karl Popper wrote. "A dictatorship can happen anywhere."

The word contractor helps launder the fear and threat out of a more accurate term: "paramilitary force." We're not supposed to have such forces in the United States, but we now do. And if we have them, we have a potential threat to democracy. On U.S. soil, Blackwater so far has shown few signs of being an out-and-out rogue retainer army, though they looked the part in New Orleans. But were this country to become even a little less stable, outfits like Blackwater might see a heyday. If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown that triggers social unrest, or a series of environmental disasters, such paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could ruthlessly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to corporations, and to right-wing interests such as the Christian Right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on the streets in New Orleans could appear on our streets.

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Chris Hedges (hedgesscoop@aol.com) is author, mostly recently, of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Hedges is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.



http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060407J.shtml

[Caprinardo Delirio]

the blackwater thing is more important than what treatment has been given it shows. it's another post-apocalyptic-desert-wasteland-dystopia variable to the mix. habit and entropy, here we come!

[Mars]

I've read a bit about Blackwater, but never realized what their numbers were or how endorsed by our government they had become. This is perhaps the scariest and most damning piece of evidence yet of the ill will of the Radical Right, and of the Bush administration's ambitions to operate outside of the law and the constitution.

I don't watch the TV news, so don't know if this gets any play in their coverage. I haven't seen much about it in print media beyond the alt-y publishers. It just makes me crazy.

[sidecross]

Mars, you will not find this type of news on TV or even in most of the main stream press. You will find this kind of information by a diligent look at many sources outside of the major corporation owned news sources.

Senator William Fulbright during his many hearings on the Vietnam War was asked how he gained his information to ask his questions; he answered by reading as many sources of information as possible.

I have followed this advice and would advise everyone to do the same.

[craazyman]

i'm somewhat sympathetic to Hedges point of view on this one and I doubt this sort of thing will survive a democratic administration. I wonder how much of the hell in Iraq results from some of these tatooed steriod heads running around shooting at anything that moves.

But the Praetorian gaurd was capable of defeating Roman armies, mounting assisinations, choosing emporers and basically getting whatever they wanted. It ran Rome for centuries.

20 or 30 G armed contractors (most of whom are probably doing gaurd duty, not combat) pale compared to half a million U.S. troops under arms. And the 126,000 figure includes cooks, drivers, etc. The historical comparison is flamboyant and greatly exaggerated.

the privatization thing began under Reagan/Thatcher in the 1980s, and not without some good cause. many of the government bureaucracies providing services (energy, utilities, transportation, etc.) were bloated and wasteful and run for the benefit of those in power not those being served. It's a long pendulum swing that in the case of blackwater has run far beyond it's original purpose. it's gone too far.

Hopefully President Obama (or Gore) will pull the plug on it.

[Mars]

I shared the above article with a bunch of friends, hoping to hear some counter arguments - if they existed. Most people responded that it synced with much of what they know about Blackwater, but one friend, a paramedic who specializes in disasters (he was a rescue worker at the Pakistan earthquake, the tsunami, as with as NOLA) had an surprising response that I thought I'd share. His politics are quite left of center, and yet here are some excerpts from his reply:

I had worked with some Blackwater contractors on at least two deployments, including NOLA. I have friends and acquaintances who work with Blackwater. These folks I've met are further from being thugs than you, I or the author of this article is...many of the soldiers working for Blackwater are some of the best of the best of retired American Military.

I think it is all too easy to attack the people who make up an organization who may be trying to do real good, with the organization itself and/or the people who run it. The mistake Mr. Hedges makes, I think, is to make a wide generalization about these folks, characterizing them as callous fascists, thugs or black-suited agents of ill intent. It probably won't hold up with real experience, which weakens his case.

[craazyman]

That's a fair point Mars. I suspect this thread (and my comments too) are a bit guilty of stereotyping. In fact, most of the military folks I've met throughout my life have been very high quality human beings.

There's a larger issue though whether this stuff is good for a democracy, and whether a private army within a public army isn't a candidate for eventual co-option by forces whose financial interests and political interests might diverge from the public interest. I tend to think there's a real danger of this, over the long-term, and that it's very bad public policy to let this continue.

The Washington Post has covered this issue. Here are a couple of reports.


U.S. Security Contractors Open Fire in Baghdad
Blackwater Employees Were Involved in Two Shooting Incidents in Past Week

By Steve Fainaru and Saad al-Izzi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 27, 2007; Page A01

Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

A Blackwater guard shot and killed an Iraqi driver Thursday near the Interior Ministry, according to three U.S. officials and one Iraqi official who were briefed on the incident but spoke on condition of anonymity because of a pending investigation. On Wednesday, a Blackwater-protected convoy was ambushed in downtown Baghdad, triggering a furious battle in which the security contractors, U.S. and Iraqi troops and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters were firing in a congested area.

Blackwater confirmed that its employees were involved in two shootings but could neither confirm nor deny that there had been any casualties, according to a company official who declined to be identified because of the firm's policy of not addressing incidents publicly.

Blackwater's security consulting division holds at least $109 million worth of State Department contracts in Iraq, and its employees operate in a perilous environment that sometimes requires the use of deadly force. But last week's incidents underscored how deeply these hired guns have been drawn into the war, their murky legal status and the grave consequences that can ensue when they take aggressive action.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/26/AR2007052601394.html


* * *

Four Hired Guns in an Armored Truck, Bullets Flying, and a Pickup and a Taxi Brought to a Halt. Who Did the Shooting and Why?
A Chaotic Day On Baghdad's Airport Road

By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 15, 2007; Page A01

On the afternoon of July 8, 2006, four private security guards rolled out of Baghdad's Green Zone in an armored SUV. The team leader, Jacob C. Washbourne, rode in the front passenger seat. He seemed in a good mood. His vacation started the next day.

"I want to kill somebody today," Washbourne said, according to the three other men in the vehicle, who later recalled it as an offhand remark. Before the day was over, however, the guards had been involved in three shooting incidents. In one, Washbourne allegedly fired into the windshield of a taxi for amusement, according to interviews and statements from the three other guards.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/14/AR2007041401490.html

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Mars, you are missing the main point about Blackwater. The qualities of military personnel they hire are some of the best and include Delta Force, Navy SEALS, and the equivalent.

The point you miss is that Blackwater is outside the control of normal constitutional controls. They can not be held responsible for their actions.

[Mars]

The point you miss is that Blackwater is outside the control of normal constitutional controls. They can not be held responsible for their actions.

Absolutely, I agree that this is the heart of the issue. My point was that we compromise our argument when we start to caricature these people as some kind of sinister or brutish operators (as Mr. Hedges does) when in fact, they may simply be folks no different in decency than you or me trying to making a living doing what they've been trained to do, and in the case of NOLA, maybe do some good. The problem really is what they MIGHT become, not what they currently are - at least as far as their presence in the U.S. is concerned. And of course, we could make ourselves blue in the face talking about how Blackwater shouldn't have been necessary in the first place at NOLA, that we should have had adequate National Guard forces, that they should've responded quicker, that resources that might have been used were allocated to Iraq, a place we shouldn't have be in the first place, etc.

I think what I've learned from this exchange is that there is often a big difference between a remote analysis of an event and the subjective experience of those in the thick of it. It suggests to me that Mr. Hedges fears for the future (and I understand them, believe me) might be getting in the way of a more grounded and more accurate examination of the Blackwater phenomenon.

[sidecross]

Blackwater Heavies Sue Families of Slain Employees for $10 Million in Brutal Attempt to Suppress Their Story

By Daniel J. Callahan and Marc P. Miles
AlterNet

Friday 08 June 2007

The following article is by the lawyers representing the families of four American contractors who worked for Blackwater and were killed in Fallujah. After Blackwater refused to share information about why they were killed, the families were told they would have to sue Blackwater to find out. Now Blackwater is trying to sue them for $10 million to keep them quiet.

Raleigh, NC - The families of four American security contractors who were burned, beaten, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and their decapitated bodies hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River on March 31, 2004, are reaching out to the American public to help protect themselves against the very company their loved ones were serving when killed, Blackwater Security Consulting. After Blackwater lost a series of appeals all the away to the U.S. Supreme Court, Blackwater has now changed its tactics and is suing the dead men's estates for $10 million to silence the families and keep them out of court.

Following these gruesome deaths which were broadcast on worldwide television, the surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

After filing its suit against the dead men's estates, Blackwater demanded that its claim and the families' existing lawsuit be handled in a private arbitration. By suing the families in arbitration, Blackwater has attempted to move the examination of their wrongful conduct outside of the eye of the public and away from a jury. This comes at the same time when Congress is investigating Blackwater.

Over 300 contractors have been killed in Iraq with very little inquiry into their deaths. The families claim that Blackwater is attempting to cover up its incompetence, its cutting of corners in favor of higher profits, and its over billing to the government. Due to lack of accountability and oversight, Blackwater's private army has been able to obtain huge profits from the government, utilizing contacts established through Erik Prince's relationships with high-ranking government officials such as Cofer Black and Joseph Schmitz.

In addition to assembling its litigation troops, Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed. Over the past two and a half years, Blackwater has not responded to a single question or produced a single document. When the families' attorneys, Callahan & Blaine, obtained a Court Order to take the deposition of a former Blackwater employee with critical information about the incident, Blackwater quickly re-hired him and sent him out of the country. When the witness returned to the United States more than a year later, the families obtained another Court Order for his deposition. Blackwater again prevented them from taking his deposition by seeking the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office to block the deposition under the guise that he possibly possessed national secrets. Following an investigation, the U.S. Army reported that the witness had no secret information and that it had no objection to the deposition.

Blackwater has now lifted this atrocity to a whole new level by going on the offensive and suing the families for $10 million. The families now find themselves looking down the barrel of a gun as Blackwater, armed with a war chest and politically-connected attorneys, is aggressively litigating against them. Blackwater has also threatened to hold the administrator of the estates personally liable to scare him into abandoning his position, and has threatened the families' attorneys as well.

The families are simply without the financial wherewithal to defend against Blackwater. By filing suit, Blackwater is trying to wipe out the families' ability to discover the truth about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths of these four Americans and to silence them from any public comment. In February, the families testified before Congress.

However, Blackwater's lawsuit now seeks to gag the family members from even speaking about the incident or about Blackwater's involvement in the deaths. This is a direct attack to their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

"I initially took this case because it was the right thing to do in helping the families find closure by discovering the events surrounding their loved ones deaths, " said Daniel J. Callahan, attorney for the families. "I have found the evidence concerning Blackwater's involvement in the deaths to be overwhelming and appalling. Even more disturbing though is the callous nature in which Blackwater has not only concealed the truth, but also outright sued to force the families to stop pursuing the case and to silence them." Blackwater has spent millions of dollars and hired at least five different law firms to fight the families, rather than meeting and addressing what should be Blackwater's top priority - the safety and well being of the mothers, wives, and children left behind. Blackwater has said that it will not pay one red cent to assist or console the surviving families, but instead has counter sued for $10 million.

Without help, Blackwater will succeed in avoiding scrutiny for its conduct, escaping accountability for its actions, and silencing the families of the four Americans killed in Fallujah. A defense fund has been established by which the public is able to donate money to assist the families with litigation costs and expenses.




http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060807C.shtml

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September 17, 2007

Security Firm’s License Is Pulled in Iraq

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 17 — The Iraqi government said it had revoked the license of Blackwater USA, a private security company that provides protection for American diplomats across Iraq, after shots fired from an American convoy killed eight Iraqis.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, said the authorities had canceled the company’s license and barred its activity across Iraq. He said the government would prosecute the deaths, though according to the rules that govern private contractors, it was not clear whether the Iraqis had the legal authority to do so.

“This is a big crime that we can’t stay silent before,” said Jawad al-Bolani, Iraq’s interior minister, speaking on satellite television. “Anyone who wants to have good relations with Iraq has to respect Iraqis.”

The incident took place on Sunday in Nisour Square, an area in western Baghdad that is clogged with construction and concrete blocks. American officials said that a convoy of State Department vehicles came under fire, causing one to break down. It was towed. The officials did not say whether any of the convoy’s security guards fired back or whether they worked for Blackwater.

Shortly before the incident, a car bomb had detonated some distance away, according to an Interior Ministry official, and mortars had landed in an Iraqi Army base that has guard towers overlooking the square. A grocery shop owner, Abu Muhammad, reported seeing two helicopters firing down into the area, apparently reacting to the nearby explosions.

A spokeswoman for the United States Embassy, Mirenbe Nantongo, seemed to confirm that when she told reporters on a conference call, “Our people were reacting to a car bombing.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17cnd-iraq.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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September 18, 2007

Iraq to Review All Security Contractors

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and GRAHAM BOWLEY


The Iraqi government said today that it would review the status of all foreign and local security companies working in Iraq after a shooting that left eight Iraqis dead.

Blackwater USA, an American contractor that provides security to some of the top American officials in Iraq, was banned from working in the country by the Ministry of Interior following the shooting on Sunday, which involved an American diplomatic convoy.

A spokesman for the Iraqi government, Ali al-Dabbag, said that the cabinet met today and supported the decision to cancel Blackwater’s license and begin an immediate investigation. The ministry has said that it would prosecute the participants in the shooting, but a law issued by the American occupation authority prior to the return of sovereignty to Iraq in 2004 grants American contractors, along with American military personnel, immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

Mr. Dabbag said the investigation should “compel the company to respect the Iraqi laws, citizens’ dignity and the results and consequences the investigation would come up with.”The statement by the Iraqi government today seemed to blame Blackwater employees directly for the deaths, calling it a “vicious assault which was carried out by the employees of the American security company” against Iraqi citizens.

But American officials have stopped short of saying whether the Blackwater guards in the diplomatic motorcade had caused any of the deaths.

In a statement today, the anti-American Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, called for an investigation and said that the government should annul “this company’s and all other intelligence and criminal companies’ contracts.”

Details of the shooting Sunday are still unclear. Bombs were going off in the area at the time, and shots were fired at the convoy, American officials said.

“There was a firefight,” said Sean McCormack, the principal State Department spokesman. “We believe some innocent life was lost. Nobody wants to see that. But I can’t tell you who was responsible for that.”

In separate violence today, a series of car bombs around Baghdad killed at least eight people. In the largest attack, a car bomb exploded close to the Health Ministry, near the central morgue, killing five civilians and injuring 20 others, the Ministry of Interior said. Another car bomb, which exploded in the Ur district near a popular market, killed one civilian.

The deaths on Sunday linked to the American security firm have struck a nerve with Iraqis, who say that private security companies are often quick to shoot and are rarely held responsible for their actions.

A security expert based in Baghdad said Monday night that the law granting contractors immunity, Order No. 17, had never been overturned. Like others, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains under official inquiry.

Senior officials, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, expressed outrage on Monday.

“This is a big crime that we can’t stay silent in front of,” said Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister, in remarks on Al Arabiya television. “Anyone who wants to have good relations with Iraq has to respect Iraqis. We apply the law and are committed to it.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Mr. Maliki on Monday afternoon to express her regret “over the death of innocent civilians that occurred during the attack on an embassy convoy,” said Tom Casey, another State Department spokesman.

Mr. Maliki’s office said Ms. Rice had pledged to “take immediate steps to show the United States’ willingness to prevent such actions.”

Because Blackwater guards are so central to the American operation here, having provided protection for numerous American ambassadors, it is still not clear whether the United States would agree to end a relationship with a trusted protector so quickly. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker praised private security companies in a speech on Sept. 11, referring to Blackwater by name.

“This incident will be the true test of diplomacy between the State Department and the government of Iraq,” said one American official in Baghdad.

Blackwater has defended its actions, saying it had come under attack from armed militants.

“The ‘civilians’ reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies, and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire,” said Anne Tyrrell, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail message. “Blackwater professionals heroically defended American lives in a war zone.”

The American official said he believed that the contract had been pulled, although Ms. Tyrrell said that there had been no official action by the Ministry of Interior “regarding plans to revoke licensing.” Mr. McCormack said the State Department had not been informed about any cancellation.

It was not clear what legal mechanism the Iraqi government was using to block the company. All security contractors must obtain licenses for their weapons. Companies must also register with the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Interior.

One of the most terrifying images of the war for Americans involved four of Blackwater’s contractors in Falluja who were killed in 2004, and their bodies hung from a bridge. Reports of the number of Blackwater employees in Iraq ranged from at least 1,000 to 1,500, but the numbers were impossible to confirm.

At the end of the cold war, Congress and the Pentagon were eager to take advantage of a new, less threatening landscape and drastically scaled back the standing Army, leading to the outsourcing of many jobs formally done by people in uniform.

The Bush administration expanded the outsourcing strategy after the invasion of Iraq, with companies like Blackwater and its two main competitors, Triple Canopy and DynCorp, supplying guards and training at many levels of the war. About 126,000 people working for contractors serve alongside American troops, including about 30,000 security contractors.

A Blackwater employee was responsible for the shooting death of a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s vice presidents, Adel Abdul Mahdi, on Christmas Eve last year, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal in May. The Blackwater guard had been drinking heavily in the Green Zone, according to the report, and tried to enter an area where Iraqi officials live. The employee was fired, but left Iraq without being prosecuted, the report said.

In the shooting on Sunday, initial reports from the American Embassy said a convoy of State Department vehicles came under fire in Nisour Square, a commercial area in western Baghdad that is clogged with construction, traffic and concrete blocks. One vehicle became “disabled” in the shooting, officials said. The officials did not say whether any of the convoy’s security guards had fired back.

But two bombs exploded around the time of the convoy’s passage. Iraqis who were there said Monday that guards in the American motorcade, which had apparently been stuck in traffic, began shooting in response. That appeared to be confirmed by the embassy’s information officer, Johann Schmonsees.

“The car bomb was in proximity to the place where State Department personnel were meeting, and that was the reason why Blackwater responded to the incident,” he said on a conference call for reporters in Baghdad on Monday afternoon.

Mirenbe Nantongo, the embassy spokeswoman, said directly, “Our people were reacting to a car bombing.”

But typical for Iraq, confusion prevailed over who was firing at whom. Iraqis who had been at the scene said they saw helicopters, though American officials did not speak of air power. Ms. Tyrrell said helicopters came but did not shoot.

“There were several groups on the scene,” said a senior American administration official. “Bad guys. Us. Iraqi police. We don’t know if other parties were there, too. So we have to do forensics.”

A grocery shop owner, Abu Muhammad, reported seeing two helicopters firing down into the area, around the time of the bombing. “I was hearing the shooting continuing every now and then, for about 15 minutes,” he said, adding that the gunfire sounded low and fast, different from the sound of an AK-47 firing.

He said he saw a charred car with a man and a woman inside. A man whom he knew had been shot to death. Video images of the scene after the fighting subsided showed charred cars and bodies, though it was not clear what had caused the damage.

An official at Yarmouk Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken, said 12 dead Iraqis had been taken in from three different incidents. Thirty-seven more Iraqis were wounded.

It was still unclear on Monday night whether the company had been ordered to leave. Mr. Schmonsees said earlier, “No one has been expelled from the country yet.”



Reporting was contributed by James Glanz, Ali Fahim, Mudhafer al-Husaini, Ahmad Fadam and Khalid al-Ansary from Baghdad, Thom Shanker from Washington, and Alain Delaquérière from New York.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/world/middleeast/18cnd-iraq.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

[sidecross]

Published on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by TruthDig.com

Checkbook Imperialism: The Blackwater Fiasco

by Robert Scheer

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the “democratically elected government” of “liberated” Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the U.S. government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a U.S. State Department convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired “randomly at citizens” in a crowded square on Sunday, killing 11 people and wounding 13 others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country after what a government spokesman called a “flagrant assault … on Iraqi citizens.”

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel working for the U.S. in Iraq? Don’t they know about Order 17, which former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded by Blackwater and other “private” soldiers.

They are “private” in the same fictional sense that our uniformed military is a “volunteer” force, since both are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster, the U.S. government. Contractors earn substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by now in protest.

Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The U.S. government purchases whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to protect U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq. That is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki branded a “crime,” is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday: “The U.S. clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and compensation to the victim’s families-and not insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here without.” Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the U.S. Senate last week: “There is simply no way at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts.”

Consider the irony of that last statement-that the U.S. experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, once the American government enters into these “foreign entanglements,” we lose the Republic, because public accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue from the U.S. government-much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and others in this international security racket operate as independent states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that the U.S. government applies to its own uniformed forces. “We are not simply a ‘private security company,’ ” Blackwater boasts on its corporate website. “We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm. … We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.”

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/19/3935/

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Privatizing Murder

by Marie Cocco

There is no set piece more emblematic of the tragic farce that is the American involvement in Iraq than the grotesque episode of Blackwater USA and the killing of civilians in Baghdad-at least nine and as many as 28-on Sunday.

Everyone has reacted on cue with the usual expressions of outrage or, at minimum, grave diplomatic concern over the fusillade of gunfire that was unleashed against Iraqis who apparently were bystanders to the passing of an American convoy that was being escorted by heavily armed Blackwater security guards.

The Iraqi government said it was pulling the private security firm’s license to operate in the country, and has asked that its contract be severed. But it seems there may not be a license, or if there was, it would have been granted by that wonderment of bureaucratic dysfunction and sectarian passion, the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile, says it hasn’t been informed that Iraq has “lifted, suspended or terminated” any permit.

No matter. American diplomats now are sequestered in their Green Zone fortress, unable to motor around Iraq without their mercenary guards who have, in the interest of cooling tempers, been temporarily sidelined as investigations proceed. Yet it’s almost without question that, soon enough, some private security contractors will be back in action. They are as crucial to sustaining the American military occupation of Iraq as is the president’s unrepentant refusal to end it.

All the essential elements of governance in the Bush era come together in the Blackwater episode.

The heavy use of private armies-”corporate warriors” is the term used by Brookings Institution expert Peter Singer-helps to hide the initial and catastrophic decision to limit the number of American troops deployed far below what many military experts said was necessary to pacify post-invasion Iraq. Secrecy, another administration hallmark, prevented even the Congressional Research Service from getting a definitive count of the number of private contractors taxpayers support. “The executive branch either has not kept sufficient records to produce or has been unwilling to present basic, accurate information on the companies employed under U.S. government contracts and subcontracts in Iraq,” the researchers reported in July.

Add the odor of political cronyism: Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, has deep ties to the Republican Party and conservative religious organizations. He was a Republican congressional aide and briefly an intern in the White House of President George H.W. Bush, according to The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. When four Blackwater employees were murdered in Fallujah in 2004, the company turned for public relations and lobbying advice to the Alexander Strategy Group, a now-defunct Republican lobbying firm that was closely linked to former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Meanwhile, the zone of lawlessness the Bush administration created for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for its global network of secret prisons and in its domestic surveillance program extended, as well, to private contractors. Under an order issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation bureaucracy that governed Iraq in the initial months after the invasion, private security contractors are immune from any legal action, including prosecution, that arises from their work. Nor are they subject to U.S. military law as are regular American forces. A law enacted in 2000 that conceivably could cover them hasn’t been tested. Nor, Singer says, has a 2006 effort to bring the private forces under the military justice system been implemented.

And no one-not the White House nor the Pentagon nor, apparently, the State Department-heeded repeated reports of abuse and flagrant violence against Iraqis that have dogged the private security guards for years. “Everybody has known about these problems,” Singer told me in an interview. “They’ve been widely reported.”

The Army’s investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal identified private contractors as responsible for more than a third of abuses and identified six employees as culpable, Singer says. Yet, unlike soldiers who were court-martialed for their crimes at Abu Ghraib, no private contractor has been prosecuted. There even was a “trophy video”-of contractors for one security company shooting at Iraqi civilians-that the guards themselves posted on the Internet.

We have reached the inevitable moment of anger and recrimination. In keeping with the administration’s overarching philosophy that private business is always better-at everything-than government, we have privatized the most elemental government function of waging war. Now we will pay dearly for this folly.

Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/20/3966/

[sidecross]

September 22, 2007

Another Blackwater Investigation

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:18 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking comment Friday. The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George Holding, declined to comment, as did Pentagon and State Department spokesmen.

Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad.

The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is under scrutiny.

In Saturday's editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that two former Blackwater employees -- Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia Beach, Va., and William Ellsworth ''Max'' Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. -- are cooperating with federal investigators.

Cashwell and Grumiaux pleaded guilty in early 2007 to possession of stolen firearms that had been shipped in interstate or foreign commerce, and aided and abetted another in doing so, according to court papers viewed by The Associated Press. In their plea agreements, which call for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the men agreed to testify in any future proceedings.

Calls to defense attorneys were not immediately returned Friday evening, and calls to the telephone listings for both men also were not returned.

The News & Observer, citing unidentified sources, reported that the probe was looking at whether Blackwater had shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq without a license.

The paper's report that the company itself was under investigation could not be confirmed by the AP.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a review of security practices for U.S. diplomats in Iraq following a deadly incident involving Blackwater USA guards protecting an embassy convoy.

Rice's announcement came as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad resumed limited diplomatic convoys under the protection of Blackwater outside the heavily fortified Green Zone after a suspension because of the weekend incident in that city.

In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels.

The Turks provided serial numbers of the weapons to U.S. investigators, said a Turkish official.

The Pentagon said in late July it was looking into the Turkish complaints and a U.S. official said FBI agents had traveled to Turkey in recent months to look into cases of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq.

Investigators are determining whether the alleged Blackwater weapons match those taken from the PKK.

It was not clear if Blackwater employees suspected of selling to the black market knew the weapons they allegedly sold to middlemen might wind up with the PKK. If they did, possible charges against them could be more serious than theft or illegal weapons sales, officials said.

The PKK, which is fighting for an independent Kurdistan, is banned in Turkey, which has a restive Kurdish population and is considered a ''foreign terrorist organization'' by the State Department. That designation bars U.S. citizens or those in U.S. jurisdictions from supporting the group in any way.

The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.

In response, Krongard said in a written statement that he ''made one of my best investigators available to help Assistant U.S. Attorneys in North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of weapons into Iraq by a contractor.''

His statement went further than Waxman's letter because it identified the state in which the investigation was taking place. Blackwater is the biggest of the State Department's three private security contractors.

The other two, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, are based in Washington's northern Virginias suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of the North Carolina's attorneys.

------

Associated Press writers Mike Baker in Raleigh and Desmond Butler and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.



http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-US-Blackwater-Probe.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

[suebee]

hey anyone ever heard john cleary or richard thompson music? im new to them and its like where have i been? reason im posting here is thompson has a new cd and a great song on it called 'dad's gonna kill me, 'dad being short for bagdad. good rock and roll and a great political protest song.

we should keep this thread on blackwater as im sure its gonna be interesting for awhile....but how about those 7 soldiers who wrote that ny times letter about the iraq they knew and now 3 are already dead? two in a rollover truck and one with a bullet in the forehead.

[sidecross]

September 23, 2007

Security Firm Faces Criminal Charges in Iraq

By JAMES GLANZ and SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 22 — The Iraqi government said Saturday that it expects to refer criminal charges to its courts within days in connection with a shooting here by a private American security company, and the Interior Ministry gave new details of six other episodes it is investigating involving the company.

The state minister for national security affairs, Shirwan al-Waili, said the government had received little information from the American side in the early days of a joint investigation of the shooting, which involved the company Blackwater USA and left at least eight Iraqis dead. But he said that the Iraqi investigation was largely completed and that he believed the findings were definitive. “The shots fired on the Iraqis were unjustifiable,” he said. “It was harsh and horrible.”

Although Mr. Waili did not spell out what the investigative committee would recommend to the criminal court, a preliminary report of findings by the Interior Ministry, the National Security Ministry and the Defense Ministry stated that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation.”

“The criminals will be referred to the Iraqi court system,” it said.

The spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, also laid out previous episodes involving Blackwater this year in which he said a total of 10 Iraqis had been killed and 15 wounded. The company would not comment on those incidents on Saturday.

The details came as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was at the United Nations to meet with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials to discuss Iraqi security and other issues. The Iraqi government has already demanded that Blackwater, which handles security for diplomatic personnel, be banned from working in Iraq, and the broadening investigation is sure to pull the Iraqis and their American supporters even further apart.

Blackwater may also face investigation on another front: The News and Observer newspaper in Raleigh, N.C., reported that United States federal investigators were looking into whether the company shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq. The Department of Justice would not confirm whether an investigation was under way; Blackwater, in a statement issued Saturday, said it had not done anything wrong.

The main shooting under investigation began near midday last Sunday when Blackwater guards fired at Iraqi civilians for reasons that neither the company nor the United States government, which is also investigating, have fully explained.

Some witnesses have said that Iraqi Army soldiers nearby also began firing at some point, greatly complicating efforts to understand what happened and raising the question, at least among American officials, of whether the Blackwater guards believed they were under attack and acted properly.

Blackwater, in its only statement on the shooting, has said its employees were responding to an ambush.

Iraqi officials indicated that they were weighing the earlier shootings involving Blackwater in their consideration of what the practical consequences of the Nisour Square shooting should be. “The American Blackwater company has made for the seventh time the same mistake against the Iraqis and in different places in Baghdad,” according to a preliminary report from the Iraqi investigation obtained by The New York Times.

According to General Khalaf, the other events under investigation are a Feb. 4 shooting that killed an Iraqi journalist near the Foreign Ministry; a Feb. 7 shooting in which three guards at the Iraqi state television station were killed; a Feb. 14 episode in which Blackwater employees are accused of smashing windshields; a shooting in May that killed one person near the Interior Ministry; a Sept. 9 shooting that killed five people near a Baghdad city government building; and a Sept. 12 shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.

No results of the American inquiry have been made public. For that reason, American officials have privately cautioned against drawing early conclusions.

In addition, a United States Embassy official said Saturday that investigators did not want to present incorrect results that would have to be revised, and so would let the investigation take its course before commenting. And the official said that cooperation between the two sides in the investigation was beginning and that information would begin flowing more freely.

But the official also said that embassy activities had been slowed because convoys protected by Blackwater guards had been temporarily stopped as a result of the shooting.

“Our own movements, as you know, were severely restricted and remain restricted,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So ever since the incident took place, we have not been moving around Baghdad as we did before.”

Although the official declined to comment directly on how those restrictions may have had an impact on the American investigation, United States military personnel, who can move with their own security details, have been seen interviewing Iraqis at the scene of the shooting in recent days. If American civilian officials who are leading the investigation from the embassy are unable to move through the city, that restriction could clearly slow the work of gathering information from the scene and from witnesses.

The embassy official said he had not heard that the Iraqi government was preparing to forward the Blackwater case to the Iraqi justice system. “In all honesty I’m not aware of that,” the official said. “I don’t think they’ve communicated that to us government-to-government.”

Even if murder charges were referred to Iraqi courts, it is unclear what real legal peril would be faced by Blackwater or any of its employees. A provision originally called Order 17, signed by L. Paul Bremer III in 2004, while he was the top American administrator in Iraq, was later enshrined into Iraqi law, effectively giving security companies working for the United States government immunity from prosecution here.

Perhaps for that reason, no Western contractors of any kind are known to have been convicted of any crimes in Iraq.

In the possible weapons smuggling case, evidence of a federal investigation came to light earlier this week, when the Democratic chairman of a House committee mentioned it in a letter complaining about the actions of the State Department’s inspector general.

In a Sept. 18 letter to Howard J. Krongard, the inspector general, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said a federal prosecutor had asked State Department investigators for help in looking into whether “a large private security contractor working for the State Department was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq.”

In its statement Saturday from its headquarters in Moyock, N.C., Blackwater said it had uncovered thefts by two employees who were then fired. The company said that it notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and that the two former employees have been convicted in court.

The statement added that the “issue is completely unrelated to Blackwater U.S. government programs in Iraq.” It said “the company has no knowledge of any employee improperly exporting weapons.”

In Iraq on Saturday, President Jalal Talabani expressed anger at the arrest of a man he said was an Iranian diplomat, Agai Mahummdi Firhadi, who was detained by the American military on Thursday in northern Iraq. A statement from the president’s office said he had “sent a message of anger,” to the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, and the American military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, because the Iranian had been on a diplomatic delegation.

The American military said in a statement at the time that he had been involved in transporting bombs into Iraq, and in training militants.

Mr. Talabani told the Americans that the Iranian government had threatened to close its borders with the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq if the official was not released.

As the Blackwater case moved forward, violence continued elsewhere in Iraq. A Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic State in Iraq, released a video to Islamic Web sites Saturday showing the execution of five men said to be captured Iraqi Army soldiers.

In the video, apparently intended to terrify Iraqi Army soldiers, men wearing army uniforms and blindfolds, their hands tied behind their backs, knelt in a dusty clearing between eucalyptus trees while a hooded man shot them from behind with a pistol. Also visible in the video is another hooded man apparently also videotaping the executions, though from a different angle.

Also on Saturday, the Iraqi authorities arrested 11 suspects in the car bomb assassination of Abdul-Sattar Abu Reesha, the leader of the American-supported Sunni tribal uprising against extremist Islamic insurgents. Hurra television quoted Mr. Abu Reesha’s brother, Ahmed Abu Reesha, as saying that the suspects were members of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which took credit for the slaying.

In Baghdad, Mr. Waili, the security minister, indicated that despite announcements that Iraqi and American investigators would be working together, Iraqi investigators had received little or no information from their American counterparts and had gotten no access to the Blackwater guards at the center of the events.

Mr. Waili said that there were effectively three separate investigations: an Iraqi one, an American one, and a joint effort that had gotten nowhere.

But the embassy official said cooperation between the two sides was taking place.

“From our point of view there are not three investigations,” he said. “There is only the joint investigation that we have with the Iraqis.”

He said that the United States had received cooperation from Iraqi officials and that the first joint meetings were just starting.

The push against foreign security companies, some Western officials have suggested, may be motivated by more than the quest for justice. There could also be a financial motivation, particularly if, as some Iraqi officials say, the episode could result in new rules that would cut down on the number of foreign companies operating here.

Fewer foreign companies would mean more space for Iraqi companies, and Iraqi officials in charge of licenses for the private security industry have become slower at issuing them to foreigners for more than a year, according to one security industry official formerly in Baghdad.

In 2006, rules for registration changed dramatically, the official said, with two new steps, including consulting with Mr. Waili’s ministry, added to the already complicated process.

What is obvious, though, is the emotional push for change created by the Nisour shooting.

“It was really painful,” Mr. Waili said. “We are losing Iraqis every day, but this was a really painful incident. They were innocent people.”

Karim Hilmi and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Baghdad, and James Risen from Washington. .



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/world/middleeast/23blackwater.html?hp

[ielectric]

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Hardcover)
By Jeremy Scahill

scariest book i've read in my 48 yr old memory
scahill was on amy goodman last week

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/140201&mode=thread&tid=25

peace

[sidecross]

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Hardcover)
By Jeremy Scahill

scariest book i've read in my 48 yr old memory
scahill was on amy goodman last week

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/140201&mode=thread&tid=25

peace



Add to the book you mentioned Chris Hedges American Fascists and you will be even more fearful.
:eek:

[Rob P]

.......

Another really good scary book is
'Dark Ages America' by Morris Berman...

........

[sidecross]

September 27, 2007

Blackwater Tops All Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate

By JOHN M. BRODER and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.

Blackwater is now the focus of investigations in both Baghdad and Washington over a Sept. 16 shooting in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed. Beyond that episode, the company has been involved in cases in which its personnel fired weapons while guarding State Department officials in Iraq at least twice as often per convoy mission as security guards working for other American security firms, the officials said.

The disclosure came as the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had sent a team of officials to Iraq to get answers to questions about the use of American security contractors there.

The State Department keeps reports on each case in which weapons were fired by security personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq. Officials familiar with the internal State Department reports would not provide the actual statistics, but they indicated that the records showed that Blackwater personnel were involved in dozens of episodes in which they had resorted to force.

The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.

The State Department would not comment on most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the department’s spokesman, said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force.”

In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable Blackwater statistics were not available, government officials said the firm’s rate per convoy mission was about twice DynCorp’s.

The State Department’s incident reports have not been made public, and Blackwater refused to provide its own data on cases in which its personnel used their weapons while guarding American diplomats. The State Department is in the process of providing at least some of the data to Congress. The administration and industry officials who agreed to discuss the broad rate of Blackwater’s involvement in violent events would not disclose the specific numbers.

“The incident rate for Blackwater is higher, there is a distinction,” said a senior American government official who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss a delicate, continuing investigation. “The real question that is open for discussion is why.”

A Blackwater spokeswoman declined to comment.

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, has gained a reputation among Iraqis and even among American military personnel serving in Iraq as a company that flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions to protect the people they are paid to guard. After the latest shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that the company be banned from operating in the country.

“You can find any number of people, particularly in uniform, who will tell you that they do see Blackwater as a company that promotes a much more aggressive response to things than other main contractors do,” a senior American official said.

Today, Blackwater operates in the most violent parts of Iraq and guards the most prominent American diplomats, which some American government officials say explains why it is involved in more shootings than its competitors. The shootings included in the reports include all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots. Others add that Blackwater’s aggressive posture in guarding diplomats reflects the wishes of its client, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Still, other government officials say that Blackwater’s corporate culture seems to encourage excessive behavior. “Is it the operating environment or something specific about Blackwater?” asked one government official. “My best guess is that it is both.”

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former member of the Navy Seals, and is privately owned. Most of its nearly 1,000 people in Iraq are independent contractors, rather than employees of the company, according to a spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell. Blackwater has a total of about 550 full-time employees, the she said.

Its diplomatic security contract with the State Department is now the company’s largest, Ms. Tyrrell said, while declining to provide the dollar amount. The company also provides security for the State Department in Afghanistan, where it also has counternarcotics-related contracts.

In addition to the Sept. 16 shooting in the Nisour area of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Blackwater employees had been involved in six other episodes under investigation. Those episodes left a total of 10 Iraqis dead and 15 wounded, they said.

Many American officials now share the view that Blackwater’s behavior is increasingly stoking resentment among Iraqis and is proving counterproductive to American efforts to gain support for its military efforts in Iraq.

“They’re repeat offenders, and yet they continue to prosper in Iraq,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who has been broadly critical of the role of contractors in Iraq. “It’s really affecting attitudes toward the United States when you have these cowboy guys out there. These guys represent the U.S. to them and there are no rules of the game for them.”

Despite the growing criticism of Blackwater and its tactics, the company still enjoys an unusually close relationship with the Bush administration, and with the State Department and Pentagon in particular. It has received government contracts worth more than $1 billion since 2002, with most coming under the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, according to the independent budget monitoring group OMB Watch.

Last year, the State Department gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq, reducing the roles of DynCorp and Triple Canopy.

The company employs about 850 workers in Iraq under its diplomatic security contract, about three-quarters of them Americans, according to the State Department and the Congressional Research Service. DynCorp has 157 security guards in Iraq; Triple Canopy has about 250. The figures compiled by the State Department track the number of shootings per convoy mission, rather than measuring against the number of employees.

Just in recent weeks, Blackwater has also been awarded another large State Department contract to provide helicopter services in Iraq.

The company’s close ties to the Bush administration have raised questions about the political clout of Mr. Prince, Blackwater’s founder and owner. He is the scion of a wealthy Michigan family that is active in Republican politics. He and the family have given more than $325,000 in political donations over the past 10 years, the vast majority to Republican candidates and party committees, according to federal campaign finance reports.

Mr. Prince has helped cement his ties to the government by hiring prominent officials. J. Cofer Black, the former counterterrorism chief at the C.I.A. and State Department, is a vice chairman at Blackwater. Mr. Black is also now a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security issues to the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.

Joseph E. Schmitz, the former inspector general at the Pentagon, now is chief operating officer and general counsel for Blackwater’s parent company, the Prince Group. Officials at other firms in the contracting industry said that Mr. Prince sometimes met with government contracting officers, which they say is an unusual step for the chief executive of a corporation.

No Blackwater employees, or any other contractors, have been charged with crimes related to the shootings in Iraq, although there are a number of American laws governing actions overseas and in wartime that could be applied, according to experts in international law. In addition, a measure enacted last year calls for the Pentagon to bring contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of American military law, but the Defense Department has not yet put into effect the rules needed to do so.

Separately, American officials specifically exempted all United States personnel from Iraqi law under an order signed in 2004 by L.Paul Bremer III, then the top official of the American occupation authority. The Sept. 16 shootings have so angered Iraqis, however, that the Iraqi government is proposing a measure that would overturn the American rule and subject Western private security companies to Iraqi law. The proposal requires the approval of the Iraqi Parliament.

In a sign of the Pentagon’s concern over private security contractors, Mr. Gates last Sunday sent a five-person team to Iraq to discuss with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, the rules governing contractors. “He has some real concerns about oversight of contractors in Iraq and he is looking for ways to sort of make sure we do a better job on that front,” Geoff Morrell, Mr. Gates’s spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England sent a three-page memorandum to senior Defense Department officials and top commanders around the world ordering them to ensure that contractors in the field were operating under rules of engagement consistent with the military’s.





http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/world/middleeast/27contractor.html?hp

[sidecross]

September 28, 2007

Hired Gun Fetish

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely consistent with many other documented incidents involving security contractors.

For example, Mr. Singer reminds us that in 2005 “armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also U.S. Marines.” The contractors were not charged. In 2006, employees of Aegis, another security firm, posted a “trophy video” on the Internet that showed them shooting civilians, and employees of Triple Canopy, yet another contractor, were fired after alleging that a supervisor engaged in “joy-ride shooting” of Iraqi civilians.

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren’t the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren’t for the hatred such incidents engender.

Which raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits still playing such a big role in Iraq?

Don’t tell me that they are irreplaceable. The Iraq war has now gone on for four and a half years — longer than American participation in World War II. There has been plenty of time for the Bush administration to find a way to do without mercenaries, if it wanted to.

And the danger out-of-control military contractors pose to American forces has been obvious at least since March 2004, when four armed Blackwater employees blundered into Fallujah in the middle of a delicate military operation, getting themselves killed and precipitating a crisis that probably ended any chance of an acceptable outcome in Iraq.

Yet Blackwater is still there. In fact, last year the State Department gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq.

Mr. Singer argues that reliance on private military contractors has let the administration avoid making hard political choices, such as admitting that it didn’t send enough troops in the first place. Contractors, he writes, “offered the potential backstop of additional forces, but with no one having to lose any political capital.” That’s undoubtedly part of the story.

But it’s also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers’ money to give lucrative contracts to its friends — people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization — but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

So the privatization of war — no matter how badly it works — is just part of the pattern.




http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html?ref=opinion

[sidecross]

October 1, 2007

Report Depicts Recklessness at Blackwater

By DAVID STOUT and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Guards working in Iraq for Blackwater USA have shot innocent Iraqi civilians and have sought to cover up the incidents, sometimes with the help of the State Department, a report to a Congressional committee said today.

The report, based largely on internal Blackwater e-mail messages and State Department documents, depicts the security contractor as being staffed with reckless, shoot-first guards who were not always sober and did not always stop to see who or what was hit by their bullets.

In one incident, the State Department and Blackwater agreed to pay $15,000 to the family of a man killed by “a drunken Blackwater contractor,” the report said. As a State Department official wrote, “We would like to help them resolve this so we can continue with our protective mission.”

The report was compiled by the Democratic majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is scheduled to hold a hearing on Blackwater activities on Tuesday. That hearing is sure to be contentious now that the chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and other members have the staff’s findings to study.

A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, had no immediate comment. “We look forward to setting the record straight,” she told The Associated Press. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder and chairman, is to testify before Mr. Waxman’s panel. The State Department said several of its senior officials would address the issues in the report at the hearing on Tuesday.

The report is likely to raise questions not only about the wisdom of employing private security forces in Iraq, but also about the basic American mission in the country.

Blackwater guards have engaged in nearly 200 incidents of gunfire in Iraq since 2005, and in the vast majority of cases Blackwater people fired their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the injured, the report found.

The shootings logged by Blackwater were more than those by the other two private military contractors combined, the committee found. Blackwater has more than twice the number of contractors than the other two combined. The other contractors are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

“Blackwater also has the highest incidence of shooting first, although all three companies shoot first in more than half of all escalation-of-forces incidents,” the staff report said.

And the State Department’s own documents “raise serious questions” about how department officials responded to reports of Blackwater killings of Iraqis, the report said.

“There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting incidents involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the committee staff wrote.

Moreover, contrary to the terms of its contract, Blackwater sometimes engaged in offensive operations with the American military, instead of confining itself to its protective mission, the staff found.

The report also raised questions about the cost-effectiveness of using Blackwater forces instead of United States troops. Blackwater charges the government $1,222 per day per guard, “equivalent to $445,000 per year, or six times more than the cost of an equivalent U.S. soldier,” the report said.

The incident involving “a drunken Blackwater contractor” arose when the employee killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, Adil Abd-al-Mahdi, in December 2006. State Department officials allowed Blackwater to take the shooter out of Iraq less than 36 hours later.

Then the State Department charge d’affaires recommended that Blackwater make “a sizable payment” and an “apology” in an effort to “avoid this whole thing becoming even worse,” the report went on. The State Department official suggested a $250,000 payment to the guard’s family, but the department’s Diplomatic Security Service said that was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed.” In the end, $15,000 was agreed upon. The report adds credence to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have adopted an aggressive, trigger-happy approach and displayed disregard for Iraqi life.

In late March 2004, four Americans working for Blackwater were ambushed and killed, and an enraged mob then jubilantly dragged the burned bodies through the streets of downtown Falluja, hanging at least two corpses from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

The Congressional report, based on 437 internal Blackwater incident reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, says that that Blackwater’s use of force “is frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.” It notes that Blackwater’s contract authorizes it to use lethal force only to prevent “imminent and grave danger” to themselves or the people they are paid to protect.

“In practice, however,” the report says, “the vast majority of Blackwater weapons discharges are pre-emptive, with Blackwater forces firing first at a vehicle or suspicious individual prior to receiving any fire.” Among the incidents cited in the report:

On Oct. 24, 2005, Blackwater guards fired on a car that failed to heed a warning to stop. In the gunfire, a civilian bystander was hit in the head with a bullet, but Blackwater personnel did not stop. Blackwater officials reported the incident as a “probable killing” but there is no evidence the company offered compensation to the victim’s family.

On June 25, 2005, a Blackwater team in Hillah fatally shot an Iraqi man, a father of six, in the chest. The victim’s family complained to the State Department, which said in an internal report that the Blackwater gunmen initially failed to report the killing and tried to cover it up.

On Sept. 24, 2006, a Blackwater convoy with four vehicles was driving the wrong way on a road in Hillah when a red Opel failed to get out of the way. The Opel skidded into one of the Blackwater vehicles, disabling it. The Opel then hit a telephone pole and burst into flames. The Blackwater team scooped up its people and equipment from the disabled vehicle and fled the scene without attempting to help the occupants of the burning car.

On Nov. 28, 2005, a Blackwater motorcade traveling to and from the Iraqi oil ministry collided with 18 different vehicles. According to an internal Blackwater report of the incident, the statements from employees were “invalid, inaccurate, and at best, dishonest.” Two Blackwater employees were dismissed, but there was no other apparent action taken as a result.





http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/washington/01cnd-blackwater.html?hp

[suebee]

sidecross i have to drink before i read your excellent posts. i heard today also that blackwater itself wrote the report released by the state department on the latest matter.

[sidecross]

October 2, 2007

Report Says Firm Sought to Cover Up Iraq Shootings

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Employees of Blackwater USA have engaged in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded, according to a new report from Congress.

In at least two cases, Blackwater paid victims’ family members who complained, and sought to cover up other episodes, the Congressional report said. It said State Department officials approved the payments in the hope of keeping the shootings quiet. In one case last year, the department helped Blackwater spirit an employee out of Iraq less than 36 hours after the employee, while drunk, killed a bodyguard for one of Iraq’s two vice presidents on Christmas Eve.

The report by the Democratic majority staff of a House committee adds weight to complaints from Iraqi officials, American military officers and Blackwater’s competitors that company guards have taken an aggressive, trigger-happy approach to their work and have repeatedly acted with reckless disregard for Iraqi life.

But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

On Sept. 16, Blackwater employees were involved in a shooting in a Baghdad square that left at least eight Iraqis dead, an episode that remains clouded. The shooting set off outrage among Iraqi officials, who branded them “cold-blooded murder” and demanded that the company be removed from the country.

The State Department is conducting three separate investigations of the shooting, and on Monday the F.B.I. said it was sending a team to Baghdad to compile evidence for possible criminal prosecution.

Neither the State Department nor Blackwater would comment on Monday about the 15-page report, but both said their representatives would address it on Tuesday in testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose Democratic staff produced the document. Based on 437 internal Blackwater incident reports as well as internal State Department correspondence, the report said Blackwater’s use of force was “frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.”

Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday are Erik Prince, a press-shy former Navy Seal who founded Blackwater a decade ago, and several top State Department officials.

The committee report places a significant share of the blame for Blackwater’s record in Iraq on the State Department, which has paid Blackwater more than $832 million for security services in Iraq and elsewhere, under a diplomatic security contract it shares with two other companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

Blackwater has reported more shootings than the other two companies combined, but it also currently has twice as many employees in Iraq as the other two companies combined.

In the case of the Christmas Eve killing, the report says that an official of the United States Embassy in Iraq suggested paying the slain bodyguard’s family $250,000, but a lower-ranking official said that such a high payment “could cause incidents with people trying to get killed by our guys to financially guarantee their family’s future.” Blackwater ultimately paid the dead man’s family $15,000.

In another fatal shooting cited by the committee, an unidentified State Department official in Baghdad urged Blackwater to pay the victim’s family $5,000. The official wrote, “I hope we can put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.”

The committee report also cited three other shootings in which Blackwater officials filed misleading reports or otherwise tried to cover up the shootings.

Since mid-2006, Blackwater has been responsible for guarding American diplomats in and around Baghdad, while DynCorp has been responsible for the northern part of the country and Triple Canopy for the south.

State Department officials said last week that Blackwater had run more than 1,800 escort convoys for American diplomats and other senior civilians this year and its employees had discharged their weapons 57 times. Blackwater was involved in 195 instances of gunfire from 2005 until early September, a rate of 1.4 shootings a week, the report says. In 163 of those cases, Blackwater gunmen fired first.

The report also says Blackwater gunmen engaged in offensive operations alongside uniformed American military personnel in violation of their State Department contract, which states that Blackwater guards are to use their weapons only for defensive purposes.

It notes that Blackwater’s contract authorizes its employees to use lethal force only to prevent “imminent and grave danger” to themselves or to the people they are paid to protect. “In practice, however,” the report says, “the vast majority of Blackwater weapons discharges are pre-emptive, with Blackwater forces firing first at a vehicle or suspicious individual prior to receiving any fire.”

The report cites two instances in which Blackwater gunmen engaged in tactical military operations. One was a firefight in Najaf in 2004 during which Blackwater employees set up a machine gun alongside American and Spanish forces. Later that year, a Blackwater helicopter helped an American military squad secure a mosque from which sniper fire had been detected.

Blackwater has dismissed 122 of its employees over the past three years for misuse of weapons, drug or alcohol abuse, lewd conduct or violent behavior, according to the report. It has also terminated workers for insubordination, failure to report incidents or lying about them, and publicly embarrassing the company. One employee was dismissed for showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Senate on Monday gave final approval, 92 to 3, to a defense policy bill that included the establishment of an independent commission to investigate private contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill, which must be reconciled with a House version, faces a veto threat because it includes an expansion of federal hate-crimes laws.

James Risen, David Stout and David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.




http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/washington/02blackwater.html?hp

[Rob P]

.......

Blackwater Covered Up 195 Shootings and More
By Steve Benen
Posted on October 2, 2007, Printed on October 2, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/benen/64134/

This post, written by Steve Benen, originally appeared on The Carpetbagger Report

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing tomorrow on Blackwater's activities in Iraq, and by all indications, lawmakers will have plenty to talk about.

Guards working in Iraq for Blackwater USA have shot innocent Iraqi civilians and have sought to cover up the incidents, sometimes with the help of the State Department, a report prepared for a Congressional committee said today.
The report, based largely on internal Blackwater e-mail messages and State Department documents, depicts the security contractor as being staffed with reckless, shoot-first guards who were not always sober and did not always stop to see who or what was hit by their bullets.
In one incident, the State Department and Blackwater agreed to pay $15,000 to the family of a man killed by "a drunken Blackwater contractor," the report said. As a State Department official wrote, "We would like to help them resolve this so we can continue with our protective mission."
And when it comes to alleged Blackwater malfeasance, that's really just scratching the surface.

The committee's majority staff, led by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), will release a report on Blackwater's activities to coincide with tomorrow's hearing, and the document will no doubt raise plenty of questions, including a look at the extent to which Bush's State Department covered up the company's killings.

Indeed, given the revelations of the past few weeks, Blackwater seems to have reached a unique point in our discourse, one in which a corporate name is so scandalous, it automatically represents outrage and indignity. There are a few -- Enron, WorldCom, Halliburton -- and with each passing day, Blackwater is taking its place. Indeed, in some ways, it may be the most scandalous of all.

The Speaker's office has a detailed post documenting information being made available to the rest of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Previously undisclosed information reveals (1) Blackwater has engaged in 195 "escalation of force" incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 per week, including over 160 incidents in which Blackwater forces fired first; (2) after a drunken Blackwater contractor shot the guard of the Iraqi Vice President, the State Department allowed the contractor to leave Iraq and advised Blackwater on the size of the payment needed "to help them resolve this"; and (3) Blackwater, which has received over $1 billion in federal contracts since 2001, is charging the federal government over $1,200 per day for each "protective security specialist" employed by the company.
Moreover, Josh Marshall has a doozy, highlighting a State Department report that largely exonerates Blackwater personnel involved with the Sept. 16 Baghdad shootings. The report, apparently, was written by Blackwater.

The report was written out of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the folks who hired Blackwater to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq. But it turns out that the State Department employee who interviewed the Blackwater folks and wrote the report, Darren Hanner ... well, he wasn't a State Department employee. He was another contractor from Blackwater.
So yes, you've got that right. We've now reached what can only be called the alpha and the omega of contracting accountability breakdown ridiculousness. We're outsourcing our investigations of Blackwater to Blackwater.
And yet, through it all, the U.S. keeps awarding Blackwater more and more lucrative contracts.

Stay tuned.

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/benen/64134/

.......

[sidecross]

October 3, 2007

Sinking in a Swamp Full of Blackwater

By MAUREEN DOWD
Washington

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” Nietzsche said. “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

We’re gazing into the abyss all right, and Blackwater is gazing back.

Besides having an army for hire, brave kids who are paid to fight so that most Americans are not personally touched by war, we have the real mercenaries. And they’re a spooky cadre, careening outside the laws of Iraq, the United States and the military.

President Bush continues to preach that we must defeat the “dark ideology” of extremists with “a more hopeful vision.”

But the compromises W. makes to slog on in Iraq, be it with warlords, dictators or out-of-control contractors, are spreading a dark stain on America’s image.

“Blackwater appears to have fostered a culture of shoot first and sometimes kill, and then ask the questions,” said Representative Elijah Cummings, a Democrat, yesterday at a House hearing.

The Times reports today that Blackwater’s explanation of an incident in Baghdad on Sept. 16 that left 17 dead and 24 wounded is sketchy.

It seems as though a bullet struck an Iraqi man driving his mother to pick up his father, a pathologist, at the hospital. The dead man’s weight, The Times reports, “probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the car forward” toward a Blackwater convoy.

Blackwater guards then unleashed a spray of gunfire and explosives, even though witnesses did not see anyone shooting at the American convoy and even though Iraqis were turning their cars around and escaping the scene.

Newsweek quotes the Iraqi national police as saying that Blackwater vehicles “opened fire crazily and randomly, without any reason.”

The Blackwater desperados are a sinister symbol of how little progress we’ve made in Iraq, that V.I.P.’s — or “packages,” as the contractors call them — can’t make a move in the country without the high-priced hired guns of the State Department.

Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War.

But W. outsourced his presidency to Cheney and Rummy, and Cheney and Rummy went to war on the cheap and outsourced large chunks of the Iraq occupation to Halliburton and Blackwater. The American taxpayer got gouged, and so did the American reputation.

The mercenaries inflame Iraqis even as Gen. David Petraeus tries to win their trust.

Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, summoned the 38-year-old crew-cut chairman of Blackwater, Erik Prince, to defend his private security company yesterday.

Once there was the military-industrial complex. Now we have the mercenary-evangelical complex.

Mr. Prince, a former intern to the first President Bush and a former Navy Seal, is from a well-to-do and well-connected Republican family from Michigan.

He and his father both have close ties to conservative Christian groups. His sister was a Pioneer for W., raising $100,000 in 2004, and Erik Prince has given more than $225,000 to Republicans.

Blackwater, in turn, has been the beneficiary of $1 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract with the State Department worth hundreds of millions.

Mr. Waxman yesterday called the State Department “Blackwater’s enabler.” His committee staff summarized State Department reports revealing a cascade of Blackwater trouble.

“In a high-profile incident in December 2006, a drunken Blackwater contractor killed the guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi. Within 36 hours after the shooting, the State Department had allowed Blackwater to transport the Blackwater contractor out of Iraq.”

The State Department chargé d’affaires “suggested a $250,000 payment to the guard’s family, but the Department’s Diplomatic Security Service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to ‘try to get killed.’ ” In the end, they agreed on a $15,000 payment.

“The State Department took a similar approach,” the report stated, “upon receiving reports that Blackwater shooters killed an innocent Iraqi, except that in this case, the State Department requested only a $5,000 payment to ‘put this unfortunate matter behind us quickly.’ ”

Mr. Prince was pressed by Representative Paul Hodes about the penalty paid by the Blackwater employee who, while drunk and off-duty at a Christmas party, killed the Iraqi guard.

The man was fired. And he had to pay his own airfare home and forfeit his bonuses, amounting to a loss of about $14,697 — slightly less than the amount paid to the family of the Iraqi he blew away.





http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/opinion/03dowd.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Rob P]

...

next time you see a military recruiting stand,
ask them why a kid would
want to join the army instead of
blackwater??

seems like a higher profile gig...

...

[Rob P]

....

it can't happen here right?
don't shoot the messenger, but...

...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

...

The term Sturmabteilung predates the founding of the Nazi party in 1919. It originally comes from the specialized assault troops used by Germany in 1918 in World War I utilising Hutier infiltration tactics. Instead of a large mass assault, the Sturmabteilung was organized into small squads of a few soldiers each. First applied during the German Eighth Army's siege of Riga, then again at the Battle of Caporetto, their wider use in March 1918 allowed the Germans to push back British and French lines tens of kilometers.
In Munich in late 1920, Hitler created the Ordnertruppen, a body of ex-soldiers and beer hall brawlers in order to protect gatherings of the Nazi party from disruptions from Social Democrats and Communists. On November 4, 1921 the Nazi party held a large public meeting in the Munich Hofbräuhaus. After Hitler had spoken for some time the meeting erupted into a melee in which a small company of Ordnertruppen distinguished itself by thrashing the opposition. After this the organisation came to be called the SA. Under their popular leader Ernst Röhm, the SA grew in importance within the Nazi power structure, initially growing in size to thousands of members. In 1922, the Nazi Party created a youth section, the Jugendbund, for young men between the ages of 14 and 18 years. Its successor, the Hitler Youth, remained under SA command until May 1932.
From April 1924 until late February 1925 the SA was known as the Frontbann to avoid the temporary ban on the Nazi party. The SA carried out numerous acts of violence against socialist groups throughout the 1920s, typically in minor street-fights called Zusammenstöße ('collisions'). The SS eventually took over their original role.


....

[sidecross]

...

next time you see a military recruiting stand,
ask them why a kid would
want to join the army instead of
blackwater??

seems like a higher profile gig...

...


The military would answer the regular U.S. military is just an apprenticeship to earn the big money.

[sidecross]

The State Department's Murderous Guardians

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig

Tuesday 02 October 2007

How did it come to be that the ostensibly best-educated and most refined representatives of the United States in Iraq are guarded by gun-toting mercenaries who kill innocent civilians? More urgently, why did State Department employees and their bosses in Washington tolerate-and pay to conceal-the wanton murder conducted on their watch?

That's the real scandal of the more than $832 million the U.S. State Department paid Blackwater, investigated this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, headed by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). The issue is not simply that of the Blackwater forces' horrid behavior but, more important, why the mayhem they unleashed upon innocent Iraqis was approved and covered up by the Bush administration. For example, why did a top State Department official initially suggest a payment of $250,000 of American taxpayers' money to conceal the uncontested fact that, as the House committee report states, "a drunken Blackwater contractor killed the guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi"?

The State Department enabled the Blackwater shooter to be spirited out of the country within 36 hours, and although Blackwater subsequently fired him, he has never faced any criminal charges. Nor have any of the others involved in the 195 shooting incidents Blackwater officials admitted have occurred in the past two years, incidents in which 84 percent of the time Blackwater contractors fired first. According to Blackwater's own documents, the congressional committee reports, "in the vast majority of incidents ... Blackwater shots are fired from a moving vehicle and Blackwater does not remain on the scene to determine if their shots resulted in casualties." During one trip U.S. diplomats made to the Ministry of Oil, 18 different Iraqi civilian vehicles were smashed by the fast-moving motorcade. Those hit-and-runs were conducted in full view of the escorted State Department officials without any of them forcing a subsequent investigation.

Despite all the nonsense about a "liberated Iraq," one of President Bush's favorite phrases, the Iraqis still lack the authority to prosecute American mercenaries occupying their country because of a law pushed through by then-U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer, who was also guarded by Blackwater personnel. Bremer awarded the original no-bid contract to Blackwater, run by a major Republican campaign contributor, Erik Prince, who has donated $225,000 to the GOP. Prince's sister Betsy DeVos was Michigan's Republican Party chair and a Bush-Cheney "Pioneer" who came through with at least $100,000 for their 2004 campaign.

But this is not yet another story about payoffs to the GOP faithful who have predominated in the occupation and are totally untrained for their assigned tasks in the restructuring of a country that they know nothing about. The Blackwater guards know their job all too well, which is to guard top U.S. officials by any means necessary-including the casual extermination of innocent Iraqis.

Clearly, paid contractors are better for this task than American military personnel, since contractors operate outside of the restraints imposed on ordinary troops by law and by their own consciences. Many Blackwater contractors have been recruited from the U.S. military at much higher pay than direct service to their country afforded them. Whereas a top Army sergeant is paid $51,100 to $69,350 a year in salary, housing and other benefits, a Blackwater contractor (often a retired sergeant) receives six to nine times as much. The U.S. government pays Blackwater $1,222 per day for one Blackwater "Protective Security Specialist," which, the congressional report notes, "amounts to $445,891 per contractor" per year. In an unusual display of disapproval aimed at Blackwater from the right side of the aisle, Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., R-Tenn., noted Tuesday that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' annual salary amounts to less than half of what some high-ranking Blackwater security officials in Iraq earn.

Of course they're worth it, along with the Iraqi deaths they cause, if your own life is on the line and that's all that matters. This is clearly the position of the State Department employees in Iraq and their bosses in Washington who have covered up for Blackwater for years. As the House committee majority staff states: "There is no evidence in the documents that the Committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater's actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting incidents involving Blackwater or the company's high rate of shooting first, or detained contractors for investigation."

No better evidence that the Iraqis are the Indians, attempting as imperfectly as they may to protect their ancestral terrain. But this time the imperial majesty of the United States, represented by American Ambassador Ryan Crocker, is established not by the U.S. cavalry but by a band of hired gunslingers.


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100407F.shtml

[sidecross]

Published on Saturday, October 6, 2007 by The Guardian/UK

The Scandal of Blackwater

The only punishment doled out to US security men involved in deadly shootings is a jet home

by Jeremy Scahill

Erik Prince, the secretive 38-year-old owner of the leading US mercenary firm Blackwater, has seldom appeared in public. But on Tuesday he found himself in front of a Congressional committee, TV cameras trained on his boyish face. The official focus of the hearing, convened by Henry Waxman’s committee on oversight and government reform, was two questions that should have been asked long ago: whether the government’s heavy reliance on private security is serving US interests in Iraq, and whether the specific conduct of Blackwater has advanced or impeded US efforts.

What put Prince in the hot seat were the infamous Nisour Square shootings in Baghdad on September 16, in which as many as 28 Iraqi civilians may have been killed. Waxman said the justice department had asked him not to take testimony on the incident because it was the subject of an FBI investigation. In Prince’s prepared testimony, he said that people should wait for the results of the investigation - originally handled by the state department - “for a complete understanding of that event”.

But the investigative process so far has hardly been impartial. Just hours before Prince’s testimony, CNN reported that the state department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner. The next day came the news that the FBI team assigned to look into the incident in Baghdad had a contract with Blackwater itself to provide security for their investigation.

At the hearing Prince boldly declared that in Iraq his men have acted “appropriately at all times” and appeared to deny that the company had ever killed innocent civilians, only acknowledging that some may have died as a result of “ricochets” and “traffic accidents”. This assertion is simply unbelievable. According to a report prepared by Waxman’s staff, since 2005 Blackwater operatives in Iraq have opened fire on at least 195 occasions. In more than 80% of these instances, the Blackwater agents fired first.

Not surprisingly, Prince said he supported the continuation of Order 17 in Iraq, the Bremer-era decree giving organisations such as Blackwater immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. Prince said Blackwater operatives who “don’t hold to the standard, they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their flight home. In all, Blackwater has sacked more than 120 of its operatives in Iraq. Given that being fired and sent home have been the only disciplinary consequences faced by Blackwater employees, it is worth asking: what did they do to earn this punishment?

Waxman’s committee scrutinised one incident: the killing of one of the Iraqi vice-president’s bodyguards by an allegedly drunk Blackwater contractor last Christmas Eve. Prince confirmed that Blackwater had whisked him out of Iraq and fired him, and said that he had been fined and billed for his return ticket.

According to the committee report, after the killing the state department chargé d’affaires recommended that Blackwater make a “sizable payment” to the bodyguard’s family. The official suggested $250,000, but the department’s diplomatic security service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed”. In the end, the state department and Blackwater are said to have agreed on a $15,000 payment.

A pattern is emerging from the Congressional investigation into Blackwater: the state department urging the company to pay what amounts to hush money to victims’ families while facilitating the return of contractors involved in deadly incidents for which not a single one has faced prosecution.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.




http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/06/4360/

[Isaiah Mpski]

I don't understand shit like that since the tide has turned and radical Muslims are heading to their heaven in record numbers,praise the Lord.

What the author fails to understand that the only reason the the Middle East conflict has lasted so long is that we have a seperation of Church and state while the radical terroist Muslims do not.
Wait until they take on the states of Russia and China-both of whom at their core is no religion-The beast is about to be conqueored.
If ,born again Bill Clinto han't putin the breaks on the Serbs,the communists would be in Iraq now.
Now as it is,we have to kick ass in Iran.Not only because there were over a million casualties on BOTH sides of the Iran Iraq war but they beat women.

[sidecross]

Published on Sunday, October 7, 2007 by The Guardian/UK

The Immorality of Blackwater

American soldiers in Iraq should fight because the cause is right, not because the price is right.

by Daniel Baer

The apparently unjustified killings of Iraqi civilians by employees of the private military company Blackwater USA in al-Nissour on September 16 has triggered debate and hand-wringing about the legal situation of contractors involved in the US military operation in Iraq. Despite Congress’s expansion of the uniform code of military justice last November to cover contractors, the defense department has failed to give implementation guidelines for this expansion. Therefore, the provision that originated as Paul Bremer’s Order 17 granting contractors immunity from prosecution persists in Iraqi law, and means that contractors continue to exist above the law and outside its grasp - unlike soldiers, they can’t be court-martialed; unlike civilians, they can’t be prosecuted under the laws of the land. Sadly, as the investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill has testified for US senators, “impunity and immunity have gone hand in hand.”

As a matter of justice, we should all hope that the Blackwater employees are held accountable for their actions. However, the legal predicament that contractors’ crimes raises is a symptom of a deeper, extremely troubling problem: in allowing the Bush administration to significantly privatize the fighting force for the war, we have undermined our ability as citizens to weigh the costs of the conflict, and to demand that what is done in our name is done in a manner consistent with the liberal democratic principles that we as a nation claim to be defending.

It would likely come as a surprise to most Americans to learn that, in addition to the more than 168,000 American military personnel currently engaged in Iraq, there is a private shadow army of nearly 200,000 contractors supporting, and, in some cases, fighting and dying along side the troops. Not only is this private army outside the bounds of public justice, the costs of this army are largely hidden from public view. The material cost is opaquely smuggled in through war funding resolutions; the human cost is never publicly reported. Payments for contractors, who often get work through no-bid contracts, amount to tens of billions of dollars. More than 1,000 of these contractors have died and another 13,000 have been injured - figures that are excluded from official casualty numbers. (To be fair, not all contractors are warriors: no one knows for sure how many of the contractors are engaged in combat-like operations rather than support services, but assuming parity of mortality rates with official US troops, one could conservatively estimate that upwards of 25,000 contractors are so-engaged - in other words, about a “surge” worth.)

Even more troubling than the fact that these costs are being hidden is the way that the money involved is being used to undermine one of the key moral features of American democracy: the all volunteer fighting force.

Bush administration officials are adamant that we need Blackwater and other contractors - that we do not have adequate military capacity to execute the functions that contractors currently carry out. Surely this doesn’t mean that America, with the most advanced military on earth, doesn’t have the know-how to execute these tasks or to train people to do them. So it must mean that we simply don’t have the manpower to do them - that not enough volunteers have come forward to join the military, or that the administration knows that the public wouldn’t countenance sending more soldiers into war.

In effect, the government has used contractors as a way to covertly put more troops on the ground and to attract those who can’t be motivated by the cause but who can be motivated by dollars. So-called security personnel working for contractors earn princely salaries many times what a soldier earns. And so, rather than facing the hard slog of convincing Congress and the public to authorize sending more soldiers, the administration has simply bought additional soldiers on the sly.

One of the many reasons why the civilized world has come to accept a moral prohibition on mercenaries is that moral intuition tells us that money is the wrong reason for a person to go onto a battlefield, that war is a unique environment and that soldiers who kill and risk dying for a cause should do so primarily because the cause is right, not because the price is right.

By using vast sums to lure individuals onto the battlefield, we disregard our commitment - fundamental to our way of life, to the justification of our system of government and indeed to our justification of the war itself - to respect the dignity of the individual. We use them as means to an end in a kind of martial prostitution.

Now, many have argued that we already practice a form of economic conscription in the US - that many who go into the US military do so because they have no other option. This is a separate question worthy of public debate, and perhaps we should work together to ensure that our society provides viable economic alternatives.

This should not distract us from the fact that by using Blackwater and other such companies our government is guilty of egregious economic conscription, of purposefully using the size of the purse rather than the justice of the cause to entice soldiers. And, perversely, this wrong is amplified by the fact that in the process we create an unjustified inequity between Blackwater personnel and US military soldiers who get paid far less.

In liberal democracies, the need to convince the populace that a war is worthy of its costs - in terms of blood and treasure - and the need to find volunteers to fight it are structural safeguards that limit the wars we fight. Perhaps if the government cannot find enough volunteers to fight this war, it means that the war should not continue to be fought. Otherwise, we Americans should openly revisit the national debate about conscription, rather than permitting the administration to covertly circumvent that prohibition with money.

As the US Congress debates the next round of war funding, and as the administration calls on Americans to support the troops, we should be conscious of the fact that we are not just funding support for our soldiers, but enabling the president to maintain a shadow army of soldiers of fortune on our behalf.

Daniel Baer is a faculty fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/07/4370/

[Rob P]

...

I survived Blackwater

A former U.S. official received the security company's services --
and witnessed its disregard for Iraqi lives.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gans6oct06,0,1155563.story?coll=la-opinion-center

By Janessa Gans

October 6, 2007

When the Iraqi government last month demanded the expulsion of Blackwater USA, the private security firm, I had one reaction: It's about time.

As a U.S. official in Baghdad for nearly two years, I was frequently the "beneficiary" of Blackwater's over-the-top zeal. "Just pretend it's a roller coaster," I used to tell myself during trips through downtown Baghdad.

We would careen around corners, jump road dividers, reach speeds in excess of 100 mph and often cross over to the wrong side of the street, oncoming traffic be damned.

But much more appalling than the ride was the deleterious effect each movement through town had on the already beleaguered people of Iraq. I began to wonder whether my meetings, intended to further U.S. policy goals and improve the lives of Iraqis, were doing more harm than good. With our drivers honking at, cutting off, pelting with water bottles (a favorite tactic) and menacing with weapons anyone in their way, how many enemies were we creating?

One particularly infuriating time, I was in the town of Irbil in northern Iraq, being driven to a meeting with a Kurdish political leader. We were on a narrow stretch of highway with no shoulders and foot-high barriers on both sides. The lead Suburban in our convoy loomed up behind an old, puttering sedan driven by an older man with a young woman and three children.

As we approached at typical breakneck speed, the Blackwater driver honked furiously and motioned to the side, as if they should pull over. The kids in the back seat looked back in horror, mouths agape at the sight of the heavily armored Suburbans driven by large, armed men in dark sunglasses. The poor Iraqi driver frantically searched for a means of escape, but there was none. So the lead Blackwater vehicle smashed heedlessly into the car, pushing it into the barrier. We zoomed by too quickly to notice if anyone was hurt.

Until that point I had never mentioned anything to my drivers about their tactics, but this time I could not contain myself.

"Where do you all expect them to go?" I shrieked. "It was an old guy and a family, for goodness' sake. Was it necessary for them to destroy their poor old car?"

My driver responded impassively: "Ma'am, we've been trained to view anyone as a potential threat. You don't know who they might use as decoys or what the risks are. Terrorists could be disguised as anyone."

"Well, if they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now!" I retorted. Sulking in my seat, I was stunned by the driver's indifference.

The Iraqis with whom I dealt quickly learned to differentiate between the U.S. military and private contractors. The military has established rules of engagement, plus it is required to pay compensation for damages (though it is a difficult and bureaucratic process). Blackwater seemed to have no such rules, paid no compensation and, per long-standing Coalition Provisional Authority fiat, had immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.

As we do the work of bridge building and improving our host citizens' lives, if the people providing our transportation and security are antagonizing, angering and even killing the people we are putatively trying to help, our entire mission is undermined.

Janessa Gans, a visiting political science professor at Principia College, was a U.S. official in Iraq from 2003 to 2005.

...

[craazyman]

Something tells me that Blackwater's days are numbered.

If these guys can stay sober, I think they'd be good on the Mexican border, or in search and rescue operations.

We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think these guys have a lot of potential with better management oversight.

Or better yet, even (if that's possible).

I could see Blackwater turned into a debt collection company. Seriously, when I was in the graphics business back in the 1990s there were a few low-rent book publishers that owed me money and wouldn't pay. I had a friend who was a printer who said he could put me in touch with someone who could break some bones for me if I wanted it. Serious. I declined that offer. But I did send my accountant over to get $1500 from one guy. My accountant at that time had a pony tail and looked a little bit like Jean Claude Van Dam, but he smoked way too many Marlboro Reds and drank to much to be dangerous to anyone but himself (and possibly my tax return but I wouldn't know, that's what I paid him for). Anyway, it's the situation and the appearance that counts in these things. People have to feel the fear. And you have to take them by surprise. Yes, I got my money. LOL.

I wouldn't mind at all to have sent a few Blackwater guys on the rounds in those days. LOL.

[suebee]

well now we have the eyewitness woman's version of how things work in bagdad. these ex-military cia trained black ops boys have so little to do these days, its no wonder they........ fucking a. i cant even write about this stuff. how about that fortuante son right wing fascist psuedo religious billionaire hack owner. he and steve schwartzman (is he your hero c-man?) can go ---- each other. this whole thing frys my ass. what if this is all there is - no reincarnation, no heaven, no new dimension, splat and we're dust. so everyone's life matters hugely (even if we do come back these lives matter hugely, dont get me wrong) but if this is it then why should some american or muslim be able to kill with impunity? those f. ganja weed horsemen of the sudan apocolypse. why didnt we air drop these black ops boys and their harleys into the desert to wipe out those madmen? NOTHING makes sense.

[sidecross]

"NOTHING makes sense."

You are right; we a spending, I should write borrowing, $500,000 each minute paying for the occupation of Iraq.

And our President veto’s a bill meant to provide medical insurance for U.S. children.

:(

[craazyman]

I have no clue who Steve Schwarzman is.

But allegedly being a lawyer, you must know how hopeless our court system is when an honest working man is owed money by a fop. It's the stuff of revolutions. LOL. I would almost say Che Guevera RIP, but I don't go for that summary execution stuff. Even in my condition, or maybe especially because of it, I still have respect for due process as a way of turning the temperature down.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Due process is an expensive dream in a land of little justice for the masses.

[suebee]

yes, why do you think i do not love my craft. hello isaiah.

we have small claims court here in calif which works very well for claims under $5K. very well. very cheaply. you can garnish wages as long as the debtor works. you can file judgments which last against any newly acquired property for ten years and renew the judgments but it all takes time and effort and most people are smart enough to do it but dont trust themselves, or are so beaten down by doughnuts that they just give up.

and mostly in the court system, the rich win. che had some things right. but im also for no killing. i vote for glass cages.

i left off the 'n' c-man. its steven schwartzman. and i know i didnt insult you but i didnt try to.....and what is your 'condition' ?

[craazyman]

No insult taken at all. I still have no idea who Steve Schwartzman is and why anyone would think he would be my hero.

My condition is the human condition.

[willoweyes]

(FORTUNE Magazine) -- Today Wall Street's newest titans can be found every Monday morning gathered around a long, slightly scuffed conference table in a windowless boardroom high above Park Avenue, the home of the Blackstone Group.

Wearing white shirts and pinstriped suits that underscore their Harvard Business School credentials, Blackstone's top dealmakers have learned well the techniques pioneered by previous masters. What makes them different is that they also happen to dominate the iconic business of this decade - private equity.

Presiding over this weekly gathering, which begins promptly at 8:30 A.M. and sometimes lasts till lunch, is Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's 60-year-old CEO. . . .They control 47 companies, with more than $85 billion in revenue from wildly different businesses (within days of its takeover of Equity Office Properties, Blackstone also swallowed Pinnacle Foods, the maker of Vlasic pickles and Aunt Jemima pancake mix).

Schwarzman celebrated his 60th birthday with several hundred of his closest friends, along with performances by Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle, at a bash at the Park Avenue Armory. The multimillion-dollar party, orchestrated by his wife, Christine, an intellectual-property lawyer, took place just a few blocks from his $30 million apartment in a trophy building that has counted Rockefellers and Vanderbilts among its residents.

What Schwarzman has always wanted, says a former colleague, is "to be Henry Kravis and Bruce Wasserstein rolled into one. But you've got to give him credit. There's always somebody who is the symbol of an era, and he hit this era right."

Blah blah blah. He's rich, a show-off, and voracious. I could forgive him everything but Rod Stewart.

[Isaiah Mpski]

What a great time to be alive.

[craazyman]

So that's Steve Schwarzman, huh?

Puh-leeze.

If you want to know my opinion of private equity economic parasites, read my posts on the mortgage thread. LOL. And if you saw the way I live, you'd cringe in apologetic shame at even thinking that.

But I do like Rod Stewart. :p

[willoweyes]

I don't know what to say about Blackwater. It is told they have never lost a "client." They treat the Iraqis like crap. So do we. ("They" are we?)

I saw the scene of the Blackwater killing spree this morning. A car inching forward--a convoy trapped--classic Schwarzenegger country.

What in the hell are these diplomats doing running around Bagdad constantly anyhow. Haven't they heard of the internet and conference-calls?

Yet another example of demonizing a tool.

The problem with Blackwater in my mind, is the problem between the myth and the reality of what we are doing in Iraq.

[sidecross]

Fuck Stephen Schwarzman and all that he stands for!
:evil:

[suebee]

steven schwartzman and yes sidey, im with you.

i read that too willow, and thought patti and rod??? maybe no one else would play for him. eddie vetter wouldnt. maybe electricity is a problem with conferencing and internet communiques but that thought crossed my mind too, why are these people constantly moving about in armored convoys?

speaking of the 40th anniversary of the death of ernesto guevara (lynch) de la serna, c-man, there is a talk tonight in manhattan at the brecht forum with the author of a book (about our (usa, usa, usa!) meddling in latin america starting in the 40's up to today and its ramifications, including free trade, and about che peripherally) at 6:30.

so so many of my latin brothers and sisters. and still it continues.

oh well to bemoan is wasted energy. and ive gone off topic. black ops, blackstone, blackwater.

[craazyman]

thanks for the heads-up Suebee but I think I'll pass. Not my cup of tea to sit through a bunch of nuevo revolutionary nonsense from limousine liberals and Brechtians. Oh my, would I need a drink for that.

The CIA didn't help matters much down there, for sure, but the problems started long before America, before Cortez, before Columbus. It's the refuse of century after century of blood kings, tribal warfare, ritual sacrifice and despotic opression. And some folks want to blame the USA for all the problems. Simple minds, simple minds, simple minds.

The problem with all these armchair revolutionaries and radical intellectuals is that they generally are totally ignorant of human history and insensible to human nature, and so they stumble from one utopian holocaust to another and wonder what went wrong. It would almost be funny if so many people didn't get hammered.

[suebee]

youre welcome.

have you studied guatamalan history c-man?

[suebee]

black. appropos word. my take on the world without yoga's influence for 12 days. wanted: personal trainer. i am sorry everyone. nothing gained by contributing to the darkness.

i tried to edit out that last post c- man but it was too late. ;)

our usa lifestyle has been obtained/maintained in large part off the backs and through the deaths of many peoples. (for most of us a lucky by-product of those building this empire.) we are no different than those mayan warring tribes, the history of man doomed to be repeated ad naseum. but peoples ruined by our avarice and expectations have their right to reparation, no? no, they dont. no one matters but us. those of us with everything cant lead humanity through any darkness. we cant learn. its built in. survival of the fit. dog eat dog. and our way of life will soon be wrested from us by the next dominant human culture; there is no hope. is that about it?

[craazyman]

no problem suebee, I egged you on. I like it when you're inflamed and on a roll.;)

seriously though, why do you have such a selective guilt and prosecution complex about this stuff. You are far from alone, too. It's an interesting but somewhat frightening study in collective mob psychology, this oedipal rage roaring through the lens of politics, wanting to blame America for every ill in the world. There's plenty of guilt to go around, and time.

In the words of the Roman poet Horace, "Vixere fortes ante agamemnona "

The USA lifestyle has also been a life-raft for millions of people too. In a different age and a different time they built a statue of liberty to celebrate it, some French sculpture I think, in Paris. And tens of millions came by boat. And still do. Why is that, do you think? Philosophicallly speaking.

[suebee]

well do you suppose people once thought rome was the place to go?

why do they come 'philosophically'? can that be separated out from 'physically'? dont most come to escape this or that (take your pick) horrible condition of their own lives? many of these horrible conditions having been caused directly by the very country they see as their only hope. mexico maybe being the only exception...i dont really know the history of our meddling in mexico but our business interests in latin america trumped everything to the point we literally killed off any hope of any democratic reform which perhaps naturally rises in humans whenever it did arise there and put in brutality disguised as protecting the hemisphere from communism. its the same now. and yes it is found where ever people have power and strength to protect their interests. its just we are such tremendous hypocrits about it, pushing our liberty and democracy like a drug onto people when in truth it's mostly just ignoble greed. the tired human condition.

philosphically they may come, sailors to sirens, believing our tremendous (and precarious) freedom and opportunity are the be-all end-all of human evolution....

its three a.m. i may be incoherent.

p.s i never heard of the brecht forum before yesterday or whenever.

[sidecross]

October 13, 2007

New Evidence That Blackwater Guards Took No Fire

By JAMES GLANZ

This article was reported by James Glanz, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Michael Kamber and written by Mr. Glanz.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 12 — Fresh accounts of the Blackwater shooting last month, given by three rooftop witnesses and by American soldiers who arrived shortly after the gunfire ended, cast new doubt Friday on statements by Blackwater guards that they were responding to armed insurgents when Iraqi investigators say 17 Iraqis were killed at a Baghdad intersection.

The three witnesses, Kurds on a rooftop overlooking the scene, said they had observed no gunfire that could have provoked the shooting by Blackwater guards. American soldiers who arrived minutes later found shell casings from guns used normally by American contractors, as well as by the American military.

The Kurdish witnesses are important because they had the advantage of an unobstructed view and because, collectively, they observed the shooting at Nisour Square from start to finish, free from the terror and confusion that might have clouded accounts of witnesses at street level. Moreover, because they are pro-American, their accounts have a credibility not always extended to Iraqi Arabs, who have been more hostile to the American presence.

Their statements, made in interviews with The New York Times, appeared to challenge a State Department account that a Blackwater vehicle had been disabled in the shooting and had to be towed away. Since those initial accounts, Blackwater and the State Department have consistently refused to comment on the substance of the case.

The Kurdish witnesses said that they saw no one firing at the guards at any time during the event, an observation corroborated by the forensic evidence of the shell casings. Two of the witnesses also said all the Blackwater vehicles involved in the shooting drove away under their own power.

The Kurds, who work for a political party whose building looks directly down on the square, said they had looked for any evidence that the American security guards were responding to an attack, but found none.

“I call it a massacre,” said Omar H. Waso, one of the witnesses and a senior official at the party, which is called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “It is illegal. They used the law of the jungle.”

Many of the American soldiers were similarly appalled. While Blackwater has said its guards were attacked by automatic gunfire, the soldiers did not find any casings from the sort of guns typically used by insurgents or by Iraqi security forces, according to an American military official briefed on the findings of the unit that arrived at the scene about 20 minutes after the Blackwater convoy left. That analysis of forensic evidence at the scene was first reported Friday by The Washington Post.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, added that soldiers had found clear evidence that the Blackwater guards were not been threatened and also opened fire on civilians who had tried to flee. “The cartridges and casings we found were all associated with coalition forces and contractors,” the official said. “The only brass we found where somebody fired weapons were ones from contractors.”

The case has angered many in the military who believe that the conduct of the security guards makes the troops’ jobs harder. “If our people had done this,” another American military official said, “they would be court-martialed.”

The shooting, on Sept. 16, and the deaths of two Iraqi women in a shooting by a different security company on Tuesday, have provoked anger at politically potent levels of Iraqi society. In the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, officials affiliated with Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called for sanctions against the companies.

In Karbala, a spokesman for the ayatollah inveighed against “the cheapening of Iraqi blood” and called for Parliament to take action. In a legacy of orders handed down during post-invasion American rule here, Western contractors essentially have immunity to Iraqi law.

None of the roughly two dozen witnesses previously interviewed by Iraqi investigators said that they saw or heard anyone but the Blackwater guards fire during the shooting, which Iraq says killed 17 and wounded 27. Still, because nearly all of those witnesses were in the field of fire, their accounts could conceivably have been skewed by the terror and confusion of the moment.

The Kurdish witnesses on the rooftop said they had not been interviewed by Iraqi investigators. They said they had been visited by American investigators, but had not been fully interviewed.

After the shootings, American soldiers found plenty of empty bullet casings 7.62 millimeters in diameter. Had the 7.62-millimeter casings been from an AK-47 rifle, a common insurgent and Iraqi police weapon, they would have been 39 millimeters long. Had they been from a PKC machine gun, another common Iraqi weapon, they would have been 54 millimeters long. The soldiers did not find any of those, the military official said.

Instead, the official said, the casings were 51 millimeters long, the length used by NATO weapons, including the M-240 machine gun, a standard automatic weapon used by the America military and American security contractors, the official said. The soldiers also found empty 5.56-millimeter casings of the type used by the M-4 and M-16 rifles that American troops and contractors bear.

The F.B.I. has been interviewing soldiers from the unit that responded to the scene, the Third Battalion of the 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, which is part of the Second Brigade of the First Cavalry Division, to collect information in its investigation of the shooting, the official said.

Only one of the Kurdish witnesses, a guard who would give his name only as Sabah, saw the first shots fired by the Blackwater guards into a white sedan, killing a man and his mother and setting the events in motion.

Two others, Mr. Waso and his driver, Sirwan Ali, went to the roof after the shooting started and observed long enough to see the Blackwater vehicles leave the square. Eventually both went down to help the victims, they said. All three men have military backgrounds.

When asked if anything had occurred to provoke the initial shots from Blackwater, Sabah said: “Nothing at all. No mortars. No shooting.”

All he saw, Sabah said, was that the white sedan “moved a little bit and they started shooting.”

As events unfolded and the Blackwater guards unleashed a storm of gunfire into the crowded square, Mr. Waso and Mr. Ali both said, they could neither hear nor see any return fire. “It was one-sided shooting from one direction,” Mr. Waso said. “There wasn’t any return fire.”

Mr. Waso said that what he saw was not only disturbing, but also in some cases incomprehensible. He said that the guards kept firing long after it was clear that there was no resistance. People were shot while trying to flee, he said. One man ran from a Volkswagen and the guards shot him in the head from behind, Mr. Waso said.

Finally there was a pause of a few seconds in the shooting as the Blackwater convoy prepared to leave, he said. Then, Mr. Waso said with a look of disbelief on his face, at least one Blackwater guard began firing again, this time at a red bus full of people on the western rim of the square.

“The glass was all broken,” Mr. Waso said, struggling to describe the bus after the firing resumed. “Women and children, all of them were shouting and crying.”

Some of the people who survived in the bus were tended to later at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan building, he said.

After that last burst of gunfire in the square, Mr. Waso said, all four of the Blackwater vehicles left. As far as he could see, they drove away under their own power, he said.

In the end, Mr. Waso said, he went down and asked Iraqi national guard soldiers to chase the Blackwater team.

“Leave them and try to follow that company before they get away,” Mr. Waso said he told a soldier. “They killed innocent people for no reason.”

Reporting was contributed by Wisam A. Habib, Ahmad Fadam, Qais Mizher and Alissa J. Rubin.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/middleeast/13blackwater.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[suebee]

it is a coalition of 126 countries. blackwater hires from all over the world; those militias trained at the georgia "school of assassins" are recycled after they blow their game in their own countries.

[sidecross]

October 23, 2007

Reports Assail State Dept. on Iraq Security

By ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID ROHDE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 — A pair of new reports have delivered sharply critical judgments about the State Department’s performance in overseeing work done by the private companies that the government relies on increasingly in Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out delicate security work and other missions.

A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA, according to people who have been briefed on the report. In addition to Blackwater, the State Department’s two other security contractors in Iraq are DynCorp International and Triple Canopy.

At the same time, a government audit expected to be released Tuesday says that records documenting the work of DynCorp, the State Department’s largest contractor, are in such disarray that the department cannot say “specifically what it received” for most of the $1.2 billion it has paid the company since 2004 to train the police officers in Iraq.

The review of security practices was ordered last month by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and it did not address the Sept. 16 shooting involving Blackwater guards, which Iraqi investigators said killed 17 Iraqis. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading a separate inquiry into that episode.

But in presenting its recommendations to Ms. Rice in a 45-minute briefing on Monday, the four-member panel found serious fault with virtually every aspect of the department’s security practices, especially in and around Baghdad, where Blackwater has responsibility.

The panel’s recommendations include creating a special coordination center to monitor and control the movement of armed convoys through areas under the command of the American military, which has long complained that contractors operate independently in the field.

The report also urged the department to work with the Pentagon to develop a strict set of rules on how to deal with the families of Iraqi civilians who are killed or wounded by armed contractors, and to improve coordination between American contractors and security guards employed by agencies, like various Iraqi ministries.

“They don’t have the right communications, they don’t have the right procedures in place, and you’ve got people operating on their own,” said one official who has been briefed on the report but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not been released yet. “This is not up to the degree it should be.”

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said Ms. Rice would closely examine the report’s findings and recommendations and consult with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on what steps to take.

Mr. Gates, who is traveling overseas this week, is pressing for the nearly 10,000 armed security contractors now working for the United States government in Iraq to fall under a single authority, most likely the American military, in an effort to bring the contractors under tighter control.

State Department officials say they have already tightened controls over Blackwater by sending State Department personnel as monitors on Blackwater convoys in and around Baghdad, and by mounting video cameras on Blackwater vehicles.

The panel was led by Patrick F. Kennedy, the State Department’s director of management policy. The other members were Eric J. Boswell, a former diplomat and intelligence office and a former head of the bureau of diplomatic security; J. Stapleton Roy, a former ambassador to China and Indonesia; and George Joulwan, a retired four-star Army general.

While the panel’s review focused on work overseen by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security at the State Department, the second report, focusing on DynCorp, was an audit carried out by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, and it focused on another department office, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

The audit said that until earlier this year the State Department had only two government employees in Iraq overseeing as many as 700 DynCorp employees. The result was “an environment vulnerable to waste and fraud,” the audit said.

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the chief of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said in an interview that while the department had made “significant strides” in scrutinizing payments to DynCorp in the past year, the police training contract “appears to me to be the weakest-staffed, most poorly overseen large-scale program in Iraq.”

He added that “when you put two people on the ground to manage a billion dollars, that’s pretty weak.”

The contract gave DynCorp the job of building police training facilities and deploying hundreds of police trainers to instruct a new Iraqi police force.

Developing a police force was considered central to stabilizing Iraq, but the effort, led first by the State Department and then by the Defense Department, has been criticized by administration opponents as well as by the bipartisan commission on the war led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton.

The State Department said it had improved monitoring of DynCorp, but in a letter to auditors department officials said that it would still take “three to five years” to reconcile fully the payments made to the company during the first two years of the training contract, beginning in February 2004.

As a sign of the confusion, the State Department reported to auditors that as part of its work in Iraq, DynCorp had purchased a $1.8 million X-ray scanner that was never used and spent $387,000 to house company officials in hotels rather than in existing living facilities.

Then, later, the State Department said those costs were actually incurred in Afghanistan, according to the audit. State Department officials say they have always said the spending occurred in Afghanistan.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said the special inspector general has shown, once again, “how vulnerable the federal government is to waste when it doesn’t invest up front in proper contract oversight.” He added, “This scenario is far too frequent across the federal government: we spend billions of dollars for goods and services with no oversight plans in place and hope and pray that an audit will identify any mistakes later.”

Thomas A. Schweich, the acting director of the law enforcement bureau, said it had increased staffing in October 2006 and had thoroughly checked all DynCorp invoices since then. He said a detailed review of all DynCorp spending was under way. “We put more people in place,” he said, referring to three additional staff members sent to Iraq to oversee DynCorp. “We have put together a team of 11 people to review historical invoices.”

A review of DynCorp’s spending over the past year identified $29 million in overcharges by DynCorp, including $108,000 in business travel, according to a State Department letter in response to Mr. Bowen’s auditors. A separate review by the Defense Contracting Audit Agency found that DynCorp had billed for $162,869 of labor hours “for which it did not pay its workers.”

Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said the amounts involved were small fractions of the $1.2 billion paid to DynCorp since 2004. He said that if DynCorp filed an erroneous charge the company would reimburse it, adding that DynCorp had already reimbursed the State Department for $72,000.

“There was no intentional misbilling,” Mr. Lagana said. “It could be just a documents problem.” He said that the company initially struggled with some record-keeping, but that it had informed the government whenever it found errors. “We fully acknowledge that we have some problems with invoicing,” he said. “It’s something we’re working really hard to clean up.”

In a letter to Ms. Rice on Monday, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, accused the department of failing to respond to a request the committee made in March for DynCorp-related documents. Mr. Waxman, whose committee is investigating the department’s oversight of both DynCorp and Blackwater, demanded that the department send him the records by Nov. 2.

“The police training program is a critical component of the administration’s efforts to bring stability to Iraq,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “It is a matter of serious concern that this critical initiative appears to have been so poorly managed.”

Officials and auditors said the law enforcement bureau that handled the DynCorp contracts was overwhelmed when large police training programs were begun in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A senior State Department official said the bureau was not equipped to handle such large contracts. “You have a perfect storm of bad events,” said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “You have huge amounts of money passing through an organization that is being retooled as it’s running the race of its life.”

John M. Broder contributed reporting.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/washington/23contractor.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[sidecross]

October 24, 2007

Use of Contractors by State Dept. Has Soared

By JOHN M. BRODER and DAVID ROHDE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — Over the past four years, the amount of money the State Department pays to private security and law enforcement contractors has soared to nearly $4 billion a year from $1 billion, administration officials said Tuesday, but they said that the department had added few new officials to oversee the contracts.

It was the first time that the administration had outlined the ballooning scope of the contracts, and it provided a new indication of how the State Department’s efforts to monitor private companies had not kept pace. Auditors and outside exerts say the results have been vast cost overruns, poor contract performance and, in some cases, violence that has so far gone unpunished.

A vast majority of the money goes to companies like DynCorp International and Blackwater USA to protect diplomats overseas, train foreign police forces and assist in drug eradication programs. There are only 17 contract compliance officers at the State Department’s management bureau overseeing spending of the billions of dollars on these programs, officials said.

Two new reports have delivered harsh judgments about the State Department’s handling of the contracts, including the protective services contract that employs Blackwater guards whose involvement in a Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad has raised questions about their role in guarding American diplomats in Iraq.

In a report made public on Tuesday, a review panel found that there were too few American officials in Iraq to enforce the rules that apply to Blackwater and other security contractors. It also found that the conduct of the contractors had undermined the broader mission of ending the insurgency and establishing a democratic government in Iraq.

Ms. Rice approved a number of the review panel’s recommendations intended to strengthen oversight of the security contractors, including a revision of the rules for the use of deadly force to bring them more in line with the military’s rules of engagement, and creation of review panels to investigate every incident involving the injury or killing of a civilian. The panels could refer possible instances of wrongdoing to the Justice Department. The contractors would also undergo more rigorous training in Iraqi culture and language.

The other report was an audit of the State Department’s oversight of DynCorp, released Tuesday, which found that records tracking hundreds of millions of dollars paid to the company were in “disarray.”

Interviews with administration officials, auditors and outside experts show that the use of contractors has grown far beyond what department officials imagined when they first outsourced critical security functions in 1994 and hired private security guards to protect American diplomats in Haiti, which was thrown into turmoil by civil strife.

Today, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the small State Department office that oversees the private security contractors in Iraq and elsewhere, is overwhelmed by its responsibilities to supervise the contractors, according to former employees, members of Congress and outside experts. They say the office has grown too reliant on, and too close to, the 1,200 private soldiers who now guard American officials overseas.

“They simply didn’t have enough eyes and ears watching what was going on,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert on security contactors at the Brookings Institution. “Secondly, they seemed to show no interest in using the sanctions they had.”

Another State Department office, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, has issued more than $2.2 billion in contracts for police training and drug eradication in Iraq, Afghanistan, Latin America and elsewhere, according to State Department records. Ninety-four percent of that money has gone to DynCorp.

State Department officials say they have tried to increase competition, but few companies are able to operate in war zones. “The lack of competition does concern us a great deal,” said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We want as many companies as possible.”

State Department contracting officials complain that they do not have nearly enough people to properly oversee the more than 2,500 contractors now under their informal command around the world. And a proposal to charge contractors a fee to pay for additional government compliance officers has stalled in the State Department bureaucracy.

The ballooning budget for outside contracts at the State Department is emblematic of a broader trend, contracting experts say.

The Bush administration has doubled the amount of government money going to all types of contractors to $400 billion, creating a new and thriving class of post-9/11 corporations carrying out delicate work for the government. But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown.

“That’s a criticism that’s true of not just State but of almost every agency,” said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harvard Law School.

On the eve of the 1994 American invasion of Haiti, the State Department’s law enforcement bureau received an urgent request. The department needed 45 American police officers to help secure the nation.

Officials in the small bureau contacted DynCorp, a Texas aviation services company with a $30 million bureau contract to operate counternarcotics flights in Latin America. Impressed with its aviation work, a selection committee awarded DynCorp a small contract.

State Department officials viewed it as an interim measure. DynCorp viewed it as an opportunity. “We always saw it as a growth area because of the conflicts in the world,” said Steve Cannon, a former DynCorp executive.

Later that year, DynCorp won a contract from the diplomatic security office to guard American diplomats in Haiti. Over the next several years, the two small State Department offices issued more than $250 million in police training and diplomatic security contracts to DynCorp for work in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

After the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, contracts grew again, eventually bringing the company $400 million a year. The law enforcement office had DynCorp dispatch dozens, then hundreds, of police trainers to Afghanistan. The diplomatic security office had DynCorp send employees to guard the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

Former State Department officials and Afghan officials said the DynCorp guards were far too aggressive in their tactics, and their conduct alienated Afghan and European officials, as well as Afghan citizens. Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said the company agreed there was a problem and replaced the guards. “The demeanor, the swagger, was wrong,” he said. “We put a stop to that.”

State Department officials said DynCorp had performed well over all, and won most contracts through competitive bidding.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq opened new opportunities in the burgeoning world of government security. Blackwater got a toehold with a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of the American occupation in Baghdad. A year later, the State Department expanded that contract to $100 million. Blackwater now employs 845 of the more than 1,100 private security contractors at work in Iraq and holds a contract worth $1.2 billion.

Assistant Secretary of State Richard J. Griffin, who oversees the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told Congress this month that his office had 36 agents overseeing the guards.

Congressional investigators say the security bureau has sought to minimize episodes like the shootings of civilians.

“We are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly,” one State Department security official in Iraq wrote to another, after Blackwater guards killed a father of six in Hilla in 2005, according to an internal State Department memo turned over to Congress. He recommended paying the man’s family $5,000.

The State Department took no action against Blackwater for the killing. Blackwater declined to comment for this article. The company has denied any wrongdoing and said that its techniques have resulted in no diplomats, visiting members of Congress or other American dignitaries being killed or seriously hurt in thousands of escort missions since 2005. Twenty-seven Blackwater employees have died in Iraq.

DynCorp’s work and the department’s oversight of the company have been questioned also. In interviews in Iraq and Afghanistan, local police officials said DynCorp’s trainers were costly and in some cases poorly qualified. The trainers are mostly retired civilian police officers from the United States who are paid up to $134,000 in Iraq and $118,000 in Afghanistan for a year of service.

State Department and DynCorp officials said all of the trainers were carefully screened and well qualified. Department officials also said they had added some two dozen staffers to oversee DynCorp over the past year.

American military officials in Iraq and Afghanistan said the quality of trainers was mixed as well. Jonathan Shiroma, a captain in the California National Guard who worked with DynCorp trainers in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, said some were “outstanding,” while others preferred to remain on base.

DynCorp and Blackwater, meanwhile, continue to win contracts.

The State Department has said it will continue to rely on contractors because, for now at least, it has no choice. It cannot quickly hire the bodyguards and trainers it would need to replace the contractors, and the military does not have the trained personnel to take over the job.

John M. Broder reported from Washington, and David Rohde from Washington, Baghdad and Kabul, Afghanistan. Paul von Zielbauer contributed reporting from Baghdad.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24contractor.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1193235286-BEdzx/8ZMz81HuS4jBeoTA&pagewanted=print

[sidecross]

October 29, 2007

Immunity Deals Offered to Blackwater Guards

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — State Department investigators offered Blackwater security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians, government officials said today, calling it a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode.

The State Department investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added.

Most of the guards who took part in the episode were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true.

The immunity offers were first reported today by the Associated Press.

State and Justice Department spokesmen would not comment on the matter. “If there’s any truth to this story, then the decision was made without consultation with senior officials in Washington,” one State Department official said.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater, Anne E. Tyrell, said: “It would be inappropriate for me to comment on the investigation.”

The immunity deals came as an unwelcome surprise at the Justice Department, which was already grappling with the fundamental legal question of whether any prosecutions could take place involving American civilians in Iraq.

Blackwater employees and other civilian contractors cannot be tried in military courts and it is unclear what American criminal laws might cover criminal acts committed in a war zone. Americans are immune from Iraqi law under a directive signed by the United States occupation authority in 2003 that has not been repealed by the Iraqi parliament.

A State Department review panel sent to investigate the shootings concluded that there is no basis for holding non-Defense Department contractors accountable under United States law and urged Congress and the administration to urgently address the problem.

Earlier this month, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make such contractors liable under a law known as the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act; the Senate is considering a similar measure.

The government has transferred the investigation from the diplomatic service to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has begun re-interviewing Blackwater employees without any grant of immunity in an effort to assemble independent evidence of possible wrongdoing.

Richard J. Griffin, the chief of Diplomatic Security Service resigned last week, in a departure that appeared to be related to problems with his supervision of Blackwater contractors.

In addition, the Justice Department reassigned the investigation from prosecutors in the criminal division who had read the State Department’s immunized statements to prosecutors in the national security division who had no knowledge of the statements.

Such a step is usually taken to preserve the government’s ability to argue later on in court that any case it has brought was made independently and made no use of information gathered under a promise that it would not be used in a criminal trial.

Immunity is intended to protect the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination while still giving investigators the ability to gather evidence. Usually people suspected of crimes are not given immunity and such grants are not given until after the probable defendants are identified. Even then, prosecutors often face serious obstacles in bringing a prosecution in cases in which defendants have been immunized.

The courts have made it all but impossible to prosecute defendants who have been granted immunity since the appellate court reversals of the Iran-contra affair convictions against John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser, and Oliver L. North, a national security aide, who had each been immunized by Congress.

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/washington/30cnd-blackwater.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[suebee]

you can bet someone will be scapegoated so that darling prince can continue in his mindlessness.

[sidecross]

State to Blackwater: Nothing You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

by Jeremy Scahill

Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16 Nisour Square shooting in Iraq were told. Most of the Blackwater shooters were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could not be used to bring criminal charges against them, nor could they be introduced as evidence. In other words, “Anything you say can’t and won’t be used against you in a court of law.”

ABC News obtained copies of sworn statements given by Blackwater guards in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, all of which begin, “I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry,” and that, “I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding.” Constitutional law expert Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says the offering of so-called “use immunity” agreements by the State Department is “very irregular,” adding he could not recall a precedent for it. In normal circumstances, Ratner said, such immunity is only granted after a Grand Jury or Congressional committee has been convened and the party has invoked their 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination. It would then be authorized by either a judge or the committee.

Military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First says, “What the State Department has done in this case is inconsistent with proper law enforcement standards. It is likely to undermine an ultimate prosecution, if not make it impossible. In this sense, the objective of the State Department in doing this is exposed to question. It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees. By purporting to grant immunity, the State Department draws itself more deeply into the wrongdoing and adopts a posture vis-a-vis Blackwater that appears downright conspiratorial. This will make the fruits of its investigation a tough sell.”

Ratner says that while what was offered the Blackwater operatives is not immunity from prosecution, prosecutors would need to prove they did not use the sworn statements as part of their investigation. “Even though the person can be prosecuted if independent evidence is relied upon, often this is hard to demonstrate,” he says. As an example of the problems such immunity can pose, Ratner points to the case of Oliver North. “He had been granted ‘use immunity’ and was then prosecuted, supposedly on the basis of independent evidence,” Ratner says. “However, his conviction was reversed in the court of appeals because it could not be demonstrated that all of the evidence against him had an independent source outside of his own testimony.”

Aside from the fundamental problem that there is quite possibly no legal framework for charging the Blackwater shooters under any legal system–US civilian law, military law or Iraqi law–legal analysts and a former federal prosecutor say the State Department has already tainted the Nisour Square criminal investigation in several ways. The FBI was not dispatched to investigate the case until two weeks after the shootings occurred, meaning that the initial investigation was in the hands of a non-law enforcement agency that just happens to be Blackwater’s employer. By the time actual law enforcement, the FBI, was sent to Baghdad, the crime scene had been tainted and some of the perpetrators questioned with the alleged immunity provision. “To rely on non-law enforcement to conduct sensitive law enforcement activities makes no sense if you want impartial justice,” says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who currently serves as Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “This investigation has already taken so long and it looks like the State Department has impeded the possibility of a successful criminal investigation.” The Washington Post reported that “Some of the Blackwater guards have subsequently refused to be interviewed by the FBI, citing promises of immunity from State.”

This is hardly the first indication that the government’s investigation of the Nisour Square shootings was lacking in integrity and impartiality. The State Department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on official US government stationary. The FBI team initially dispatched to Baghdad to investigate Blackwater was to be guarded by Blackwater until Sen. Patrick Leahy raised questions about the arrangement forcing the Bureau to announce it would be guarded by official personnel and not personnel from the same company it was investigating.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story (aside from the loss of Iraqi civilian life) is that even if Blackwater was not so politically connected to the White House and even if there was a truly independent US Justice Department and even if immunity had not been offered and even if there was an aggressive investigation, it may all be totally irrelevant. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently dispatched a team to Baghdad led by veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy to review the department’s private security force, the team returned with the conclusion that it “is unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under US law.”

While there are currently moves afoot in the US Congress to adjust language in the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act to allow for prosecutions of State Department contractor crimes in US civilian courts and although there is a debate over whether the court martial system could be applied, the reality is that the political will to prosecute contractors has been totally absent since day one of the Iraq occupation. Not a single armed contractor has ever been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq–not under US civilian law, not under military law and certainly not in Iraqi courts, which have been banned by the US occupation authorities from going after private contractors.

What is so often lost in this new debate on accountability and oversight is this fact: private contractors now outnumber regular soldiers on the Iraq battlefield. The military–with its massive bureaucracy–has been unable or unwilling to effectively monitor the actions of its soldiers and prosecute them for crimes. Who will effectively oversee the 180,000-strong shadow corporate army? Will FBI teams really be running around Iraq chasing allegations (ever increasing) of contractor crimes and misconduct? Who will guard the investigators? Who will interview Iraqi witnesses? Where will the funding come from? Who will arrest the heavily-armed mercenary alleged to have committed a crime, particularly when he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do in keeping VIP US officials alive in Iraq?

While there may be some token prosecutions that stem from the recent uptick in reporting on contractor crimes in Iraq, the reality is that without private forces from Blackwater and its ilk, the US occupation of Iraq would be untenable. Nothing will be done that would actually jeopardize the use of such forces in the war zone. While Blackwater’s conduct in Iraq is horrifying, it is important to remember that US ambassadors–all four who have served under the Iraq occupation–owe their lives to Blackwater’s shoot-first-and-never-ask-questions cowboy tactics. They are the reason the company can brag it has never lost an American life it was protecting. Blackwater does its job and while it is essential to prosecute its operatives for their crimes, the ultimately responsible party is the entity that hired them and deployed them armed and dangerous in Iraq.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/31/4930/

[Isaiah Mpski]

..armed and dangerous...

That's war man.You make sure you stay out of my line of sight.God decides innocence

[sidecross]

Published on Thursday, November 15, 2007 by the Los Angeles Times

Blackwater’s Loopholes

Prosecuting private security contractors for shooting Iraqi civilians might be impossible.


by Jeremy Scahill

Federal agents investigating the Sept. 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by operatives of the Blackwater security company have concluded that 14 were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shootings. Some died in a hail of bullets as they fled. The investigators also have rejected assertions by Blackwater that its forces were defending themselves, saying there is no evidence to support that claim.

This initial glimpse into the evidence uncovered by the FBI bolsters the Iraqi government’s claim (made within hours of the shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square) that the killings were criminal, as well as the findings of a U.S. military investigation that called all 17 of the killings unjustified. But that raises a crucial and complicated question: Who will prosecute the killers?

The answer may be no one. That certainly seemed to be the view of veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, who recently reviewed the State Department’s use of private security. Kennedy and his team came back from Baghdad concluding that they were “unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law.”

Although the FBI conclusions appear damning, each of the three potential avenues for prosecuting Blackwater have fatal flaws:

U.S. civilian law: The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 provides for prosecution in federal court of U.S. contractors for crimes committed overseas. The problem is that this law only applies to contractors working for or directly accompanying the U.S. military. Blackwater works for the State Department in Iraq as “diplomatic security,” which is separate from military operations. Legislation has been introduced that would expand the act to apply to all contractors, but not retroactively. The Justice Department might argue that the Blackwater guards were indeed accompanying the military, but courts could well throw out such a case.

U.S. military law: In late 2006, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) inserted an amendment in the Defense Authorization Act that places all U.S. contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. But this has not been tested, and the Department of Defense has shown no desire to use this option against any security contractors — let alone ones who aren’t working for the military. Facing a military prosecution, Blackwater could even get support from civil libertarians, who would see it as a creep toward applying military law to civilians.

Iraqi law: The Iraqi government wants to prosecute the Blackwater shooters in its courts, but that isn’t going to happen. The day before L. Paul Bremer III ended his tenure as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in June 2004, he issued Order 17. It grants all contractors sweeping immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. There is a provision that allows the U.S. to lift immunity in individual cases, but Washington would never hand over a U.S. citizen to an Iraqi court.

“These legal loopholes amount, in practice, to a license to kill with impunity,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing Blackwater for wrongful death and war crimes in federal court over the shootings. “There is no genuine deterrence to acting unlawfully.”

Even if the Justice Department moves forward, the investigation was contaminated from the start. The State Department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on U.S. government stationery. Two weeks passed before the FBI was dispatched to investigate; for two weeks, the only people looking into this crime were from a non-law-enforcment agency, the State Department, which had potential culpability of its own.

Then there is this fact: The State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, who previously has been accused of impeding investigations into Blackwater, has direct family ties to the company. His brother, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, former CIA executive director, this year joined Blackwater’s advisory board as a paid consultant. While at the CIA, Krongard played a role in Blackwater’s first soldier-for-hire contract in Afghanistan in 2002.

Late last month, it emerged that the State Department had granted “limited use immunity” to some Blackwater operatives involved in the shootings before taking their statements. The result? Some Blackwater agents reportedly have refused to answer FBI questions, and those statements cannot be used as evidence, nor can any charges be based on them.

The immunity-for-statements deal calls the State Department’s motivation into question, says military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First. “It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees.” This makes prosecution in any venue difficult, if not impossible.

The Bush administration has overseen a radical privatization of the U.S. war machine. There are now more private contractors in Iraq — tens of thousands of them armed — than U.S. troops. At the same time, the White House has militarized the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, staffing it with private warriors from Blackwater, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy. This force, conceived as a small-scale bodyguard operation for U.S. diplomats, now constitutes a paramilitary squad thousands strong, seemingly accountable to no one.

Although Blackwater’s operatives must be held accountable, this is not just a case of rooting out “bad apples.” These forces were deployed without any accountability structure or effective oversight; their mission was to keep U.S. officials alive by any means necessary. Blackwater has done that job, but we may never know how many Iraqis have died as a result. The investigation must determine which operatives killed the Iraqis on Sept. 16, but it can’t stop there. It must extend to those who hired them and deployed them, armed, dangerous and apparently above the law.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.


http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/15/5245/

[suebee]

hmmmm. just about two years since this thread was active. looks like the feds found some willing witnesses...

[suebee]

the rachel maddow show - nov 10, 2009

MADDOW: “The New York Times” is out tonight with a bombshell of an investigative report that reveals plans by the firm Blackwater to bribe its way out of trouble after its employees shot and killed 17 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. In the wake of that shooting and the outrage it provoked against Blackwater, “The New York Times” tonight cites four of the company‘s former executives as saying that the company approved secret bribes of about $1 million to be paid to Iraqi officials to silence their criticism of the company and to allow Blackwater to stay in Iraq. The bribes were reportedly authorized by Blackwater‘s president at that time, Gary Jackson.

One former executive telling “The Times” that when confronted about the scheme, the Blackwater chairman and founder Erik Prince did not dispute that there was a bribery plan.

The bribe money was allegedly intended for officials in Iraq‘s interior ministry. None of the four former executives who spoke with “The Times” say they know whether or not the million bucks was actually delivered to the Iraqi officials. But they say they do know that the cash was sent from the company‘s operational hub in Jordan to a man named Rich Garner, who was then a top Blackwater manager in Iraq, and who still works for the company.

There are a number of ways in which this plan could turn out to be illegal, as “The Times” points out - if Blackwater followed through with the bribes, the company or its officials could face charges of obstruction of justice and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials.

There‘s also the prospect that Blackwater bribing officials to shut up about the shooting might have impeded the American FBI investigation into the shooting. We don‘t know whether or not Blackwater will be held to account for these new allegations if they are proven.

But we do know that a federal grand jury is investigating the company in North Carolina, where the company is headquartered. And one of the former Blackwater executives, who told the “New York Times” about the bribery scheme, says he‘s also given details of that scheme to federal prosecutors.

Joining us now is Jeremy Scahill, reporter for “The Nation” and author of the book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World‘s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Jeremy, thanks for coming on the show tonight.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Good to be with you.

MADDOW: How big are the legal implications here? Could this revelation result in criminal charges?

SCAHILL: Sure. Let‘s remember here that we are talking about the single worse massacre committed by a private force in Iraq, Blackwater, the Nisoor Square massacre. It was the biggest diplomatic crisis between Washington and Baghdad at the time.

You had the Iraqi government saying that Blackwater was banned from the country, and then suddenly doing an about face, and Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day. So on the issue of criminality here, if you have the FBI going over to conduct the criminal investigation, if you had Blackwater officials attempting to bribe Iraqis, that‘s tantamount to tampering with the federal investigation.

There is a grand jury sitting right now in North Carolina that has reportedly been informed of these allegations by Blackwater officials. Very serious.

MADDOW: On the issue of Iraqi officials changing their tune, we don‘t, of course, know if the bribes were actually paid to Iraqi officials. But you are saying that the Iraqi government, at least some officials in the Iraqi government, did radically change their mind about how badly they wanted Blackwater out of the country.

SCAHILL: Absolutely. And let‘s remember, Blackwater is a company that had with deep political ties to the Bush White House. This was one of the top companies in the Bush administration.

The State Department was always defending Blackwater. So you had a sort of one, two punch where you had Blackwater literally paying hush money to the families - and we know this be a fact - to the families of people that it shot dead. And the State Department was facilitating this. And on the other hand, you had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telling Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, to stand down.

And that was a big reason why we saw Blackwater there. The issue of criminality comes up as, if there was an additional layer to it, did Blackwater actually pay off Iraqi officials to essentially look the other way and allow the company to remain in the country?

MADDOW: “The Times” story tonight ends with this coda, that Iraq decided this spring to not give Blackwater a license to operate in the country after all, the exact thing the bribes were supposed to protect the company against.

And “The Times” says that the State Department took away Blackwater‘s Iraq contract and gave it to Triple Canopy, which is why I wanted to talk to you. Isn‘t Blackwater still in Iraq?

SCAHILL: Yes. Blackwater has a $200 million contract in Iraq for aviation services. But the State Department confirmed to me that Blackwater is still armed and in Iraq indefinitely.

And I should also say, Rachel, Triple Canopy hired former Blackwater guys after that contract, just transferred to Triple Canopy. You know who is guarding Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan right now? Blackwater. You know who guards members of Congress? Blackwater. They have $500 million in contracts in Afghanistan right now, for the CIA, State Department, Defense Department.

Why is President Obama keeping these guys on the payroll? There‘s never been a company in recent history that made a better case that corporations are corrupt, evil organizations than Blackwater.

MADDOW: The lie in Washington has long been that you cannot get rid of this company, can‘t get rid of these firms because we are not capable as a government or as a military of doing what they do without them. What do you make of that?

SCAHILL: You talk to people in the military and they‘ll say that it‘s nonsense. Another way of looking at this is Blackwater knows where a lot of bodies are buried. These are guys who work in the CIA‘s assassination program, the drone bombing campaigns.

And regarding all the senior officials, they know a heck of a lot about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. And those are not guys that you want on the other side of the fence if you are running things in Washington.

MADDOW: Jeremy Scahill, reporter for “The Nation” and author of the book - good job - “Blackwater: The Rise of the World‘s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Thank you for coming on the show tonight, Jeremy. It‘s great to see you. Thank you.

[Isaiah Mpski]

War is hell SB.This sort of thinking has been going on a long time from Viet Nam-with the assisination of Diem-to the US backed wars in Central America in the 80's-to Blackwater.
Yes Blackwater hires alot of military men straight from the fighting-the reason-BECAUSE THEY ARE GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO.Wars are always won by people who know how to fight them.
The only solution is to get out and it doesn't look like we are going to do that.I honestly feel a large part of the recession was allowed to happen so more blood would be created for our Wharmacht.
Senseless thinking.Just thank your lucky stars our SS are honorable and mostly lawabiding servants and not like what happened in Germany or during the Nixon years.