[Adwetyren]

This thread replaces the original, which was deleted in error.

[DrJonson]

Posted by Punzie on Sept 28th, 2007


U.S. Contractor Banned by Iraq Over Shootings


Ahmad al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Blackwater contractors in Baghdad in 2005.
Reports of the number of its employees in Iraq ranged from 1,000 to 1,500.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times
September 18, 2007

(9/25/07 correction appended at end.)

BAGHDAD, Tuesday, Sept. 18 — Blackwater USA, an American contractor that provides security to some of the top American officials in Iraq, has been banned from working in the country by the Iraqi government after a shooting that left eight Iraqis dead and involved an American diplomatic convoy.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, said Monday that authorities had canceled the company’s license and that the government would prosecute the participants. But under the rules that govern private security contractors here, the Iraqis do not have the legal authority to do so.

The shooting took place in Baghdad on Sunday, but the details were still unclear, and American officials stopped short of saying whether the Blackwater guards in the diplomatic motorcade had caused any of the deaths. 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.”

The deaths struck a nerve with Iraqis, who say that private security firms are often quick to shoot and are rarely held responsible for their actions. A law issued by the American authority in Iraq before the United States handed over sovereignty to Iraqis, Order No. 17, gives the companies immunity from Iraqi law. A security expert based in Baghdad said Monday night that the order, issued in 2004, 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.

“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 was not clear on Monday 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 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 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.

Mirembe 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.”

Refugee System Criticized

In an internal cable dated Sept. 7, Mr. Crocker, the United States ambassador to Iraq, criticized the American government’s handling of Iraqi refugees for admission to the United States as too slow. He called on officials to smooth “bottlenecks” that make Iraqis wait months for their applications to be processed.

In the cable, which was first reported by The Washington Post, Mr. Crocker said the numbers of Department of Homeland Security officials conducting interviews in the region should be doubled. He said the United States should seriously consider alternatives, like having State Department officials process Iraqis inside Iraq, a step not allowed under the current rules.

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

Correction: September 25, 2007

A front-page article last Tuesday about a deadly shooting in Baghdad that involved American security guards from Blackwater USA, a private contractor employed by the State Department, misspelled the first name of an American embassy spokeswoman in Baghdad, who was quoted as saying the Blackwater employees had been reacting to a car bombing. She is Mirembe Nantongo, not Mirenbe Nantongo.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/wo...=1&oref=slogin

[phernikas]

Posted by Punzie on Sept 28th, 2007


Founded in 1998 by former Navy Seals, Blackwater USA says it has prepared tens of thousands of security personnel to work in hot spots around the world. At its complex in North Carolina, it has shooting ranges for high-powered weapons, buildings for simulating hostage rescue missions and a bunkhouse for trainees.

The Blackwater installation is so modern and well-equipped that Navy Seals stationed at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Norfolk, Va., routinely use it, military officials said. So do police units from around the country, who come to Blackwater for specialized training.

The lengthy conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have given the company an even greater presence around the world, guarding diplomats and performing other security functions. In 2004, four of its employees were captured, killed and burned by a mob in the Sunni city of Fallujah. Pictures of their charred bodies hanging from lamp posts led President Bush to order a Marine assault against the city.

Iraqi officials have long complained about what they have called indiscriminate gunfire by private security forces hired by Americans. On Sept. 17, 2007, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry announced that the government had revoked Blackwater's license to operate in the country after gunfire from a convoy killed eight civilians.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/b...usa/index.html

[tsaaapla]

Posted by Punzie on Sept 28th, 2007


The New York Times
September 28, 2007

Scene of Blackwater Shooting Was Chaotic

Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press
At least eight Iraqis were killed in a shooting involving Blackwater private security officers in Nisour Square on Sept. 16.


By JAMES GLANZ and SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — Participants in a contentious Baghdad security operation this month have told American investigators that during the operation at least one guard continued firing on civilians while colleagues urgently called for a cease-fire. At least one guard apparently also drew a weapon on a fellow guard who did not stop shooting, an American official said.

The operation, by the private firm Blackwater USA, began as a mission to evacuate senior American officials after an explosion near where they were meeting, several officials said. Some officials have questioned the wisdom of evacuating the Americans from a secure compound, saying the area should instead have been locked down.

These new details of the episode on Sept. 16, in which at least eight Iraqis were killed, including a woman and an infant, were provided by an American official who was briefed on the American investigation by someone who helped conduct it, and by Americans who had spoken directly with two guards involved in the episode. Their accounts were broadly consistent.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater, Anne E. Tyrrell, said she could not confirm any of the details provided by the Americans.

The accounts provided the first glimpse into the official American investigation of the shooting, which has angered Iraqi officials and prompted calls by the Iraqi government to ban Blackwater from working in Iraq, and brought new scrutiny of the widespread use of private security contractors here.

The American official said that by Wednesday morning, American investigators still had not responded to multiple requests for information by Iraqi officials investigating the episode. The official also said that Blackwater had been conducting its own investigation but had been ordered by the United States to stop that work. Ms. Tyrrell confirmed that the company had done an investigation of its own, but said, “No government entity has discouraged us from doing so.”

An Iraqi investigation had concluded that the guards shot without provocation. But the official said that the guards told American investigators that they believed that they fired in response to enemy gunfire.

The Blackwater compound, rimmed by concrete blast walls and concertina wire in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, has been under tight control. Participants in the Sept. 16 security operation have been ordered not to speak about the episode. But word of the disagreement on the street has slowly made its way through the community of private security contractors.

The episode began around 11:50 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 16. Diplomats with the United States Agency for International Development were meeting in a guarded compound about a mile northeast of Nisour Square, where the shooting would later take place.

A bomb exploded on the median of a road a few hundred yards away from the meeting, causing no injuries to the Americans, but prompting a fateful decision to evacuate. One American official who knew about the meeting cast doubt on the decision to move the diplomats out of a secure compound.

“It raises the first question of why didn’t they just stay in place, since they are safe in the compound,” the official said. “Usually the concept would be, if an I.E.D. detonates in the street, you would wait 15 to 30 minutes, until things calmed down,” he said, using the abbreviation for improvised explosive device.

But instead of waiting, a Blackwater convoy began carrying the diplomats south, toward the Green Zone. Because their route would pass through Nisour Square, another convoy drove there to block traffic and ensure that the diplomats would be able to pass.

At least four sport utility vehicles stopped in lanes of traffic that were entering the square from the south and west. Some of the guards got out of their vehicles and took positions on the street, according to the official familiar with the report on the American investigation.

At 12:08 p.m., at least one guard began to fire in the direction of a car, killing its driver. A traffic policeman said he walked toward the car, but more shots were fired, killing a woman holding an infant sitting in the passenger seat.

There are three versions of why the shooting started. The Blackwater guards have told investigators that they believed that they were being fired on, the official familiar with the report said. A preliminary Iraqi investigation has concluded that there was no enemy fire, but some Iraqi witnesses have said that Iraqi commandos in nearby guard towers may have been shooting as well, possibly leading Blackwater guards to believe that militants were firing at them.

After the family was shot, a type of grenade or flare was fired into the car, setting it ablaze, according to some accounts. Other Iraqis were also killed as the shooting continued. Iraqi officials have given several death counts, ranging from 8 to 20, with perhaps several dozen wounded. American officials have said that no Americans were hurt.

At some point during the shooting, one or more Blackwater guards called for a cease-fire, according to the American official.

The word cease-fire “was supposedly called out several times,” the official said. “They had an on-site difference of opinion,” he said.

In the end, a Blackwater guard “got on another one about the situation and supposedly pointed a weapon,” the official said.

“That’s what prompted this internal altercation,” the official said.

The official added that in the urgent moment of a shooting events could often become confused, and cautioned against leaping to hasty conclusions about who was to blame.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/wo...kwater.html?hp

[mnhloot]

Posted by Jasonik on Sept 28th, 2007


For a short look at Blackwater:
Blackwater: Shadow Army (4:25 video)

*****

The authoritative book on the topic:


*****

Romney silent on Blackwater shooting
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
September 24, 2007 08:21 AM EST

Mitt Romney has remained mum on the alleged killing of 11 Iraqis by a company where one of his top advisers serves as vice chairman, even as the case has led to an uproar in Baghdad and Washington. Barack Obama, John McCain and other politicians have raised the possibility of tighter controls on the firm.

The top counterterrorism and national security adviser to Romney’s presidential campaign is Cofer Black, vice chairman of Blackwater USA.

The Iraqis died after guards employed by the private security firm opened fire following an alleged attack on a State Department convoy under their protection. Blackwater has a lucrative contract to guard U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

Blackwater has said its employees acted “lawfully and appropriately” in response to the attack. But Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf has said a report found that the security guards opened fire first on Iraqis who were driving in their cars. And the incident has prompted a noisy debate over the role of independent security contractors in Iraq — a debate Romney thus far appears to be steering clear of.

The shooting renewed critics’ allegations that U.S. security contractors, in general, and Blackwater, in particular, are basically unregulated mercenary armies deployed by the U.S. government on the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. And the policy discussion sparked by the incident may begin to color the debate over troop levels in Iraq, a topic that’s played prominently in the presidential race.

“There is no way you can have a rational discussion of troop redeployment without discussing how contract employees are going to be a part of that equation,” said a senior Republican congressional source who has worked on security contractor issues. “There’s consensus on both sides that additional oversight of these contractors is necessary. This is going to be a front-burner issue now as we begin to discuss safe, responsible redeployment and as we continue to learn more about incidents involving private security contractors.”

But Romney’s campaign has declined to answer specific questions posed by Politico about issues central to the debate – issues now being hashed out by Congress, the State Department and the Iraqi government.

Romney, a former Massachusetts governor who has emerged as a leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, has touted his executive experience leading an equity firm, the 2002 Olympic Winter Games and a large state government.

His relative lack of foreign policy and military experience has not bogged down his campaign.

It’s become de rigueur for campaigns to assemble teams of experts to advise candidates and bolster their bona fides, particularly on their weaker issues. In tapping Black as a senior adviser to the campaign, Romney said in an April statement: “Black’s experience at the forefront of our nation's counterterrorism efforts will be a tremendous asset.”

And three days before the Blackwater shootings, Romney announced Black would lead the campaign’s 10-member counterterrorism policy group.

Black served nearly 30 years in the CIA, eventually heading its counterterrorism efforts and later those of the State Department, before joining Blackwater in 2005 as vice chairman.

After the shooting, though, a Romney spokesman would not say whether Black has advised Romney on the use of security contractors in Iraq. Nor would he elaborate on Black’s role in the campaign or answer specific questions about whether the U.S.’s level of oversight over security contractors is adequate.

The spokesman directed questions to Blackwater, whose spokeswoman did not return telephone and e-mail messages.

Under a 2004 provision, security contractors are immune from prosecution under Iraqi laws. But Defense Department security contractors are subject to military rules and most are licensed by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. That is not the case for Blackwater, which is paid by the State Department.

After the shooting, the State Department formed a commission with Iraqi officials to assess the role of security contractors. And members of Congress called for tougher oversight of the contractors and questioned whether Blackwater in particular was hurting the U.S. cause in Iraq.

An aide to Rep. Duncan Hunter (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said he supports “greater oversight of private security contractors including imposing more robust reporting requirements as part of their contracts.”

Hunter, who is running a long-shot campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, appears to be the only presidential candidate to have accepted contributions from Blackwater executives, which is somewhat surprising given that company chairman Erik Prince has given more than $230,000 to Republican candidates and committees.

The $2,000 Hunter received from company president Gary Jackson and Prince was for his congressional campaign.

Hunter’s aide said his boss thinks it's premature to consider sanctioning Blackwater or ending its contract “until all of the facts of the incident are known.”

Provisions added to the Pentagon’s budget in the Senate Armed Services Committee could bring security contractors in Iraq under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and give the Defense Department authority over them, even if they’re working for the State Department or other agencies.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the committee’s top Republican, is vying with Romney for the GOP nomination. McCain “is open to measures that reasonably and rationally improve upon the good work of the” committee, according to Melissa Shuffield, his spokeswoman.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, among the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced legislation in February that would tighten regulations for security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And on Friday, he told Democratic colleagues he was “disturbed” by the Blackwater shooting, after which he wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking whether the Pentagon had investigated earlier shootings by Blackwater employees. His letter expressed concern “about the impact of this incident – and similar incidents – on our overall effort to end the war in Iraq.” And he wondered whether “turning over such armed functions in a war zone to contractors outside the chain of command … is actually hurting, rather than helping, our counter-insurgency efforts, especially in winning local hearts and minds.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) also would like to question Blackwater. He sent a letter Thursday asking Prince to testify Oct. 2 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Waxman chairs.

TM & © THE POLITICO & POLITICO.COM, a division of Allbritton Communications Company

*****

Romney is sticking with Black:
MSNBC: Copher Black to Stay On Romney Campaign Staff (1:14 video)

[DavidShreder]

Posted by Jasonik on Sept 28th, 2007


September 27, 2007
Blackwater Tops Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate


Ali Yussef/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images
An Iraqi woman walked past a burnt car at the site where Blackwater guards opened fire, killing nine civilians and a policeman.

NY Times
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.

[Toossehew]

Posted by Jasonik on Sept 28th, 2007


Tough role of military contractors comes under scrutiny in Iraq


By John F. Burns
Sunday, September 23, 2007

On a stifling summer's day in Baghdad a couple of years ago, a senior American officer bound for a visit to troops in the Iraqi hinterland was preparing to board an army Black Hawk at the helicopter landing zone in Baghdad's Green Zone command compound.

With undisguised disdain, he fixed his gaze across the concrete toward two smaller helicopters taking off from a hangar operated by Blackwater USA - the private security company whose men, while guarding an American diplomatic convoy, were involved last week in a Baghdad shootout that killed at least eight people. According to an Iraqi government report, as many as 20 people were killed.

In a style now familiar to many living beneath Baghdad's skies, a Blackwater marksman in khaki pants, with matching T-shirt and flak jacket, sat sideways on the right side of each chopper, leaning well outside the craft. Their automatic weapons were gripped for battle, their feet planted on the helicopter's metal skids, and only a slim strap secured them to the craft.

As the Blackwater machines cleared the landing zone's fence, the American officer leaned toward a companion and, over the thwump-thwump of the Black Hawk's rotors, voiced his contempt. "If I've got one ambition left here," he said, "it's to see one of those showboats fall out."


YURI CORTEZ

Blackwater defends its low-flying, ready-to-shoot posture as a powerful deterrent to attacks on American officials being moved through the capital's streets. But that posture has become, to the company's critics, a hallmark of its muscle-bound showiness.

From the moment Blackwater arrived in Iraq in 2003, on the heels of the American invasion, much about its operations has seemed tinged with an aggressive machismo that has led its critics, including many in the American military, to dismiss its operatives - and counterparts from at least 25 other private security companies, with a combined manpower estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 - as "cowboys," "hired guns," and other, still harsher, terms.

Partly, the disparagement stems from the contempt with which professional military men have traditionally viewed private contractors - especially those who earn, like some in Baghdad, as much as $1,000 a day for skills and risks that bring about the lowest-paid American soldier a tenth of that. Not even four-star generals earn as much.

The security contractors' advocates counter by pointing to the guards' expertise. The highest-paid learned their skills in units like the navy Seals, the army's Delta Force, and equivalent units in the British, Australian, South African and other militaries.

The value of their skills, their proponents say, is indicated by the Pentagon's willingness to pay re-enlistment bonuses to Special Forces of as much as $150,000. But that much and more can be a single year's salary with companies like Blackwater.

There is no avoiding the fact that these bodyguards do work that is both extremely hazardous and indispensable. Blackwater's work involves a State Department contract to protect American officials, including the ambassador.

Such officials are among the most endangered individuals in Iraq. Nevertheless, no senior American officials have been assassinated, while the murder of senior Iraqi officials has become almost commonplace.

Together with other security contractors - notably the American companies DynCorp and Triple Canopy, and the British-run Aegis Security and Erinys - Blackwater operates in a nightmarish landscape.

No trip outside the Green Zone is remotely safe. The enemy lurks everywhere among the population. Attackers show no mercy for innocent bystanders, who commonly outnumber intended targets. Each mission carries the threat of roadside bombs, suicide attacks by explosives-packed cars and trucks, and ambushes by insurgents.

Reliable figures are elusive, but figures quoted by security industry insiders suggest that more than 100 contractors in Iraq have been killed, and scores of others wounded.

Against this, critics point to a pattern of recklessness in the use of deadly force, of a kind that the Iraqi government, and some Iraqi witnesses, have alleged - and Blackwater has denied - in the shootings Sept. 16 in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

To some who have watched the private security companies' operations for the past four years, the only real surprise was that the crisis was so long in coming. The seeds were sown in the first year of the American occupation, when a decree by Paul Bremer III, the American administrator, exempted security companies and their employees from accountability under Iraqi law for deaths and injuries caused in the execution of their duties.

Although Congress in 2005 instructed the Pentagon to bring contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, no action has been taken, leaving the contractors in a legal no-man's land.

No official records have been made public of how many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by contractors. But a glimpse at the scale was offered by one American general who kept his own tally, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division. He told The Washington Post in 2005 that he had tracked at least a dozen shootings of civilians in Baghdad between May and July that year, with six Iraqis killed.

"These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff," the paper quoted the general as saying. "There's no authority over them."

But critics say the heart of the problem lies in an attitude that the security contractors share with the American military, one that elevates "force protection" to something approaching an absolute. This, the critics say, has the effect of valuing the saving of American lives above avoiding risk to innocent Iraqis.

After some of the most damaging incidents in Iraq, especially the killing by marines of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November 2005, the American command ordered new restraints on force escalation that had the effect of sharply cutting incidents in which troops opened fire on civilians.

But the change appeared to have scant impact on security contractors, whose attitudes, unconstrained by concern at being held accountable under law, continued to cast a pall of fear and resentment among Iraqis.

This has had the effect - as officers like Horst have said - of undermining Iraqi trust in the American forces, and in the wider American enterprise in Iraq, since many Iraqis who survive or witness negligent shootings make no distinction between an American in uniform and one in the paramilitary guise of a contractor.

Contractors say the high profile of their armored convoys, coupled with the covert nature of the insurgents, places a premium on high mobility and rapid response - driving at high speed and in a bullying manner through city traffic and driving on the wrong side of boulevards and expressways, always ready to resort instantly, at the first hint of threat, to heavy firepower.

At their worst, some contractors have acted out tendencies that have gone beyond bullying. In a Virginia civil court case against Triple Canopy last month, two former employees claimed that their supervisor - like his accusers, a veteran of the United States military - shot randomly into two Iraqi civilian vehicles last year, after telling them that he wanted to "kill somebody" before leaving the country on vacation. The supervisor denied it.

Just why some contractors resort to such extremes is a study in war and the ways in which it plumbs the darker sides of human nature. In the military units where they acquired their weapons and tactical skills, the men who are now contractors were subject to tight constraints.

[Arrocousa]

Posted by ManhattanKnight on Sept 28th, 2007


September 28, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

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.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[turbutbamethyg]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 4th, 2007


Great Op-ed piece. The New York Times has done a particularly fine job covering Blackwater.

_______
Ex-Paratrooper Is Suspect in a Blackwater Killing

By JOHN M. BRODER
The New York Times
October 4, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — The former Blackwater USA employee who is the sole suspect in the killing last Christmas Eve of a bodyguard for an Iraqi vice president is a 27-year-old former Army paratrooper from Montana who now lives in Seattle, where he spends much of his time renovating his small home.

The former employee, Andrew J. Moonen, is identified in numerous government and company documents and is known to scores of Blackwater and government officials, but Congress, the State Department and the company have been keeping his identity confidential.

In an interview on Tuesday evening, Mr. Moonen declined to discuss the episode, in which, American and Iraqi officials say, a Blackwater worker who had been drinking heavily got into a confrontation with a bodyguard to Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi and shot him three times. The guard, Raheem Khalif, died early the next day at an American military hospital.

Mr. Moonen, who appeared composed during the interview, said that he had been following closely the flurry of recent news about Blackwater in Iraq, including the Sept. 16 shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead. On Tuesday, the company’s founder, Erik D. Prince, testified before a Congressional committee about the Christmas Eve shooting and other lethal episodes involving Blackwater guards.

Mr. Moonen said the situation made him uneasy. “There’s a lot of dust being kicked up, and I’ll be glad when it settles,” he said.

Mr. Moonen’s father, Alvin Moonen of Kalispell, Mont., where Andrew and his seven brothers and two sisters grew up, said that his son did not speak about his duties in the military or at Blackwater. “He said he was in the 82nd Airborne and that’s all he told me,” the father said in an interview on Tuesday. “He wouldn’t tell me anything.”

Asked about the accusations that his son was involved in the fatal shooting last December, Mr. Moonen’s voice fell. “They train these guys like they do and then they’re surprised?” he said.

More than nine months after the shooting, no charges have been brought. But there is an active investigation of the case in Seattle, an F.B.I. official said, although there is some question about what statutes apply to events occurring overseas and in a war zone.

The case has had wide reverberations from Baghdad to Washington. Iraqi officials have labeled the killing “murder” and say it is a textbook example of the way foreign contractors operate with impunity in their country.

The State Department, which employs Blackwater under a multibillion-dollar contract spread among three companies to provide security for its diplomats in Iraq, hoped to keep the case quiet by helping Blackwater to take Mr. Moonen out of Iraq and by paying the slain guard’s family $20,000 in cash. But the episode has become one of the central exhibits in numerous investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and Iraqi authorities into the operations of Blackwater and 170 other private security contractors working in Iraq.

Within hours of the Christmas Eve shooting, Blackwater officials ended Mr. Moonen’s employment, citing a “blatant and egregious” violation of company policy against possessing a firearm while drunk. Without naming the suspect in the shooting, Mr. Prince said on Tuesday that the company had dismissed him, fined him thousands of dollars and immediately shipped him out of the country. “We can’t flog him; we can’t incarcerate him,” Mr. Prince said. “That’s up to the Justice Department.”

They made him pay his own airfare home and forfeit his $3,000 Christmas bonus. Mr. Prince said that Blackwater paid $20,000 in compensation to the victim’s family, correcting earlier accounts that had put the sum at $15,000.

Mr. Moonen acknowledged that he had served in Baghdad, which he described as “scary,” particularly for a Westerner who found himself alone and isolated in the city. He did not explain why he felt isolated while serving as one of nearly 1,000 Blackwater security agents in Iraq and living in a secure compound in the Green Zone.

Stewart P. Riley, a Seattle lawyer, confirmed that he was representing Mr. Moonen in the investigation into the Baghdad shooting. He said that he had been in contact with federal prosecutors, but cautioned that no charges had been brought and that none may ever be brought.

“Everyone’s rushing to judgment in this case, and they’ve forgotten about the presumption of innocence and it’s a shame,” Mr. Riley said.

Mr. Moonen served in the 82nd Airborne Division from April 2002 to April 2005, according to Army personnel records. He served a seven-month deployment in Iraq, from September 2003 until early April 2004. Army records indicate that he was honorably discharged, but do not show any special medals or commendations.

Mr. Moonen’s family members revealed little about him, referring most questions to his lawyer in Seattle. But according to public records, he was granted a divorce in North Carolina in December 2004 from a woman who appears to live in the Seattle area. She could not be reached.

Washington State court records indicate that Mr. Moonen received six traffic citations between April 2001 and September 2007. An employee of the sheriff’s department in Kalispell said that Mr. Moonen was picked up on a juvenile misdemeanor charge when he was 16, but that records of the case were sealed.

A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, would not confirm or deny that Mr. Moonen had ever worked for the company. “I will not give you any information about any current or former employees, period,” she said.

A padlocked chain-link fence surrounds Mr. Moonen’s modest Seattle home, in a working-class neighborhood near the sprawling Boeing Company complex. Mr. Moonen is installing green siding and performing other renovations with the help of some of his brothers, he said. “It helps to have a big family,” he said.

He said that he installed the fence to prevent the theft of building materials, and he keeps it tightly locked even when he is at home. After chatting for a few minutes, he handed a reporter a sheet of paper with his lawyer’s name and telephone number and went back in the house.

J. Michael Kennedy contributed reporting from Seattle, Jim Robbins from Kalispell, Mont., and Barclay Walsh from Washington.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/wo...ontractor.html

[mp3 free]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 4th, 2007


The New York Times
October 4, 2007

New Rules for Contractors Are Urged by 2 Democrats

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Two leading Democratic presidential hopefuls seized on the Blackwater case yesterday to call for more accountability in using security contractors for security and military missions.

The two, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, spoke after reports about Blackwater USA employees’ killing fleeing Iraqis and trying to cover it up.

The employees guard State Department and other personnel in Iraq.

Mr. Edwards, in Portsmouth, N.H., called for ending the outsourcing of military and security missions to contractors. He presented a plan to expand the jurisdiction of American law enforcement agencies to cover contractors overseas and used the case to highlight his opposition to the Iraq war and Bush administration tactics.

“The Bush administration is keeping the war in Iraq going, despite the overwhelming opposition of the American people,” Mr. Edwards said. “And they are doing it in part by performing an end-run around the all-volunteer force.”

Blackwater employees have been accused of involvement in a shooting on Sept. 16 in a Baghdad square that killed at least 17 Iraqis.

In Iowa City, Mr. Obama presented a plan to make the contractors more accountable by creating a special F.B.I. unit to enforce federal law. He criticized the administration as failing to supervise companies like Blackwater.

“This isn’t just about broken laws or wasted tax revenues,” Mr. Obama said. “This is about our claims to moral leadership in the world. We cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors.”



Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/us...cs/04dems.html

[slima]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 4th, 2007


Russia Angry Over Iraq Security Incident

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 3, 2007

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia voiced anger Wednesday over what it said was inappropriate treatment of its diplomats by a private security firm in Iraq.

The Foreign Ministry said armed employees of a company it identified as ''Global'' sought to search a vehicle belonging to the Russian Embassy and threatened violence during an incident Monday at the Baghdad airport.

It was apparently referring to London-based Global Strategies Group.

The actions were a ''rude violation'' of international rules governing the treatment of diplomats and could have led to ''serious consequences,'' the ministry said.

''Thanks to the restraint and composure of our diplomats and their clear and proper actions, the incident was resolved,'' it said.

The complaint from Russia, a vocal critic of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, came amid concerns over the role of security contractors in Iraq following a shootout that left 11 Iraqi civilians dead. The private security firm Blackwater USA is under investigation for its role in the Sept. 16 shootout in Baghdad.

The Foreign Ministry said Russia hopes the incident at the Baghdad airport will be ''reviewed with all seriousness by the official Iraqi authorities, including in the context of efforts toward the legal regulation of their relations with foreign private security structures.''

Global Strategies Group, which has been working in Iraq since the country's 2003 U.S.-led invasion, provides security services at Baghdad International Airport.

Six telephone calls and three e-mails seeking comment were not immediately returned by the company's London or Washington, D.C. offices.

The Foreign Ministry said Russia registered a formal protest with the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow and that Iraq's Foreign Ministry had apologized.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/worl...ssia-Iraq.html

[ViktorialHDY]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 4th, 2007


Iraq PM Maliki Questions Future Of Blackwater

By REUTERS
October 3, 2007

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki questioned on Wednesday whether U.S. private security firm Blackwater had any future role in Iraq because of the high number of shooting incidents in which it had been involved.

Maliki appeared to toughen his stand again against Blackwater over a September 16 shooting in Baghdad in which 11 Iraqis died, an incident that sparked outrage among Iraqis who see the firm as a private army which acts with impunity.

In Washington, a House of Representatives committee heard in testy hearings on Tuesday that Blackwater guards had been involved in 195 shooting incidents in Iraq from the start of 2005 until September 12 this year, an average of 1.4 a week.

In those shootings there were 16 Iraqi casualties and 162 cases of property damage. Blackwater fired first in 84 percent of the incidents, said a report given to the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"I believe the big numbers of accusations directed against (Blackwater) do not make it valid to stay in Iraq," Maliki told a news conference in Baghdad.

Blackwater, which has received U.S. government contracts worth more than a billion dollars, is one of the biggest security contractors in Iraq. It employs about 1,000 people in Iraq, where it guards the U.S. embassy and its staff.

The North Carolina-based company has said its guards reacted lawfully to an attack on a convoy they were protecting during the September 16 incident in western Baghdad.

Maliki's government was harshly critical of Blackwater immediately after the incident, which it called a crime, and vowed to freeze its work and prosecute those involved.

But Maliki's government later appeared to soften its stand, saying no action would be taken against it until after a joint investigation of the incident with U.S. officials.

Its comments came after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised a full review of how U.S. security details are conducted in Iraq. At least four separate investigations into the incident are under way.

Estimates of the number of private security contractors working in Iraq vary between 25,000 and 48,000. They are immune from prosecution under an order drafted after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

Copyright 2007 Reuters Ltd.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/...lackwater.html

[myhackingtosh_ws]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 4th, 2007


Chief of Blackwater Defends His Employees

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times
Erik D. Prince, left, spoke with his attorney during the hearing on Tuesday.

By JOHN M. BRODER
The New York Times
October 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Erik D. Prince, chief executive of Blackwater USA, told a Congressional committee on Tuesday that his company’s nearly 1,000 armed guards in Iraq were not trigger-happy mercenaries, but rather loyal Americans doing a necessary job in hostile territory.

Mr. Prince disputed a Congressional staff report that detailed several instances of Blackwater employees killing Iraqis, fleeing the scene and then the company trying to cover up the violent episodes by whisking the Blackwater employees out of the country and quietly paying off the families of the victims.

He accused Congress and the news media of a “rush to judgment” about Blackwater episodes that left civilians dead, including a chaotic confrontation in a Baghdad square on Sept. 16 that killed at least 17 Iraqis. He said it was too soon to pass judgment on that episode, which is under investigation by the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Iraqi government.

“We have 1,000 guys out in the field,” he said. “People make mistakes; they do stupid things sometimes.” But he added that the company dismissed or disciplined those who broke its rules and that many of the episodes that led to Iraqi deaths came to light only because Blackwater personnel reported them to the State Department.

Mr. Prince’s appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was his first extended turn in public. The company he founded 10 years ago has come under fire from critics in Congress and the military who portray its employees, many of them former military special forces operators, as unaccountable soldiers of fortune who are undermining the American mission in Iraq by alienating the Iraqi public.

The hearing also included testimony from two senior State Department officials who offered extensive praise for Blackwater’s professionalism in Iraq and insisted that the department had acted properly in investigating cases in which the company’s employees were accused of illegal acts.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is the committee’s chairman, citing evidence of State Department efforts to protect Blackwater employees from investigations by Iraqi officials and to help the company compensate victims of shootings, said it appeared that the department was acting as Blackwater’s “enabler.”

Mr. Prince, 38, a former Navy Seal, appeared before the committee and its openly skeptical chairman in a trim dark blue suit with his blond hair in a fresh cut. He was accompanied by a handful of Blackwater executives and lawyers.

In the audience were family members of the four Blackwater guards who were killed and whose bodies were burned in an ambush in Falluja in 2004 that marked a turning point in the war.

Mr. Prince said he welcomed additional oversight and new regulations from Congress to clarify the company’s roles and legal responsibilities overseas. He said the company was providing a needed service at a reasonable cost. Many Democrats on the committee disputed that, citing the $1,222 that the company charged the government for each day of work by one of its security guards.

Near the end of his more than three hours at the witness table, Mr. Prince said, “If the government doesn’t want us to do this, we’ll go do something else.”

Mr. Prince answered most questions directly, although he demurred on specific questions on Blackwater’s government contracts and on the number of Iraqi civilians it had compensated for killing family members or destroying private property.

By agreement with Mr. Waxman and Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the committee, Mr. Prince was not asked questions about the Sept. 16 shootings in Baghdad to avoid prejudicing the current criminal inquiry.

But in prepared testimony, Mr. Prince defended his employees’ actions in Baghdad that day. “I stress to the committee and to the American public,” he said, “that based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone on Sept. 16.”

Mr. Prince, who comes from a wealthy and prominent Republican family in Michigan, said his company’s phenomenal rise came from competence, not connections. He said he had not personally lobbied the White House or Congress to get federal contracts.

Asked if his sister-in-law, Betsy DeVos, a major Bush fund-raiser, former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and wife of the party’s 2006 nominee for governor, had interceded on Blackwater’s behalf, he smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said.

The company had less than $1 million of federal government contracts in 2001. Last year, the company took in nearly $600 million in federal money, most of it under contract with the State Department to provide bodyguards for diplomats and visiting dignitaries, including the dozens of members of Congress who travel to Iraq each year.

Mr. Prince said he was proud of his employees, who have conducted thousands of escort missions in the most dangerous parts of central Iraq without death or serious injury to any of the people they are assigned to protect. Thirty Blackwater workers have been killed in Iraq, he said.

He said Blackwater guards strictly followed rules of engagement set by the State Department, which call for gradual escalation of force before any shots are fired.

The House committee staff found that Blackwater employees had fired their weapons 195 times since early 2005 and in a vast majority of incidents used their weapons before taking any hostile fire. The report also said that in most cases Blackwater guards fired from fast-moving vehicles and immediately fled the scene of any confrontation.

“Our job is to get them off the X — the preplanned ambush site where the bad guys have planned to kill you,” Mr. Prince said. “We can’t stay and secure the terrorist crime scene investigation.”

He forcefully rejected the characterization of Blackwater from some members of the committee as a mercenary army. He said that contractors had served with the United States military since Revolutionary times and that mercenaries were soldiers who fought with foreign armies for money.

“They call us mercenaries,” he said. “But we’re Americans working for America protecting Americans.”

State Department officials who testified after Mr. Prince did largely defended the government’s use of security employees from Blackwater and other firms that handle diplomatic security in Iraq, saying the armed guards performed a critical service.

“Without private security details, we would not be able to interface with Iraqi government officials, institutions and other Iraqi civilians critical to our mission there,” said David M. Satterfield, the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq and a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

James Risen contributed reporting.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/wa...lackwater.html

[BDDkDvgZ]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 5th, 2007


The New York Times
October 5, 2007

House’s Iraq Bill Applies U.S. Laws to Contractors

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — With the armed security force Blackwater USA and other private contractors in Iraq facing tighter scrutiny, the House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would bring all United States government contractors in the Iraq war zone under the jurisdiction of American criminal law. The measure would require the F.B.I. to investigate any allegations of wrongdoing.

The bill was approved 389 to 30, despite strong opposition from the White House. It came as lawmakers and human rights groups are using a Sept. 16 shooting by Blackwater personnel in Baghdad to highlight the many contractors operating in Iraq who have apparently been unaccountable to American military or civilian laws and outside the reach of the Iraqi judicial system.

The State Department, which had been leading the investigation into the shooting, said Thursday that a team of F.B.I. agents sent to Baghdad in recent days had taken over the inquiry. No charges have been filed in the case, and Justice Department officials have said it is unclear whether American law applies.

Even if enacted, the House bill would have no retroactive authority over past conduct by Blackwater or other contractors.

Federal law enforcement officials said the team of about 10 F.B.I. special agents had been sent to Baghdad at the request of the State Department to oversee the Blackwater investigation. One official, who like others who discussed the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it publicly, described their assignment as a fact-finding mission to determine whether any of the Blackwater employees had engaged in activity in violation of American laws.

Iraqi officials have said they would like to prosecute the Blackwater case, but it is extremely unlikely that American authorities would allow them to assert jurisdiction.

Shortly after the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, issued a decree granting immunity to American military and civilian personnel from criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts.

The House bill, sponsored by Representative David E. Price, Democrat of North Carolina, would expand a law that in 2000 brought defense contractors working with American troops overseas under the jurisdiction of United States criminal law. The 2000 law has rarely been used and might not apply to firms like Blackwater, which was hired to guard diplomats and could argue that its work is not tied directly to war operations.

But Republican critics, who said they supported the overall goal of increasing accountability for contractors, said there were weaknesses in the legislation, including imprecise descriptions about the locations where the law would apply. They also said that the F.B.I. was not equipped to conduct numerous investigations overseas and that the effort would prove costly.

Mr. Price has been working on the contractor issue for about three years and first introduced his bill in January. A similar measure was submitted in the Senate by Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Mr. Obama, a candidate for his party’s nomination for president, introduced an updated version on Thursday.

The F.B.I. maintains a sizable office in Iraq. But law enforcement officials said the Blackwater inquiry would be left to the visiting agents.

The officials said the F.B.I. had received no specific accusations of criminality from the State Department in opening the investigation, which is expected to focus on Blackwater operatives who are accused of involvement in the deaths of Iraqi civilians or other violent acts. But it could prove extremely difficult to prosecute under American civilian or military laws.

The White House said it was willing to work with Congress to achieve greater accountability for contractors but it had “grave concerns” about the new House bill, which it said would overburden the F.B.I. and the Defense Department and interfere with crucial “national security activities and operations.”

Before the bill was passed, Democrats agreed to add language specifying that it was not intended to hamper intelligence efforts.

Because the Justice Department had prosecuted few crimes under the 2000 law, Congress last year approved a measure that brought Defense Department contractors in the war zone under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, potentially subjecting them to court-martial. But no prosecutions have been brought under that provision, watchdog groups said.

Mr. Obama’s measure, like the one approved by the House, would require the F.B.I. to establish “theater investigative units” — field offices in the war zone — to investigate criminal accusations against any of the roughly 180,000 contractor personnel working in Iraq. And it would require the Justice Department to report to Congress on the number of complaints, investigations and criminal cases brought against contractors.

But analysts said that even if the legislation was adopted it could prove extremely difficult to prosecute cases. Under the law adopted in 2000, only two criminal cases have originated in Iraq, the analysts said, one involving a contractor accused of possessing child pornography and another accused of attempted rape.

Under the law, responsibility for the cases falls to prosecutors in the defendant’s home jurisdiction, meaning that law enforcement officials must conduct expensive investigations overseas under dangerous conditions, then bring evidence and witnesses back to the United States.

“At the end of the day, the execution of this depends not on Congress but the executive branch,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has followed the contractor issue closely.

He said that by some accounts, as many as 20 potential criminal cases involving contractors had been referred to the Justice Department, but none were pursued. “They have disappeared into a black hole,” he said.

But Mr. Singer said prosecutors in American criminal courts would face enormous obstacles in any case where the activity described as a crime under civilian laws might be viewed by a jury as justifiable in a war.

Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer who has been heavily involved in efforts to develop legislation that would hold contractors accountable, said in an interview that the House bill would close a loophole that might allow Blackwater employees to argue that their work was unrelated to the war effort because the company had a contract to protect State Department diplomats around the world.

But he expressed frustration that officials had not been more active in prosecuting crimes in Iraq and that the legal situation remained gray.

“When we have got a contractor city, say, of 180,000 people, and there hasn’t been a completed prosecution of anybody coming out of Iraq, not one,” he said, “what sort of city in America would be like that, where no one is prosecuted for anything for three years? It’s unthinkable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/wa...05cong.html?hp

[Fvmfrctt]

Posted by Jasonik on Oct 7th, 2007


LA Times

I survived Blackwater

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

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.

[Wachearex]

Jasonik on Oct 12th, 2007


Blackwater Is Soaked
An arrogant attitude only adds fuel to the criticism.

Gervasio Sanchez / AP
Tough-Guy Reputation: Blackwater security contractors taking part in a fire fight in Najaf

By Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Oct. 15, 2007 issue - The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, "This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press."

Whatever else Blackwater is or isn't guilty of—a topic of intense interest in Washington—it has a well-earned reputation in Iraq for arrogance and high-handedness. Iraqis naturally have the most serious complaints; dozens have been killed by Blackwater operatives since the beginning of the war. But many American civilian and military officials in Iraq also have little sympathy for the private security company and its highly paid employees. With an uproar growing in Congress over Blackwater's alleged excesses, the North Carolina-based company is finding few supporters.

Responsible for guarding top U.S. officials in Iraq, Blackwater operatives are often accused of playing by their own rules. Unlike nearly everyone else who enters the Green Zone, said an American soldier who guards a gate, Blackwater gunmen refuse to stop and clear their weapons of live ammunition once inside. One military contractor, who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution in his industry, recounted the story of a Blackwater operative who answered a Marine officer's order to put his pistol on safety when entering a base post office by saying, "This is my safety," and wiggling his trigger finger in the air. "Their attitude was, 'We're f---ing security; we don't have to answer to anybody'."

Congress disagrees. Until now, private security contractors working for the State Department, as Blackwater does, have effectively not been covered by either U.S. or Iraqi law, or military regulations. A bill that overwhelmingly passed the House last week would close that loophole. But the law would also require the FBI to establish a large-scale presence in Iraq in order to investigate accusations against private contractors. Law-enforcement officials worry that this would draw valuable resources away from FBI efforts to combat terrorism in the United States. Also, whenever FBI agents venture into Iraq now they are guarded by ... Blackwater operatives. The bureau has sent a team to Baghdad to investigate the Sept. 16 shooting in Nasoor Square, in which Blackwater guards are accused of killing as many as 17 Iraqi civilians. In order to avoid "even the appearance of any conflict [of interest]," according to an FBI spokesman, the agents will be defended by U.S. government personnel.

It is not an idle concern. Blackwater's staunchest defenders tend to be found among those whom they guard. U.S. officials prefer Blackwater and other private security bodyguards because they regard them as more highly trained than military guards, who are often reservists from MP units. A U.S. Embassy staffer, who did not have permission to speak on the record, said, "It's a few bad eggs that seem to be spoiling the bunch." Late last week the State Department announced that it would increase oversight of Blackwater in particular, installing cameras in its vehicles and having a Diplomatic Security Service officer ride along on every convoy. But another State Department official, also speaking anonymously, says that DSS agents in Baghdad have not been eager to rein in the contractors in the past: "These guys tend to close ranks. It's like the blue wall."

Testifying before Congress last week, 38-year-old Blackwater chief Erik Prince vigorously defended his company's "dedicated security professionals" who "risk their lives to protect Americans in harm's way overseas." Prince probably had no reason to be as smug as he seemed to many observers. In deflecting questions about a drunken Blackwater operative who allegedly shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi in the Green Zone on Christmas Eve last year, Prince said that the employee, later identified as Andrew Moonen, had been fined and fired. But on Friday House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Henry Waxman released a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recounting evidence that Moonen was able to return to Iraq and worked there for another company. Moonen's attorney, Stewart Riley, told NEWSWEEK his client denies wrongdoing and is not facing criminal charges. Blackwater is no doubt in for further fire fights.

With Larry Kaplow in Baghdad and Michael Hastings in Washington

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

[russianstallian]

Posted by Punzie on Oct 25th, 2007


...............Under Siege, Blackwater Takes On Air of Bunker

In their compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone, Blackwater USA contractors live in trailers stacked one on top of the other.

By PAUL von ZIELBAUER and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
October 25, 2007


BAGHDAD, Oct. 24 — The Blackwater USA compound here is a fortress within a fortress. Surrounded by a 25-foot-high wall of concrete topped by a chain-link fence and razor wire, the compound sits deep inside the heavily defended Green Zone, its two points of entry guarded by Colombian Army veterans carrying shotguns and automatic rifles.

Enlarge This Image


The Blackwater compound in Baghdad is surrounded by a 25-foot wall of concrete topped by a chain-link fence and razor wire, and is guarded by veterans of the Colombian Army.





In the mazelike interior, Blackwater employees live in trailers stacked one on top of the other in surroundings that one employee likens to a “minimum-security prison.”


Since Sept. 16, when Blackwater guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square, the compound has begun to feel more like a prison, too. On that day, employees of Blackwater, a private security firm hired to protect American diplomats, responded to what they called a threat and killed as many as 17 people and wounded 24.


Richard J. Griffin, the State Department official who oversaw Blackwater USA and other private security contractors in Iraq, resigned Wednesday.
For weeks, not a word has emerged publicly from the compound, as the F.B.I., the American military and the Iraqi government investigate the Sept. 16 and earlier Blackwater shootings in Iraq.


But in recent days, that secretive Blackwater world has begun to fray under so much scrutiny, said four current and two former Blackwater employees. They described a grating sense among many of Blackwater guards, especially those with years of experience, that the killings on Sept. 16 were unjustified.


“Some guys are thinking that it was not a good shoot, that it was not warranted,” said one Blackwater contractor, using military jargon for an episode that results in a wrongful death. “I don’t think there was criminal intent involved. I just think it was the application of the use of deadly force gone horribly wrong.”


He added, “To mitigate one threat, 17 people had to die?”


Blackwater employees are aware of the conclusions of Iraqi investigators: that Blackwater never received fire and that any threat was illusory. Like the company in its official statements, the guards appear to believe that three armored Blackwater vehicles received several rounds of gunfire somewhere in the city that day, and that this might help explain why the guards fired into Nisour Square.


Still, a growing number of Blackwater guards here believe that the federal investigation may result in criminal charges against some of the four to six members of the team believed to have fired weapons on Sept. 16. Most of the men who fired are former Marine infantrymen still in their 20s, said one Blackwater contractor with a military background.


In a series of detailed interviews, given despite a company policy that forbids contractors to speak openly, the Blackwater employees provided the first glimpse into how the deaths on Sept. 16 and in prior episodes were being recounted and understood by the armed men who protect American officials on Baghdad’s streets each day.


Reporters for The New York Times spoke directly with four of the current and former employees; two others communicated with The Times in discussions and e-mail messages passed through intermediaries.
In the weeks since the shootings, Blackwater has been flooded with federal agents and investigators. A new group of State Department security agents have flown in to help supervise each Blackwater convoy. F.B.I. agents are interviewing guards involved in the Sept. 16 episode.



Blackwater lawyers also arrived at the camp about two weeks ago, contractors here said, to monitor those interviews.


“I’m just trying to hold on,” said one member of the Blackwater convoy that was involved in the Sept. 16 killings, in an e-mail message. “They’ve been trying to bring in so many State agents, it’s getting full over here.”


Inside the Blackwater camp, a crisp American flag is carefully raised and lowered each day in Baghdad’s dusty heat. In the closely stacked gray metal trailers that serve as living quarters, employees have 8-by-12-foot rooms and shared bathrooms. Recreation time is limited, and the employees eat among themselves. Many of the younger guards sunbathe on their trailer roofs — a few regularly did so in the nude, until female helicopter pilots flew overhead, saw them and complained.


According to Blackwater employees, the leader of the convoy on Nisour Square was a man known as Hoss. He and two or three other members of the team have returned to the United States because their tours of duty were up or their contracts with the company had ended, one employee here said. In Hoss’s case, the trip home was to remove shrapnel from a wound he received before the Sept. 16 shootings.

Blackwater workers rarely interact with Iraqis in Baghdad, and regulations forbid them to travel outside the Green Zone when they are not on well-armed missions to protect State Department officials. Most convoys through the city do not carry Iraqi translators, leaving the young guards, former military men, to judge whether a gesture, a foreign phrase or a glance suggests a threat strong enough to justify a violent response.


Even in the Blackwater compound, no definitive account has emerged of how and why the Sept. 16 shootings occurred, company employees said.



For its part, Blackwater has said that its guards were responding to an insurgent attack. But in furtive discussions over recent weeks, certain details about the episode, they said, have gained currency among many Blackwater workers, many of whom would like to believe that their colleagues acted appropriately.


Those workers said, for example, that Blackwater guards who fired at Iraqis in Nisour Square described how an Iraqi driver had pulled up his car well after the Blackwater convoy had arrived and warned traffic to stay back.



The encroaching car, the workers said, caused their colleagues to feel threatened and initiate machine-gun fire. They also said that friction between Blackwater convoys and groups of armed Iraqi police in the days before the shooting had created a mutual distrust, and that the police officers, perhaps as a result of earlier disputes, fired at the Blackwater convoy. “The Iraqi police were testing these guys at various intersections,” said one former Blackwater guard who has spoken with men on the convoy at Nisour Square.


Iraqi police at the intersection have said they were not armed that day, and none of the dozens of Iraqi witnesses interviewed by Iraqi investigators and reporters for The New York Times said they saw anyone firing at the Blackwater convoy or even brandishing a weapon.


But in a measure of the gulf between the narratives that have taken hold in the Blackwater compound and on the streets of Baghdad, the former guard and a current employee said that a consistent view had developed within the compound: that Blackwater was fired upon by Iraqis with AK-47s who fled the scene after Blackwater returned an overwhelming amount of fire.


“How long does it take for a dead terrorist to become a dead civilian?” a Blackwater employee said. “As long as it takes to remove an AK-47 from the body,” suggesting that accomplices might have removed weapons as they fled.


The Blackwater employees said that talk about the Sept. 16 shootings had also focused on a heated dispute between members of the team in the square, pitting the men pouring gunfire into Iraqi vehicles against other Blackwater guards who were imploring them to stop.


“There was turmoil in the team, where half the guys were saying, ‘Don’t shoot,’” said a military veteran who spoke to a member of the Blackwater team on the convoy.


But that dispute, the guards said, like the uncertainty in the compound, is likely to remain unresolved until federal investigators finally report their conclusions on what really happened that day on Nisour Square.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/wo...kwater.html?hp

[maclaudser]

Posted by Jasonik on Jan 29th, 2008


Showdown in Blackwater's Backyard
Why the controversial private security company wants to run congressional candidate Marshall Adame "out of Dodge."

Bruce Falconer
January 28 , 2008

Marshall Adame is a Democrat running for Congress in North Carolina's 3rd District, a jurisdiction along the Tar Heel state's low-lying eastern coast that is home to the U.S. Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune, Air Station Cherry Point, and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as well as Blackwater Worldwide's 7,000-acre corporate headquarters and training facility. Adame is an underdog in the congressional race, where he will likely face seven-term Republican incumbent Walter B. Jones—who brought the term "freedom fries" to Congress—in the general election. Jones has since become an opponent of the Iraq war, atoning for his vote to authorize the war by writing letters of condolence to the families of dead soldiers—a "mea culpa to my Lord," he says. But the incumbent and his Republican party are not the only obstacles Adame will have to overcome if he hopes to take over the 3rd District's congressional seat. He also faces tough opposition from Blackwater.

Despite running as a Democrat in a strongly Republican district, Adame has the sort of military past that is appreciated in these parts. "I am a retired United States Marine," he tells me. "I'm a Vietnam veteran. I spent nine months in Kuwait right after we kicked Saddam out, helping to rebuild the Kuwaiti air force. I spent four years in Egypt with Kaman Aerospace"—a military contractor—"as their logistics leader in that country." More recently, he spent three years in Iraq working on reconstruction projects, ultimately rising to a senior position with the State Department's National Coordination Team in Baghdad, where he oversaw the work of roughly ten Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Two of his sons have served in the U.S. Army in Iraq—one was seriously wounded in an IED attack and is still undergoing reconstructive surgeries; the other is currently on his second 15-month tour, stationed in Tikrit. Now back in North Carolina, Adame has even opened his home to a family of Iraqi refugees.

Yet Adame's recent public criticism of the private security industry's role in Iraq has caused him to become the target of a political attack from Blackwater. It all began in mid-January when Adame participated in a live question-and-answer forum on a North Carolina progressive blog called BlueNC. "People were writing in, and I was answering the questions," he says. "It just so happened that the first one was about Blackwater." He didn't mince words. "There is no place in the American force structure, or in American culture for mercenaries," he wrote on the blog. "They are guns for hire; No more, no less… Private Armies represent the very things we despise as a people. Servants to the highest bidder with true allegiance to no-one."

Numerous Democratic candidates, including presidential contenders Barack Obama and North Carolina's own John Edwards, have assailed Blackwater, an easy target this election cycle. But Adame claims to speak from personal experience. As a State Department official in Iraq, he was protected by Blackwater, which, he says, used excessive force on at least two occasions while he was in their care. "I saw them shoot people," he says. "I saw them crash into cars while I was their passenger…. There was absolutely no reason, no provocation whatsoever." Once, while en route to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, Adame says he heard gunfire coming from the turret gunner in his own vehicle. He looked out the window of the humvee and "saw people ducking and falling…. The vehicle in front of us rammed into a car that was trying to get out of the way, and they just spun that guy around. He was out cold in that car, maybe even dead. I don't know, but we just kept on going."

Adame's comments about the company have enraged Blackwater employees, including executive vice president Bill Mathews. In an internal corporate email, Mathews encouraged his colleagues to barrage Adame with mail ("he was too cowardly to put a phone number on the web," Mathews noted in the message). "[H]e wants this company and all of us to cease to exist," Mathews wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Raleigh News & Observer and posted to the newspaper's web site. "Do you like your jobs? Are you sick and tired of the slanderous bullshit going on in DC? If so, would you all mind joining me in reminding Mr. Adame that he is running for office in our backyard…. Let's run this goof out of Dodge...!"

Since then, Adame has been on the receiving end of "some pretty rough stuff,” he says. "I received all kinds of hate mail from Blackwater people. They use a lot of vulgarity. They tell me how Blackwater is defending America's rights, and that we're free because Blackwater is fighting for us. Give me a break! That is so erroneous and misleading. It's just totally dishonest, but those people really believe it. Blackwater is a large organization, and they have a great way of propagandizing their product."

For its part, Blackwater is unrepentant for the harsh words Adame has received from its employees. "Mr. Mathews regrets that he wrote an inappropriate email in haste," says Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell in a statement. "He does not regret for one moment his desire to defend the brave people who risk their lives every day working for Blackwater." Tyrrell says Adame "used inaccuracies to unfairly criticize the company" and notes that "one thing that should be taken away from Mr. Matthew's email is that our people are incredibly proud of and passionate about the work we do in support of the U.S. government."

Adame, who plans to hold a campaign event near Blackwater's Moyock headquarters next month, is quick to point out that he has received no threats of physical harm from Blackwater, and despite some obscene emails, has engaged in constructive conversations with some of its employees. "These people don't want to lose their jobs, and I understand that," he says. Indeed, looming larger than the issue of military contracting in his district is concern over domestic priorities like health care and jobs. Still, Adame's recent confrontation with Blackwater seems to have focused his attention on the company. "I feel very strongly about how extensively organized Blackwater has become," he explains. "And I will do everything I can as a congressman to look into that, to find out whether or not the things they're doing are even legal."

It's an open question what this particular campaign promise might do to Adame's chances.

Bruce Falconer is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington, D.C., bureau.

*****

RELATED ARTICLES:
Making a Killing: A Blackwater Timeline
Blackwater by Numbers: A Statistical Index

[virtuah]

Iraqis accuse Blackwater of shredding documents

Familes of slain Iraqis accuse security contractor Blackwater Worldwide of shredding documents

Staff
AP News
Apr 25, 2008 20:46 EST

Families of Iraqis who died in a shooting involving Blackwater Worldwide contractors accused the company Friday of shredding documents and destroying evidence.

Lawyers for the families made the accusations in court documents but identified the source of the information only as former employees. They said officials at the company's North Carolina compound shredded documents related to ongoing investigations sometime around March 18.

Company lawyers had no immediate comment Friday night, but they are quoted in court documents as saying Blackwater took appropriate steps to make sure documents were not destroyed.

Lawyers for the Iraqis do not say what investigation the documents relate to. Blackwater, a major security contractor in Iraq, is under scrutiny in several matters.

Most notably, its guards are under investigation for a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. There is no indication the Justice Department is investigating shredding as part of that case.

Family members are already suing the company for alleged wrongful death in connection with the September shooting, and they asked a judge Friday to let them add document destruction to that lawsuit.

The families also say Blackwater destroyed evidence by repainting and repairing its trucks after the shooting. The company has said the work was done to protect the guards from retribution and was approved by the State Department.

[wvbwxol]

Report: Blackwater buys Brazilian-made fighter plane

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — A subsidiary of U.S. military security contractor Blackwater Worldwide has purchased a fighter plane from the Brazilian aviation company Embraer, a Brazilian newspaper reported Sunday.

The 314-B1 Super Tucano propeller-driven fighter — the same used by the Brazilian military — was bought for $4.5 million and delivered to EP Aviation at the end of February, according to the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper.

The report included the plane's registration number with the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency, and the FAA website confirmed it is registered by EP Aviation.

It was not clear if it was Embraer's first sale of a military-style aircraft to a private company. EP Aviation has 33 planes and helicopters registered with the FAA, according to the agency's website, only one of which is from Embraer.

Officials with Brazil's government and Embraer declined to comment on the Estado report. Phone calls to Blackwater were not returned.

The sale was apparently approved, the Estado report noted, by Brazil's president in a deal negotiated with the U.S. government.

Brazilian law prohibits the sale of arms to companies or for use in existing conflicts.

The newspaper reported that Blackwater president Gary Jackson said the plane would be used for training.

The plane sold to EP Aviation did not include the two .50-caliber machine guns normally attached to the wings.

Blackwater, the largest private security company in the world, has been under scrutiny as a U.S. federal grand jury investigates its involvement in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians. Blackwater also is under investigation for possible weapons smuggling allegations — violations the company denies.