Blackwater Ban "Inevitable"

[kurth]

... Private military contractors have been involve din all sorts of questionable incidents, since the very start of the Iraq enterprise. U.S. military officers frequently expressed their frustrations with sharing the battlefield with such private forces operating under their own rules and agendas, and worry about the consequences for their own operations. For example, Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division (responsible for Baghdad area) tellingly put it two years back, “These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath.” No one has kept an exact count of the incidents, but some notable examples include:

- The Aegis “trophy video,” in which contractors took video of themselves shooting at civilians, set it to the Soul Asylum song ìRunaway Train, and put it on the Internet...

- Abu Ghraib, where reportedly 100 percent of the translators and up to 50 percent of the interrogators at the prison were private contractors. The U.S. Army found that contractors were involved in 36% of the proven abuse incidents and identified 6 particular employees as being culpable in the abuses. However, while the enlisted U.S. Army soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were court-martialed for their crimes, not a single private contractor named in the Army's investigation report has been charged, prosecuted or punished...

The relationship between the Iraqi government and Blackwater is particularly tense -- and not just because armed Blackwater guards are the contractors that most often senior Iraqi government officials run into the most. On Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi Vice President. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country and, 9 months later, has not been charged with any crime. Imagine the same thing happening in the US, an Iraqi embassy guard, drunk at a a Christmas party, shooting a Secret Service agent guarding Vice President Cheney, and you can see some potential for underlying tension there.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/09/blackwater-back.html

Erik Prince is the founder and owner of the military support contractor Blackwater USA. After Erik's mother, Elsa Prince, sold the family's automobile parts company, Prince Corporation, for $1.3 billion to Johnson Controls, Inc., Erik moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater USA at the age of 27. Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Michigan and wife of former Amway president and gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos.

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

[leftchick]

1. blackwater isn't going away

not now, not ever.

[liberal1973]

5. I think they

should be shutdown. Also get a list of all who is employed with these bastards. Because we sure as hell don't want any of these timothy McVeigh wannabes running around in our country.

[uppityperson]

2. Will they go? I just don't know. Will be watching.

[3waygeek]

4. If they do leave Iraq, they'll be here

which will enable * to declare marital law & round us up into the detention centers Halliburton is building.

[uppityperson]

6. I know. I just don't know. You know? nt

[Trillo]

3. Hope so.

I find the concept of the private military extremely disturbing.

[Rageneau]

7. If Blackwater changes its name to Superior Security, Bush will have his own SS.

And the SS is exactly what the model for Blackwater -- and other private armies -- is.