(These links are to a 6 part article, written 2006, by BILL SIZEMORE AND JOANNE KIMBERLIN of The Virginian-Pilot .)

Pt 1 - A New Breed of Warriors

MOYOCK, N.C. - Today's after-lunch lesson: How to break a man's arm with your bare hands. The students pay close attention. On a patch of grass under a powder-blue sky, they pair off to practice the moves - like the steps to some merciless dance:

Pt 2 - Profitable Patriotism

But in 2000, in the fallout from the terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole, Blackwater found its future: providing security in an increasingly insecure world.

There is nothing humble about the company today. In March, Fast Company business magazine, under the heading “Private Army,” named Blackwater President Gary Jackson No. 11 in its annual “Fast 50” list of leaders who are “writing the history of the next 10 years.” It made special note of the company’s estimated 600 percent revenue growth between 2002 and 2005.

Blackwater has rocketed from obscurity to the big time in less than a decade. Peter Singer, author of “Corporate Warriors” and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says that although Blackwater might not be the biggest player in the private military industry, “they’ve certainly gained the biggest profile.”

Pt 3 - On the Front Lines

In the first Gulf War 15 years ago, the ratio of private contractors to troops was 1 to 60; in the current war, it's 1 to 3.

Pt 4 - When Things Go Wrong

Blackwater is arguing that although it is a private company, it has become an essential and indistinguishable cog in the military machine and, like the military, should be immune from liability for casualties in a war zone.

At stake, Blackwater says, is nothing less than the authority of the president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, to wage war as he sees fit.

Pt 5 - On American Soil

Katrina offered Blackwater a chance to diversify into natural disasters. After the hurricane, the company formed a new division of domestic operations. Seamus Flatley, a retired Navy fighter pilot, is the division’s deputy director.

“Look, none of us loves the idea that devastation became a business opportunity,” Flatley said. “It’s a distasteful fact, but it is what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even newspapers – they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we, because somebody’s got to handle it.”

Pt 6 - New Horizons

In a May column in The New York Times, Koppel wrote that a “rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures.”

"..like a f..in turkey shoot."

As this information filters out into the Iraqi 'boonies', those luminaries that might have considered seeking redress for Blackwater's playing cowboys-n-indians will now be telling their militias and bodyguards to just kill any they find, since it's not worth the trouble to get money for them or for their shooting everything in sight.

I'll just be the little ray of sunshine here and shake my head....this will end badly, mark my words. It's going to take an act of Congress to put Blackwater and similar organisations into the System, and make them susceptible to tort actions....and they should consider starting that process soonest...

-5.75,-4.05 Rule of the Great:
When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.

...won't amount to much. Their primary contract is close protection for State - apparently for that job they do not require licensing by the Ministry of the Interior and their personnel have US diplomatic paper. One guy that I'd expect to know (currently in the contractor community in Baghdad) said that their license actually lapsed last year.

If true, all this sounds a bit to me like kabuki.

"Ambiguously loose statements on the one hand, and euphemisms that link terrorism and fascism to Islam on the other, have created confusion and resentment on all sides." ~ Fariborz Mokhtari

BAGHDAD - The United States on Tuesday suspended all land travel by U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials throughout Iraq except in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone following a weekend incident involving private security guards in which a number of Iraqi civilians were killed.

Also Tuesday, the Iraqi Cabinet decided to review the status of all foreign security companies amid mounting public outrage over the alleged killing of civilians by the U.S. Embassy’s security provider Blackwater USA.

Exploiting that anger, anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanded the government ban all 48,000 foreign security contractors, whom Iraqis have long viewed as mercenaries.

MORE from AP story at NBC

BAGHDAD, Sept. 18 — A preliminary Iraqi report on a shooting involving an American diplomatic motorcade said Tuesday that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman’s call to stop, killing a couple and their infant.

MORE at New York Times

By ROBERT H. REID

Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's prime minister Wednesday disputed Blackwater USA's version of a weekend shooting that left at least 11 people dead, saying he cannot tolerate ``the killing of our citizens in cold blood.''

More witnesses came forward saying they saw Blackwater security guards firing at civilians in the Mansour district of western Baghdad on Sunday. Two witnesses recalled hearing an explosion before the gunfire, suggesting a bomb may have targeted the American convoy, prompting the guards to start shooting.

Blackwater, which provides security for American diplomats and other civilian officials in Iraq, insisted its contractors were responding to gunfire from insurgents.

American and Iraqi officials announced they would form a joint committee to try to reconcile widely differing versions of Sunday's incident. Conflicting accounts were circulating among Iraqi officials themselves.

Land travel by U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials outside the fortified Green Zone remained suspended for a second day after Iraqi authorities ordered Blackwater to stop working as a separate Iraqi investigation continues.

The Moyock, N.C.-based firm is the main provider of bodyguards and armed escorts for American government civilian employees in Iraq.

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo refused to offer any version of what happened Sunday at busy Nisoor Square. She told reporters the contractors involved in the incident were still in Iraq.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spoke out sharply against Blackwater, saying the shooting was ``the seventh of its kind'' involving the company, ``and these violations should be dealt with.''

``We will not tolerate the killing of our citizens in cold blood,'' al-Maliki told reporters. ``The work of this company has been stopped in order to know the reasons.''

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne E. Tyrrell said in a statement late Monday that its employees acted ``lawfully and appropriately'' in response to an armed attack against a State Department convoy.

MORE

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

MORE at Village Voice

Blackwater can be tried in Iraqi court: judge

BAGHDAD (AFP) — US security firm Blackwater could be tried in an Iraqi court over a shootout in a Baghdad neighbourhood which killed eight people, a top judge told AFP on Tuesday.

"This company is subject to Iraqi law and the crime committed was on Iraqi territory and the Iraqi judiciary is responsible for tackling the case," said Abdul Sattar Ghafour Bairaqdar from Iraq's Supreme Judiciary Council, the country's highest court.

On Monday, Iraq's interior ministry ordered the cancellation of Blackwater's operating licence after the company's guards who were escorting US officials were involved in a shootout which killed eight people and wounded 13.

The judge said the case against Blackwater could be filed either by the relatives of the victims or by the government.

MORE - AFP

Huff

Bad Day At Blackwater
by John Lombardi
September 19/07

Old Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago had some pithy students -- Donald Rumsfeld, for one -- who tasered his mentor's laissez faire economic theories into a shock-and-awe geopolitical blueprint for remaking American democracy. The idea was to turn the country into a venture-capitalist model for the world to catch up with. Manufacturing? Let the third world do it. No pesky, profit-compromising minimum wage laws or social consciences to interfere. Plus, the industrial spill could sicken India or Bangladesh, the Mexican ratlands or the remoter parts of China . . . not suburban Connecticut or Santa Monica-by-the-Sea.

Meanwhile, in our neocon colonies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America, and here at home, U.S. Guv's job could be gradually downsized to policing the empire, while the multi-nationals did the real legislating -- it's not for nothing that voter apathy has thrived in the past 20 years, while lobbying firms like Jack Abramoff's grew by leaps and bounds. "Privatize everything!" had been Friedman's mantra.

Naturally, this is all a gradual process, so what Rumsfeld, Vice Prez Cheney, the Bush brood, Richard Perle, Karl Rove, the lupine Paul Wolfowitz (another U. of Chi ideologue), and old hands like Henry Kissinger have done is package the erosion in progressive vocabulary: "the global economy"; "NAFTA"; "privatization"; "transparency"; "economic drift" (my fave -- who would back small entrepreneurs like Hugo Chavez on the Big Board?)

But the truth is, there's a playbook, as vital and narrow as Bill Belichik's: By Sept. 11 (!), 1973, when Augusto Pinochet's Chilean fascists riddled elected socialist president Salvadore Allende's body with bullets, young, Chilean CIA-sponsored economists, newly-graduated from -- where else? -- the U. of Chi, had already delivered "The Brick," a solid, U.S.-approved plan for the "reconstruction" of Chilean society, back on home turf. The unshaveable Richard Nixon and the bizarrely croaking Kissinger (physical signs of moral corruption?), were implementing Friedman's vision the hard way. But, of course, for the good of the world.

Fast-forward to Proconsul Paul Bremer's investiture in 2003 in Iraq. Bremy had been an assistant to Rummy in R's first term as Defense Secretary, 1990-92, during the Bush I regime. Then, while Rum made some dough as CEO of General Instrument Corp. for eight years, during the Clinton "hiatus" (NAFTA, a Bush I agenda, was sold by Slick Willy after he was badly shaken by Hill's "Democrat" failure on Health Care reform), Bremer apprenticed with Kissinger Associates on Park Avenue.

When his education was complete, Bush II was in office, and Bremer helped set up Homeland Security. His reward was a job as interim governor of Iraq. Of course Clinton had already fixed up Blackwater USA, the "private" mercenary corporation from the Great Dismal Swamp (!) in North Carolina, with a $27 million contract to guard U.S. officials in Afghanistan. This opened the door for its becoming the unofficial U.S. SWAT team in Iraq and elsewhere, since its founder, Eric Prince, a former Navy SEAL and arch-conservative Republican billionaire from Michigan, was up to his Tom Cruise buzz cut in Paul Wolfowitz's old "Project for a New American Century" white paper -- through the Family Research Council, another neocon outfit.

"The Project for a New American Century" was a reworking of Uncle Milty Friedman's world domination/privatizing theories. Part of it was leaked to the Times and Post during Bush I, and caused enough of a flap in those more innocent days to be forced into semi-hibernation during the Clinton years -- one of the reasons the conservatives were so rabidly against Bill at Whitewater, etc., was that he was holding up the show. But with the coming of 9/11, Bush II made TPFANAC the Dubya foreign policy. Before that, Blackwater had scored a $35 million gig teaching the Navy how to guard against attacks like the one on the USS Cole, and came into its own on April Fool's Day, 2004, when four of its men were killed by insurgents in an open jeep in Fallujah, then smoked like sausages and hung up to dry on a bridge over the Euphrates river. Bush II had his Alamo, and by June, Blackwater had a $320 million deal with the State Department to provide so-called diplomatic security services.

Blackwater, by the way, was generously staffed by former aides to then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

Since then it's been at the head of the private security forces in Iraq, first ahead of even Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old company, the Carlisle Group, Science Applications International, and Raytheon. It has an estimated 40 to 60,000 personnel on the ground, vastly swelling the numbers of American fighters the president and General Petraeus acknowledge in their estimates of "troop strength", and that's not counting the other companies. It's also never been "registered" to operate in Iraq, as its rivals have, thus protecting it from depredations by pissed-off Iraqi government officials, tired of having the civilian population run over and killed by tough-guy cowboys in wraparound sunglasses, and slinging burp guns like North Philly gangbangers: "Drive-bys? What about Bush's fly-bys? How about Rove's bye-byes?" a banger I know told me in August.

The recent push by the "sovereign" Iraq government, media whipping boys for the administration's historical failures in the Middle East, to have Blackwater expelled from Iraq, came after a series of minimally-reported Blackwater incidents: last May, there was a two-day gun battle on the front steps of the Iraq Interior Ministry in eastern Baghdad, downplayed by CNN and other bastions of a free press, in which Blackwater thugs "accidentally" shot a number of passers-by in "retaliation" for having been shot at themselves; last Christmas, an off-duty Blackwater guard, tipsy with holiday cheer, killed the bodyguard of the Vice-President of Iraq at a party! After a protest by Nouri al-Maliki himself, the man was whisked back to the States, and Blackwater is "cooperating" in an "investigation" by American officials. Imagine if one of Cheney's bodyguards had been shot by an Iraqi . . .

The incident that set the current Blackwater expulsion demand off occurred last Sunday and again received minimal reporting here. An Iraqi driver got too close to a State Department convoy in Baghdad, and ignored signals to move off. Blackwater opened fire. At least nine Iraqis were killed, 16 wounded. In death, they were instantly labeled "insurgents", as all the Iraqis killed by occupation forces are. (The reason Al-Jazeera, the independent Arab news service, is hated and shunned by patriots like Rumsfeld and Kissinger, is that it had a camera crew inside Fallujah, and showed F-16s attacking the city, when the U. S. Command had denied that it was happening.)

Condi Rice was on the phone to Maliki immediately, sympathizing and vowing to "investigate." Ambassador Ryan Crocker, fresh from his media tag-team campaign with General Petraeus to extend the war, opined that Blackwater "plays a vital part" in the U.S. mission against terrorism, and therefore shouldn't be kicked out of Iraq.

What didn't get mentioned is that Blackwater is a key player in U. S. "privatization" master plans: War is a racket. The implications of wars fought by corporations to generate profits for shareholders come down to this: war racketeers provide bodies, weapons and supplies; profits are maximized based on the quantity of bodies killed and wounded, the volumes of weapons used and destroyed, and the amount of property damaged -- rebuilding lets you make $ on the upside and the downside. Outfits like Blackwater, Raytheon and Halliburton provide cover for the Rumsfeld/ Friedman Doctrine: venture capitalism uber alles, and in turn the reconfigured U.S. Guv, a kind of brand name in itself for an outmoded political system these days, provides cover for the companies doing the dirty work. Everything is Disney-fied.

Bush's crew may be discredited at the moment, but "The Project for a New American Century" lives on.