Author: Zandar1

Reading over the excellent liveblogging of today’s Blackwater hearing over at FDL I’m struck by how much Erik Prince sounds like Ted Bell’s   seminal fictional character, Alexander Hawke.  Literally, the guy’s something out of a Tom Clancy novel.

Waxman: We’ve gone a major way to contract out what the govt would normally do. Your company $200,000 in contracts, now over a billion a year, quite a success. We’re paying a lot of money for privatized military. No one does better than our military. Are we paying more and getting less. A particular incident. Nov 27 2004. Plane run by Blackwater, crashed in Afghanistan. Carrying 3 active duty US personnel. Crash investigated. NTSB found that Blackwater captain behaved unprofessionally. Flying the low route “for fun,” pilots unfamiliar with the route. Flight crew joked “your a Star Wars man” “They wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was.” One senior US commander told WaPo “they act like cowboys.”

Did Blackwater’s pilots act responsibly?

Prince: I disagree that they acted like cowboys. We provided a reliable service to the AF in Afghanistan. Any time you have an accident, it’s an accident, something could have been done better. There’s no nav aids, rugged Alaska-style bush flying.

Waxman: Blackwater violated its own policies. It was your policy that required one pilot to have flown in theater for a month. One said, “I hope I’m going into the right valley. I’m just gonna go up this one.” Why didn’t Blackwater follow its own policies?

Prince: Not qualified to speak to experience of pilots. Was set to take off with two people on board, but we turned around to pick up Lt Col. The military violated their own policy. Yes, accidents happen. We’re flying more than a thousand missions a month.

Waxman: Failed to follow precautions, flight plan, etc. May have caused loss of life for the one survivor. Died of cold from inattention, no way for anyone to know where plane had landed, even though that’s a requirement. Email. Ironic he had to be a passenger on this plane, rather than be responsible for the safety of this flight. Col McMahon is asking why taxpayers should pay your company when military’s own pilots better trained and cheaper.

Prince: we were hired to fill that void. We’re doing small missions. We’re filling that gap. These strips are too small for C17s.

Waxman: You’re saying the military could not do this job?

Prince: They did not have those assets either in theater or in the US. This was a temporary service to fill that gap.

Waxman: Any sanctions placed on Blackwater?

Prince: A company should be introspective.

Waxman: Were you ever fined?

Prince: It was pilot error, not corporate error.

Waxman: Corporation hired inexperienced pilots, didn’t follow your own rules. Aside from your introspection. I want to see if you’re getting a stick as well as all these carrots.

I swear, Erik Prince sees everyone in Iraq that’s not American (or working for him) as a Bad Guy, a Terrorist (Tango, in the jargon).  It’s like he’s playing his own personal video game, Erik Prince’s Tango Down: Iraq.

It’s unreal.  The guy is a walking stereotype, a movie bad guy (or good guy if you’re the GOP.)

Meanwhile not even the GOP is going to bail the guy out directly.  They’re at best trying to equate Blackwater with out men and women in uniform and saying this is an attack on our troops.

The other thing that really, really bothers me is the GOP insistence (and Prince is going along with it) that Blackwater hasn’t gotten any Americans killed, just Iraqis.  Like I said, the GOP doesn’t care about raghead sumbitch Iraqis, they’re not human, they don’t qualify as casualties.

More blogging from FDL. Kucinich for the win.

Kucinich: If war is privatized, contractors have a vested interest. How did Blackwater get its contracts? [Kucinich shows chart showing that Blackwater’s getting rich off of the war.] I want to understand how this happened. CPA one of first contracts. How’d you get no bid?

Prince: Off GSA is considered competitive.

Kucinich: Did you talk to WH or Congress about contract?

Prince: Not to my knowledge?

Kucinich: Did the DeVoses? Is it proper that no other contractors allowed to bid.

Prince: I’m not aware of what other companies.

Kucinich: New task order. You didn’t compete for that one either.

Prince: Again, off GSA.

Kucinich: Who at State?

Prince: I don’t know.

Waxman: Did GSA come to you, or did you go to them?

Prince: Most companies have GSA schedule.

Waxman: So you offered services. You don’t know if anyone else was on this list. Did anyone else go to you to ask you to do the work?

Prince: We were already in the country. We had a large presence. Prob wanted transition from DOD to State.

Nope, I dunno where the contracts came from, I’m just the CEO.  Nice.  But here’s the winner exchange so far.

Cummings: Can Iraqis distinguish between contractor actions and military actions. When the Blackwater killed the VP guard, an Iraqi press report blamed it on drunken soldier. Did Blackwater take steps to inform press that Blackwater killed the guard?

Prince: By contract we cannot engage the press.

Cummings: Quote from someone at Blackwater: At least the ID of the shooter will take the heat off of us. Did anyone raise concerns that allowing a false story to continue might lead people to retaliate against military?

Prince: I don’t believe that lasted more than a couple of hours. [note: he said he didn’t know about it a second ago]

Cummings: what do Iraqis who might want to cooperate think?

Prince: I’m not going to make any apologies.

Cummings: You’re the President of this company.

Prince: CEO. Top guy. We have clear policies. Whether the guy was involved in shooting that night or not. We hold them accountable. I’m confident if he had been with another guy from Blackwater.

[Were the other guys drinking around weapons fired?]

Cummings: It’s not about what you do well. Where is the accountability. We can’t flog him, we can’t incarcerate him. I’d be happy to see further investigation.

Waxman: How much did you fine him?

Prince: whatever he had left due him, and his plane ticket.

Kill an Iraqi, pay a fine.  You can almost hear the righteous indignationin the words. The Little Prince is lowering himself by even talking to these Congresswhatevers.

After all his job is to protect diplomats, no matter how many civilians die in order to keep that perfect record.

What a guy, that Prince.  No apologies, kill em all, let God sort em out.

Update [2007-10-2 13:40:48 by Zandar1]: More Liveblogging from FDL.

Issa: So many inaccuracies, so little time. Military mission not to guard diplomats. Contractors have been used directly and indirectly, Beirut, Bosnia, isn’t there a historic time in which we use non-career RSO.

Prince: Since founding of Republic.

Issa; If State recruited for positions that you’re providing. They’d be recruiting current or prior military. Is it proper for State to use militarized helicopters?

Prince: Ours aren’t weaponized.

Issa; Do you know of State helicopters?

Prince: Crop eradication in Colombia.

[Issa’s pretending that he knew that.]

Issa: I wish we were bringing in DOD costs. Isn’t the cost of DOD far greater than what we pay men and women.

Prince: that would be a great fully burdened cost study.

Issa: Hopefully we will. Looking at cost-benefit should be done. I don’t want to use contractors if permanent employees are more appropriate. Be glad you don’t make a diabetes drug. They had their product destroyed by jury-rigged testimony.

Prince: Huh?

Issa: Is your sister Betsy DeVos?

Prince: Yup.

Issa: Was she a Pioneer for Bush? Raised a lot of money. Isn’t it true that your family are well-known Republicans. Wouldn’t it be fair to say your company is Republican-leaning and Amway company, bc of family members?

[Silence–this is great! Issa is about to destroy Amway’s consumer base!!]

Prince: Blackwater is a non-partisan company.

Issa; I think you’re exactly right, your company appears to have done what all companies do. Labeling something as Republican oriented.

Nice shooting, Tex. It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view as a Republican).

Braley: My best friend married g-daughter of founders of Hope College. Is it your testimony that all Blackwater are subject to UCMJ and Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and War Crimes act? You would agree that no declared war in Iraq. is it your understanding that a contingency would apply to Iraq. [Reading from doct] You would agree that based on your description, your employees are not accompanying or serving with armed forces in the field.

[Braley is pointing out that the UCMJ and MEJA and War Crimes don’t apply to Blackwater employees]

Prince: I’m not a lawyer. Again, I’m not a lawyer, I’m sorry.

[Braley now asking whether cash was satisfactory compensation for killed Iraqi.]

Prince: Your actuary calculations don’t make any sense to me, because $1200 charge includes aviation support. Gear, training, travel. I’d be happy to get back to you.

[Braley did a great job here–Prince had no idea how to answer him.]

For what you would consider an “operator” like Prince, he certainly comes off looking like a desk weenie. He’s clearly in over his head here, I’m really not sure why he agreed to this, other than he thought these guys wouldn’t be able to touch him, and instead they’re making him look like a mob boss in a bad gangster movie. It’s sad…and he doesn’t have a friend in sight. Even the Republicans on the committee are making him look worse with these lame attempts to make it look like butchering Iraqis “isn’t personal, just good business.”

Which, I am reminded it *is* good business for the GOP. And so far it’s been damn good business for Blackwater and Erik Prince. I think the Blackwater gravy train just had a 17-car derailment all over Prince’s ego.

Update [2007-10-2 17:28:19 by Zandar1]: Well, the hearing is over, and some of the most damning stuff came not from Prince, but State Department Ambassador Richard Griffin.

Waxman: Why did the State Department help Blackwater get the employee the hell out of Dodge after the incident?

Richard Griffin: Can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

Waxman: Not asking you about that. The State Department even told Blackwater to pay off the family and “sweep the whole incident under the rug.” What’s up with that?

Griffin: I would say that the area of what should be prosecuted is very murky.

Waxman: You mean there’s a question as to whether this is criminal, when a person hired by a contractor shoots and kills an Iraqi in the green zone, that this isn’t criminal? And then the State Department suggested how much should be paid, and helped him get out of the country?

Griffin: That’s your judgment about what happened.

Waxman: If there’s an investigation going on, and the man’s not there any longer, it makes investigation a little tough. Hard to say you “acted responsibly.” The State Department acting as an “enabler” of Blackwater tactics, demands no accountability.

Griffin: We referred it to the DoJ.

Nice guy, huh. Chris Shays destroyed the man. With a hammer.

Chris Shays: Is there a difference between protecting an ambassador where there is not a threat to their lives, and to the challenge that one is in Jordan and other areas in the middle east, is there not a big difference?

Griffin: Some of the people…

Shays: I want you to move the mic closer…

Griffin: I’m sorry..

Shays: MOVE THE MIC CLOSER!

Griffin: Some of the people that are posted around the world are part of our local guard force, and those local guards…

Shays: (cuts him off) You know, you’re not answering the question. I asked is there a difference. You can say yes or no.

Griffin: There’s a huge difference.

Shays: Yes! There is a huge difference. Case closed.

Griffin: Okay

Shays: Let me take the next question, I only have five minutes. It’s an easy answer, THERE’S A BIG DIFFERENCE! Now Mr. Satterfield, isn’t it true the ambassador has responsibility in Iraq for those security personnel.

Satterfield: Indeed he does.

Shays: Would YOU move the mic closer please?

Satterfield: Indeed he does.

Shays: Thank you. If there were sufficient military personnel to provide security, would you still use private contractors?

Griffin: If they received training, then they certainly would be capable of…

Shays: THAT’S NOT WHAT I ASKED! These are basic, simple questions. Would you like to use outside contractors, or the resources of the military? Do you want state department employees to go around in Humvees, or people who aren’t in army uniforms? If you prefer the army, tell me!

Griffin: If they weren’t in humvees and uniforms.

Shays: Do you command them, or would the army command them? Wouldn’t they be under the command of the army? I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

(Griffin looks like he doesn’t know what to say.)

Shays: As a peace corps volunteer, I can say that you don’t want to bring in a high profile military presence. You don’t want to come in in tanks.

Satterfield: Um…yeah…

(everyone looks relieved that “the gentleman’s time has expired.”)

So not only is Erik Prince in a crapload of trouble, but the State Department deliberately covered up for Blackwater and has possibly done so on multiple occasions, all the while allowing the company free reign with zero oversight and all at triple the cost of military forces to the US taxpayer.

Somebody, to put it mildly, is screwed.

Much more on Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince and his testimony before Congress later today, but first Josh Marshall and the fine folks at TPM provide an indispensable primer on the Little Prince.

Erik Prince is 37 years old. He founded Blackwater in 1997 with money he inherited from his father, Edgar Prince, the head of Prince Automative. The elder Prince and his wife were major Republican and conservative activists and funders. And Prince himself co-founded The Family Research Council with Gary Bauer and apparently provided the key early funding for the group.

According to Bauer, “I can say without hesitation that, without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council.”

Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is married is the former Chair of the Michigan Republican Party and her husband is Dick DeVos, failed candidate for governor of Michigan and scion of the DeVos family, founders of Amway and major funders of Republican and conservative causes.

Amway is privately owned by the DeVos and van Andel families. And to give some sense of the scale of their political giving, according to a 2005 Center for Public Integrity study, Dick & Betsy DeVos were the fifth largest political givers in the country during the 2004 election cycle. Richard DeVos Sr. & his wife were ranked third. And Jay Van Andel was ranked second.

Let’s just say they give some real money to the Republican party and its candidates. And of course there are the DeVos Family Foundations which give money to conservative causes.

Back back to Betsy’s brother Erik Prince, founder and CEO of Blackwater. Back in 1990 Prince interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Blackwater’s lobbyist in DC is Paul Behrends, a former Rohrabacher aide who he met when the two worked for the congressman. Later he interned in the first Bush White House. But after doing so, he and his father broke with President Bush and supported the insurgent candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan.

The then-22 year old Prince told the Grand Rapids Press, “I interned with the Bush administration for six months. I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with — homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.”

In addition to running Blackwater Prince also serves on the board of Christian Freedom International.

And as powerful as these massively wealthy GOP donors of the Prince family and friends are — quite literally billionaire political activists of the First Order of Wingnuttia here — Erik Prince is still planning on taking the stand by all accounts.  As I’ve said on many an occasion, the question is “Why?”

What’s driving him?  Professional and personal pride bordering on arrogance?  Marching orders from on high that the dutiful ex-soldier is bound to follow?  Or has a deal already been cut?

We’ll find out in a few hours.

Keep in mind the report made to Waxman’s committee isn’t exactly filled with good news for Blackwater either.

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

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

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

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

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

But here’s the worst part for Blackwater and the GOP:

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

Let the games begin.

Still no White House response on the Blackwater issue, but plenty of news to report in the last 24 hours on the PMC on everyone’s front page.  All of it’s bad news for Blackwater.

First, a new Pentagon contract worth $92 million has gone to Blackwater.

“Blackwater has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future,” said the U.S.’s top-ranking military officer, General Peter Pace, at an afternoon press conference here.

The future arrived just two hours later when the Pentagon released a new list of contracts — Presidential Airways, the aviation unit of parent company Blackwater, was awarded the contract to fly Department of Defence passengers and cargo between locations around central Asia.

The announcement comes as a cloud of suspicion is gathering around the “professional military” firm for its actions as a State Department security contractor in Iraq in which at least eight Iraqis and possibly as many as 28 were killed, including a woman and child.

Last week, the Iraqi government announced that it had revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in the country.

The initial report by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security on the incident was put together by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and details of the event where a car bomb exploded near a meeting attended by officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Some of the Blackwater team hired as security for the officials was involved in the shootout while apparently trying to clear an evacuation path.

Certainly looks like quid pro quo here.  Looks even more like hush money.  And speaking of that “initial report by the State Department” it turns out it was actually written by Blackwater itself.

A Blackwater contractor wrote an initial U.S. government report about how his colleagues killed Iraqi civilians in a September shooting that strained U.S.-Iraqi relations, government and industry sources told CNN.

 The Iraqi government claims private contractors with Blackwater USA, who were guarding a U.S. diplomatic convoy, killed as many as 20 civilians on September 16 in western Baghdad’s Nasoor Square.

The incident produced an outcry in Iraq and raised questions about the accountability of foreign security contractors in Iraq, who under an order laid down by the U.S.-led occupation government are not subject to Iraqi law for actions taken within their contracts.

Blackwater — which provides security to U.S. diplomats — says its employees responded properly to an insurgent attack on a convoy, and the State Department initial “spot report” written by the Blackwater contractor underscores that scenario and doesn’t mention civilian casualties.

However, that account is at odds with what the Iraqis are saying. A senior Iraqi National Police official participating in the Iraqi governmental probe of the shooting said the Blackwater gunfire was unprovoked and the guards fired randomly, killing and wounding several civilians.

The Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, drafted a two-page “spot report” on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy’s Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The TOC — which tracks and monitors all incidents and movements involving diplomatic security missions — has outsourced positions to Blackwater and another private firm, the embassy source said.

No wonder the State Department wasn’t standing by the initial report.  It was Blackwater’s version of the story literally passed off as the government’s.  Again, this looks terrible for the company — is the government employing Blackwater or is Blackwater employing the government?

And just who does Blackwater employ itself?

WASHINGTON — Private security contractor Blackwater USA has had to fire 122 people over the past three years for problems ranging from misusing weapons, alcohol and drug violations, inappropriate conduct, and violent behavior, according to a report released today by a congressional committee.

That total is roughly one-seventh of the work force that Blackwater has in Iraq, a ratio that raises questions about the quality of the people working for the company.

The report, prepared by the majority staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, also says Blackwater has been involved in 195 shooting incidents since 2005, or roughly 1.4 per week.

In more than 80 percent of the incidents, called “escalation of force,” Blackwater’s guards fired the first shots even though the company’s contract with the State Department calls for it to use defensive force only, it said.

“In the vast majority of instances in which Blackwater fired shots, Blackwater is firing from a moving vehicle and does not remain at the scene to determine if the shots resulted in casualties,” according to the report.

The staff report paints Blackwater as a company that’s made huge sums of money despite its questionable performance in Iraq, where Blackwater guards provide protective services for U.S. diplomatic personnel.

Blackwater has earned more than $1 billion from federal contracts since 2001, when it had less than $1 million in government work. Overall, the State Department paid Blackwater more than $832 million between 2004 and 2006 for security work, according to the report.

Blackwater, founded in 1997 and headquartered in Moyock, N.C., is the biggest of the State Department’s three private security contractors. The others are Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, both based in Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs.

According to the 15-page report, Blackwater has had more shooting incidents than the other two companies combined.

And of course all this comes on the eve of tomorrow’s testimony in front of Congress about Blackwater.  Despite the GOP’s efforts to stonewall the testimony, it seems Blackwater founder Erik Prince will indeed testify.

The report was distributed to committee members on the eve of a hearing on private security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater’s founder and chairman, Erik Prince, will be one of the witnesses.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell had no comment on the specifics in the report.

“We look forward to setting the record straight on this issue and others tomorrow when Erik Prince testifies before the committee,” she said.

On Friday seven of the oversight committee’s 18 Republican members called on Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, to postpone the hearing until more is known about a recent incident in Iraq involving Blackwater guards.

On Sept. 16, 2007, 11 Iraqis were killed in a shoot-out involving Blackwater guards protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad. Blackwater says its guards acted in self-defense after the convoy came under attack. Iraqi witnesses have said the shooting was unprovoked.

Several investigations are under way, including one by the State Department and another by a U.S.-Iraqi commission that is also examining the broader issue of how private security contractors in Iraq operate.

In a Sept. 28 letter, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., and six other Republicans said the committee should wait until these investigations are complete.

“We feel it would be irresponsible for the committee to rush to judgment until all the facts are considered,” the letter states.

Rep. Tom Davis or Virginia, the committee’s top Republican, did not sign the letter.

Spokesman Brian McNicoll said Davis has no objection to the hearing taking place because several State Department representatives are scheduled to testify.

In addition to Prince, the witnesses include: David Satterfield, the department’s Iraq coordinator, Richard Griffin, assistant secretary for diplomatic security, and William H. Moser, deputy assistant secretary for logistics management.

Tomorrow’s testimony may be very enlightening…or very infuriating. Will Erik Prince testify before Congress?  He’s refused to do so before, so is he really trying to set the record straight out of pride in his company or is he being led to the gallows in order to spare the President from those baying for Bush and Cheney’s blood?

Something tells me it’s a combination of both.

The thing that continues to surprise me about the continuing Blackwater saga is that the White House and the GOP Right Wing Noise Machine is dead silent about Blackwater.  Only the Pentagon and State Department even bother to mention anything about the company, yet news stories keep popping up daily.

It’s been two weeks now since the Blackwater shooting incident left 16 Iraqis dead.  Not one word out of the White House about it.  And more and more evidence is being presented that Blackwater is now being thrown under the bus, especially as of this weekend.
First we have SecDef Gates cracking down on PMCs.

In a three-page directive sent Tuesday night to the Pentagon’s most senior officers, Gates’ top deputy ordered them to review rules governing contractors’ use of arms and to begin legal proceedings against any that have violated military law.

Gates’ order contrasts with the reaction of State Department officials, who have been slow to acknowledge any potential failings in their oversight of Blackwater USA, the private security firm that protects U.S. diplomats in Iraq and was involved in a Sept. 16 shooting that left at least 11 Iraqis dead.

For years, there have been tensions between mid-level military officers who operate under strict rules and private security firm employees who work in Iraq under less-rigorous guidelines. But Pentagon officials emphasized they do not believe that wrongdoing is widespread among the agency’s 7,300 security contractors or that the armed guards operate with impunity.

However, one senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing internal department debates, said a five-man team that Gates sent to Iraq over the weekend discovered that military commanders there were unclear about their legal authority.

Commanders were not certain whether they had the authority to enforce existing laws, including the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. The officers requested a clarification, the official said, prompting Gates to issue the directive.

“Commanders have UCMJ authority to disarm, apprehend and detain DoD contractors suspected of having committed a felony offense” in violation of the rules for using force, said the memo, written by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England and obtained by The Times.

The Pentagon directive does not affect private security guards under contract to other agencies, including the State Department, which is investigating the Blackwater shooting.

Unsure of the directives?  I wonder why that is.  If I’m a commander on the ground in Iraq, and I know that any chance of success whatsoever rests in winning the hearts and minds of the locals, and I hear tales of PMCs killing civilians and basically undoing ANY progress I’ve helped to make, you better believe I’m gonna ask somebody about what the hell to do to deal with them.

“Unsure of the directives” means that somebody very high up on the chain is telling these ground officers to ignore the PMCs, and these ground officers are politely saying “we’re not going to fry for doing that, you’re not going to Abu Ghraib us.  We’re not going to be the ‘bad apples’ for you.”

Gates knows he’s got a potential mutiny on his hands. Not only are the Iraqis truly pissed off at the PMCs, but the military is clearly not going to tolerate them anymore.  He’s giving a clear, loud warning.  Yes, he’s covering his ass, but he’s doing it by saying that the Pentagon can and will prosecute PMCs.

Meanwhile back home, Blackwater is putting expansion on hold indefinitely.

In more fallout from the Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad that left 11 Iraqis dead, Blackwater USA apparently has stopped its expansion projects.

On Wednesday, the North Carolina private military contractor canceled a $5.5 million deal to buy 1,800 acres of farmland near Fort Bragg, where it was going to set up a training ground for soldiers and corporate executives.

The diplomatic and public relations damage from the shooting, combined with next Tuesday’s scheduled testimony before Congress by Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince, prompted the company to put all new projects on hold, according to the president of the company that had agreed to sell the land to Blackwater.

“Blackwater said they had pulled all new projects off the table because of this shooting in Baghdad and because they were preparing Prince for Congress,” said Wayne Miller, the president of Southern Produce Distributors. “It’s a shame. This would have been good for the economy of North Carolina.”

Methinks they need the money for lawsuits more than land deals at this point.  Blackwater’s in trouble and they know it.  There’s several other shooting incidents they’re being tied to.

Five cases this year in which private Blackwater USA security guards killed Iraqi civilians are at the core of a U.S. review of how the hired protection forces guard diplomats in Iraq, officials said Friday.

Iraqi authorities are also concerned about a sixth incident in which Blackwater guards allegedly threw frozen bottles of water at civilian cars, breaking windshields. No one was killed.

The United States has not made conclusive findings about the incidents, which include a Sept. 16 case in which at least 11 Iraqis died. A State Department official said investigators are not aware of others. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiries are in progress.

The wingers have had more than enough time to formulate a response, but the thunderous, deafening silence means the right wing is conveniently trying to retend PMCs don’t exist in Iraq, because of the fact that you don’t have to spend more than a few minutes to discover that the problem goes much, much deeper than Blackwater.  Any media attention here is bad for the President.  But the plan here is clearly to hang Blackwater out to dry and see if the PMC issue goes away.

The private security firm Blackwater USA brushed aside warnings from another security firm and focused on cost, not safety, before it sent its personnel to escort trucks to Fallujah in 2004, resulting in four American deaths that marked a major turning point in the war, a congressional report said yesterday.

The report comes as Blackwater — the State Department’s prime security force — faces new scrutiny for its role this month in the killing of at least 11 Iraqis. Citing e-mails, fresh interviews and previously undisclosed incident reports, the report by the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform provides details about how cost considerations appeared to shape Blackwater’s decisions that led to the brutal deaths of its employees at the hands of insurgents on March 31, 2004.

For example, the assessment said that Blackwater, then operating under a Defense Department contract, was supposed to use vehicles with armored protection kits, but as of the date of the killings, no such vehicles had been obtained. A Blackwater internal report obtained by the committee quoted an employee who said the contract “paid for armor vehicles” but that “management in North Carolina . . . made the decision to go with soft skin due to cost.”

The report disclosed that another complicating factor was a contract dispute with a different company. The report suggested that Blackwater never intended to armor its own vehicles. Instead, Blackwater employees were told to “string along” the other company in hopes of forcing them out of their contract or giving them “no choice but to buy us armored cars,” according to interviews by the committee staff with Blackwater officials.

“These actions raise serious questions about the consequences of engaging private, for-profit entities to engage in essentially military operations in a war zone,” the committee report said.

So while Erik Prince twists in the wind and the rest of the wingers whistle past the graveyard in hopes that all this nasty stuff goes away, we see the standard GOP scandal-control playbook in action:  disavow and ignore publicly, and leak damaging info privately.

The question is once again will the media do its duty?  Will they follow up and ask questions about ALL the PMCs America has worldwide, or will they fight over Blackwater’s corpse and ignore the real story because they are being told to?

My guess is going to be not only the latter, but that Blackwater coverage won’t even make a dent in the media’s push for war with Iran unless they’re forced to.

Not much time is left.

Enough with the booting, now we’re into the counterstrike.  The Blackwater story is blowing up, and what started out as the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki saying “enough is enough” is turning into “way too much” for the Bushies to handle.

We start with this morning’s front page story in the WaPo.  It seems the State Department and the Military are having major difficulties getting along, and Blackwater is bringing to a head the entire spectrum of differences in the whole “diplomacy versus military” paradigm.

A confrontation between the U.S. military and the State Department is unfolding over the involvement of Blackwater USA in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square Sept. 16, bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions between the military and private security companies in Iraq, according to U.S. military and government officials.

In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department’s authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. “The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they’ve built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event,” the official said.

“This is a nightmare,” said a senior U.S. military official. “We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we’re trying to have an impact for the long term.” The official was referring to the prison scandal that emerged in 2004 in which U.S. soldiers tortured and abused Iraqis.

“It may be worse than Abu Ghraib” is I think putting it mildly.  The events rapidly unfolding now are threatening to reverse even the meagerly defined “gains” made from the escalation in Iraq, and it could unravel the entire planned status quo of our permanent Iraq occupation.

“This is a big mess that I don’t think anyone has their hands around yet,” said another U.S. military official. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don’t particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone — even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis.”

Most officials spoke on condition of anonymity because there are at least three ongoing investigations of Blackwater’s role in the shootings. There are also sensitive discussions between various U.S. agencies and the Iraqi government over the future of Blackwater and other private security firms in Iraq.

A State Department official asked why the military is shifting the question to State “since the DOD has more Blackwater contractors than we do, including people doing PSD [personal security detail] for them. . . . They’ve [Blackwater] basically got contracts with DOD that are larger than the contracts with State.”

According to federal spending data compiled by the independent Web site FedSpending.org, however, the State Department’s Blackwater contracts vastly exceed those of the Pentagon. Since 2004, State has paid Blackwater $833,673,316, compared with Defense Department contracts of $101,219,261.

Yep, that’s right:  Blackwater has pulled down ALMOST A BILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer money and they’re being paid to kill Iraqi civilians. State says Blackwater is the military’s problem.  The Pentagon says that Blackwater is Condi’s baby.  Blackwater is completely radioactive right now and somebody’s got to pay.

That somebody appears to be Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

In the wake of the ongoing Blackwater scandal, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants to have a frank discussion with Erik Prince, the company’s founder. His House oversight committee will hold a hearing on Blackwater on October 2. And it just won’t be a party if Prince doesn’t attend.

Waxman sent Prince a letter today requesting his appearance at the hearing. The little-seen Blackwater official probably won’t take kindly to Waxman’s intent to question “whether the specific conduct of your company has advanced or impeded U.S. efforts.”

The Blackwater hearing offers Waxman the opportunity to link the issue with a different investigation his committee is undertaking. Waxman is also looking into whether the State Department’s inspector general, Howard “Cookie” Krongard, obstructed an inquiry into allegations that Blackwater, on a State Department contract, was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq. Krongard has been invited to an October 20 hearing before the committee.

Indeed, it seems Henry Waxman has his sights set on Condi Rice too.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Cal., charged Tuesday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her aides are trying to impede congressional probes into corruption in Iraq and the activities of controversial private military contractor Blackwater USA.

Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, complained in a letter to Rice that the State Department this week barred its officials from talking to Congress about corruption in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s government unless those discussions are kept secret.

The department also retroactively classified a study drafted by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that reportedly details extensive corruption in al-Maliki’s government, Waxman said.

“Your position seems to be that positive information about the Maliki government may be disseminated publicly, but any criticism of the government must be treated as a national security secret,” Waxman told Rice.

“You are wrong to interfere with the committee’s inquiry,” he wrote.

Of course, Condi’s already ducking one Waxman investigation.  This one she may not be able to get away with.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey disputed Waxman’s version of events.

“There seems to be misunderstanding as to the facts in this matter. The information requested by the committee has been or is in the process of being provided,” Casey said.

On another Waxman complaint, that Rice has refused to testify before the panel, Casey said the department has offered to make three other senior officials available.

Waxman’s committee is also investigating the role of private military contractors in Iraq, including Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater USA.

Blackwater, which has received roughly $700 million in State Department contracts to protect U.S. government civilians in Iraq, is under fresh scrutiny following a September 16 incident in which Blackwater security guards protecting a State Department convoy allegedly shot and killed 11 Iraqi civilians. Blackwater says its employees were returning fire from insurgents, a version of events disputed by the Iraqi government.

Waxman’s panel has requested that Erik Prince, chairman of the Prince Group LLC, Blackwater’s corporate parent, appear before it next Tuesday.

But you’d be insane to think that the State Department would even think about allowing anyone from Blackwater to say a single word under oath.

But in a letter to Blackwater dated September 20-the same day as the panel’s request-a State Department contract officer ordered Blackwater not to disclose information about the contract.

“I hereby direct Blackwater to make no disclosure of documents or information generated under” the State Department contract “unless such disclosure has been authorized in writing,” wrote the contract officer, Kiazan Moneypenny.

She also wrote that State Department and Blackwater officials discussed the matter by phone on September 19 and 20, and that, as a result, “the department’s position on this matter has been further reinforced.”

Moneypenny did not respond to a message left on her office voicemail and officials in the department’s Bureau of Administration, which oversees contracts, referred questions to State Department spokesmen.

Casey said “Blackwater has been informed by the State Department that it has no objection to it providing information to the committee.”

In a related letter to Waxman, an attorney for Blackwater said it might be “difficult, if not impossible” for the company to comply with State’s orders without advance limitations on the kind of questions that will be asked at the hearing.

“We also write today to ask that the committee and its members refrain from asking questions during the hearing that might reveal sensitive operational and technical information that could be utilized by our country’s implacable enemies in Iraq,” wrote attorney Stephen M. Ryan of McDermott, Will & Emery.

So it seems executive privilege extends to people in the government but to government contractors as well.  Nobody in Blackwater can testify because of course it would be breaking Blackwater’s contract with the all powerful unitary executive.  Not even congressional oversight as a check and balance to state department contractors is allowed to be exercised.  Indeed, the argument is that if Blackwater says anything, it’s a national security breach.

But how long can the right make the argument that Bush’s private army of mercs is entitled to the same unassailable protections that the President is (apparently) entitled to?  Do the Bushies really want to give such an obvious test case to the Supremes?  They must be already confident of the legal outcome of this, and that’s what is so terrifying.

For Blackwater in a very real sense would represent Bush’s Praetorian Guard, his SS, his elite enforcement arm.  It would answer to no one but Bush himself.  In a sense, the State Department, America’s diplomatic arm now has its own private army, bought and paid for with our money.  And it’s just one small part of the thousands of PMC mercs serving the executive branch.  No oversight.  No accountability.  No stopping them.  Not subject to the same posse comitatus restrictions on the military.  Not subject to anyone but the President.

Exactly who will Bush turn this army on next?  What about the next President?  How will this all shake out?  

Update [2007-9-26 12:29:59 by Zandar1]: It turns out that of all sources, National Review is reporting that Blackwater may actually be prosecutable under the UCMJ, due to an amendment by Senator Lindsey Graham of all people.

The change regarding the UCMJ was inserted into the 2007 Defense Authorization Act by Senator Lindsay Graham who noted that the change would “give military commanders a more fair and efficient means of discipline on the battlefield. The provision clarifies the Uniform Code of Military Justice to place civilian contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field under court-martial jurisdiction during contingency operations as well as in times of declared war.” Graham is not coincidentally also a reserve Judge Advocate General (JAG) officer.

The amendment resulted in a small but highly significant change to article two of the UCMJ. Previously article two explained military legal jurisdiction over civilians as being conditional according to the following language: “in time of war, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field.” That language has now been altered to read “In time of declared war or a contingency operation, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field.” The amendment also defines “contingency operation” as “a military operation that is designated by the Secretary of Defense as an operation in which members of the armed forces are or may become involved in military actions, operations, or hostilities against an enemy of the United States or against an opposing military force” along with a host of other conditions where the military may be called into action. This is significant, as Congress is loathe to issue a declaration of war anymore. In the case of United States v. Averette, the Court of Military Appeals set aside the conviction of a contractor in Saigon because the conflict in Vietnam was not technically a “time of declared war.”

“It’s the single biggest legal development for the private military industry since its start. It holds the potential, and I emphasize ‘potential’ here, to finally bring some legal status and accountability to a business that has expanded well past the laws,” said Brookings Insitute Fellow Peter W. Singer, who’s both an acknowledged expert on private security forces and a sharp critic of them, back in January.

Seems the old school conservative right doesn’t like the idea of a Presidential private army either, but they say there’s little chance of the Army actually doing anything about Blackwater.

Potential is right, but no one in the military is ready to seize the day and exercise their authority over contractors. One JAG officer I spoke to — who emphasized he was not speaking on behalf of the whole military or offering any explicit legal opinions about the issue — said trying contractors in military courts is “pretty radioactive.”

“I have asked some senior Army prosecutors about it and they laughed and shook their heads about what the prosecution would look like,” he said. “I mean nobody wants to be the first to touch it or try to use it, [it’s] not expressly a criticism of the extension of jurisdiction itself.”

Further confounding the problem is that while the UCMJ was amended in late 2006, the 2007 update of the Manual for Courts Martial offers no clarification on how the new language should be implemented. According to Army Lawyer, an official Army publication, “Subjecting contractor personnel to the UCMJ during all contingency operations appears to constitute a significant change rather than a clarification. No legislative history explains this change. Further, as there is no published guidance, it is unclear how this change will be implemented and precisely what the ramifications will be.” Translation: We’ll let somebody way above our pay grade decide what this means before we start bringing contractors to court — particularly since there are far more legal precedents for protecting civilians from military trials (notably Reid v. Covert), rather than vice versa.

However, the recent Blackwater hubbub illustrates that we may be reaching critical mass within the political, legal and military realms for providing explicit guidelines for how private military contractors should be regulated. In fact, it’s so problematic I suspect Blackwater itself might welcome clarification on this important point, even if the company’s leaders aren’t overjoyed at the prospect of more scrutiny or being encumbered with excess regulation.

Could this be one of those rare issues both the traditional right and the traditional left both agree to hate? If so, there may be a chance on this gaining more ground.

We’ll see.

Every now and then I come across something from the other side that just defies everything, no matter what day of the week the wankery occurs on.

Trust me when I say this is one of those times.
Dan Friedman comes clean…and then drops a dirty bomb on the universe.  He opens up with some fluff about chicken pita vendors in NYC, invariably to give the impressions that Muslims are human beings and all.  Then, he gets into the meat-a of that pita.

Looked at another way, on the eve of our victory nothing moved in Saddam’s Iraq and no Iraqi dared own so much as a BB gun unless Saddam said it was OK.  Thanks to Saddam’s 24-year reign of terror, the country we seized was a pre-pacified nation. If its oppressed populace was not entirely happy to see us, they were physically and psychologically incapable of doing much about it. The remnants of its hostile leadership were on the run or in custody, the hated “Persians” were without any sway, “Iraqi insurgency” and “al Qaeda in Iraq” were two implausible oxymorons. An occupier’s dream, putty in our hands, an Arab nation bloodied and bowed with the man in the street obliged to greet us with polite deference and ask, “hot sauce or white sauce, boss?” America was on top in Iraq — but it would not be for long.

Scary and a little worshippy of fascism, but…it’s Friedman.  This really does constitute an apology on his part.  Sort of.

It was precisely at his triumphant moment when George W. Bush lost Iraq, along with America’s momentum in the war on terror, control of Congress in 2006, and the political assets needed to confront a radical Islamist Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power — a threat that today makes Saddam’s Iraq seem like a petulant child by comparison.

Instead of putting first things first, namely, mounting an occupation modeled on our WW II successes in Germany and Japan, then sealing Iraq’s borders, declaring martial law, preparing for a long-term American regency, restricting movement within the country, and disarming the entire populace, Mr. Bush flew off-course. He parachuted in battalions of bureaucrats and constitutional lawyers, staking all on a rapid handover of power to his Iraqi designees and delivering “democracy” to an ancient people with no corresponding word in its language. In a part of the world where theology is the motive force, and the name of the only religion translates to “submit” in English, the president’s jejune goodwill and misplaced egalitarianism signaled a willingness to replace a hard fist with an open hand. And that’s when the bad guys in the Islamic world, conditioned by the laws of war found in their Quran, looked at each other in utter disbelief and shouted with glee, “last one to Iraq is a rotten egg!”

Yep, Bush blew it.  We used far too few troops (and far too many PMC mercs, but that’s just, oh, everyone.)  We didn’t lock the place down and admit our fascist goal to the world, instead of turning into Bremers Gone Wild, only with people getting shot.

Treating the Iraqis like a conquered source of thrall labor instead of faking them out by “spreading democracy” would of at least been honest.  Never mind dishonesty is basically how we got into this mess, but again, this is a Friedman “apology”.  That’s sort of like a pack of 99 cent Wal-Mart “hotdogs”.  With “meat”.

A well-executed allied occupation would have blunted the rise of today’s lethal insurgency, kept al Qaeda, Iran and Syria on the sidelines, and cost far fewer Americans (and Iraqis) their lives. Also, ironically, it would have given Bush’s political goals in Iraq a better chance to be realized than the remote possibility which exists for them now.

That’s all 20-20 hindsight, sure, but it never hurts to know how we got from there to here — especially when it exposes a dangerously naïve institutional mindset that’s still in place across the entire political spectrum. One that’s balefully clueless about the nature of the Islamic enemy we’re still battling within a struggle that’s going to take many more difficult years to win. That’s why it must be noted that virtually none of the “public intellectuals” on the right have owned up to the mistakes the administration has made in Iraq, and even fewer have owned up to their own benighted prognostications and Pollyannaish advice. There are exceptions – George Will is one.

We weren’t hardass enough, and Bush should have just dispensed with the Codpiece and instead went with the Darth Vader helmet (complete with Cheney over his shoulder as Emperor Palpitatin’).  It would have been intellectually honest.  Instead of lying our way into Iraq, we should have just said “Look, we’re gonna bomb the fuckers and lock down the oil.  Deal with it.  Bush Uber Alles, rock on.”  Seems like a plan to me!

For the most part, though, the Krauthammers and the Podhoretzes of this world are content to blame the media, the frenzied Left and the Democratically-controlled Congress for the avoidable problems we are facing in Iraq. But those are the effects, not the causes, of the President’s previous failures. At the outset, the media was gung-ho, begging to be “embedded” and ride shotgun with our troops, the Left is always in a frenzy, and it was his conduct of the war that cost Bush the Congress in ’06.

And if he had just stopped here, we coulda said “Friedman’s still a putz, but at least he admitted Bush was wrong and that the conduct of the war over the last four years is on his head.”  That would at least be something of an admission that A) Friedman was wrong and that B) Friedman learned from it.

But that wouldn’t be wankery, now wouldn’t it.  Oh no.  Well, okay, it would be wankery, but not worth writing a Sunday Wankery column on a Tuesday.

Instead, we go screaming down the chocolate waterfall in Willy Wanka’s boat.

Now for the good news. All the damaging consequences of all the blunders the President has committed to date in Iraq are reversible in 48- to 72-hours – the time it will take to destroy Iran’s fragile nuclear supply chain from the air. And since the job gets done using mostly stand-off weapons and stealth bombers, not one American soldier, sailor or airman need suffer as much as a bruised foot.

You saw it coming, man.  There’s no damn way Friedman learned ANYTHING.  Bush being unfit for the role of C-in-C?  Nada.  Intellectual honesty about why we’re fighting in the Middle East?  Zip.  Muslims as human beings?  Dude they are so far below us on the evolutionary chain that they can’t even hurt us.

Let’s look downstream the day after and observe how the world has changed.

Oh let’s.

First and foremost, there’s this prospective  fait accompli — and it changes everything. The Iranians are no longer a nuclear threat, and won’t be again for at least another decade,  and even that assumes the strategic and diplomatic situation reverts to the status quo ante and they’ll just be able to pick up and rebuild as they would after an earthquake. Not possible.

Next, the Iranians would do nothing — bupkes. They don’t attack Israel, they don’t choke off the world’s oil supply, they do not send hit squads to the United States, there is no “war” in the conventional sense of attack counterattack. Iran already has its hands full without inviting more trouble. Its leaders would be reeling from the initial US attack and they would know our forces are in position to strike again if Iran provokes us or our allies. They would stand before mankind with their pants around their ankles, dazed, bleeding, crying, reduced to bloviating from mosques in Teheran and pounding their fists on desks at the UN. The lifelines they throw to the Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah and Syria would begin to dry up, as would the lifelines the double-dealing Europeans have been throwing to Iran. Maybe the Mullahs would lose control.

Strong tremors would be felt throughout the Islamic ummah. “Just as we feared, they finally called our bluff. We pushed America to the limit and America pushed us back twice as hard. Looks who’s the dhimmi now! Uh, maybe we need to rethink this 7th century Jihad crap — as well as the Jihadist idiots around here. This is all turning out to be more trouble than it’s worth.”

Bush would have the largest wang of any President ever.  And since I, Dan Friedman, told him to do this, then I, Dan Friedman, would have the largest wang ever.  Of all time.  Me, Dan Friedman.  San Dimas High School football rules!

I got your Friedman Unit RIGHT HERE, baby!

Miracles would be seen here at home. Democratic politicians are dumbstruck, silent for a week. With one swing of his mighty bat, the President has hit a dramatic walk-off homerun. He goes from goat to national hero overnight. The elections in November are a formality. Republicans keep the White House and recapture both houses of Congress.  Hillary is elected president – of the Chappaqua PTA.

Going forward, with Iran’s influence blunted and the insurgents cut off, we end the war in Iraq on our terms. In his first hundred days, the new president reads Iraq the riot act and tells its leaders if they don’t pull themselves together by a date certain, America will decide they’re not worth the candle and we’re going to get out.

From that point on, with our arms free of the quicksand, we can fight the war on terror the way it should have been fought in the first place. Using our enormous edge in weapons, intelligence and technology, and building on it, we launch quick, lethal, ad hoc strikes wherever in the world we determine terrorists are working to harm us, shooting first and asking for permission later.

That’s right, folks.  The only thing that can save us from the Coming Dhimmicratic Horde of Hellary is to bomb Iran so hard that it constitutes images of graphic rape.  Nobody would ever fuck with America again.

So we go from a half-assed…well, more like one-third assed…apology to a Tappa Kegga Bru roofies fantasy orgy involving deep penetrating bunker busters, Hillary, Congress, the entire Muslim World, and the sheer excitement of President Bush making every single one of them into his personal prison bitch.  At the same time.

This isn’t a column.  It’s Ann Coulter fanfiction.

Am I dreaming? I don’t think so. Being too sensible is probably more like it. In any event, I am not creating anything original here. Combine Bush’s recent statements with those of the President of France and it’s not hard to see where this is heading.  Mr. Bush still has time to put America back on the offensive again. But with only a little more than a year left in his term he has no time to lose. Rarely does history provide a failed wartime leader with such a golden opportunity for salvation.

And as frightening as this is, Dan Friedman actually believes this.  Despite the truly terrifying fact that he acknowledges that Bush fouled up the last four years and committed one of the largest tactical and strategic blunders in the history of the US, if not the world (not to mention of the the great war crimes of history)…he says all that goes away the second Bush perpetrates ANOTHER blunder, this time an entire order of magnitude worse.

It’s a snuff fantasy, except Iraqis and Iranians don’t even count as human.  The hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced…that doesn’t matter as long as we destroy a government and foment a massive regional war.  Iran wouldn’t dare attack us back?  They would overrun Iraq, kill everything in their path, and the results would be world chaos.  Friedman is insane, divorced from any semblance of reality.

And yet the leaders of our country actually think like this.  They believe that’s exactly what Bush needs to do…and nobody seems willing to openly try to prevent it.

Sometimes I call out wankery to scream into the blackness.  Sometimes I do it to be funny, other times I do it just because it needs to be done.  This time, it’s a public service in order to inform people that people like this have the President’s ear.

Pray to whatever you believe in that there’s a way to stop this from happening.

The Blackwater story, instead of falling away into the memory hole, instead is now getting far worse.  The Bush Administration’s expected move to pressure the Iraqis into dropping the case and moving on is instead reaching fierce resistance.

Indeed, it seems Blackwater’s transgressions have not only united the Iraqis — Sunni AND Shi’ite — but have united them against the US, not that they weren’t already.  Over the weekend, Blackwater’s situation has gotten markedly worse, and that means the Bush Administration will have to deal with a growing problem that they’re not equipped to deal with.
On Saturday, the Iraqis stated that they had video evidence of Blackwater firing on civilians.

Iraqi investigators have a videotape that shows Blackwater USA guards opened fire against civilians without provocation in an incident last week in which 11 people died, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday. He said the case had been referred to the Iraqi judiciary.

Any sympathy about the “‘Merican boys versus them ragheads” is rapidly evaporating.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said Iraqi authorities had completed an investigation into Thursday’s shooting in Nisoor Square in western Baghdad and concluded that Blackwater guards were responsible for the deaths.

He told The Associated Press that the conclusion was based on witness statements as well as videotape shot by cameras at the nearby headquarters of the national police command. He said eight people were killed at the scene and three of the 15 wounded died in hospitals.

Blackwater, which provides most of the security for U.S. diplomats and civilian officials in Iraq, has insisted that its guards came under fire from armed insurgents and shot back only to defend themselves.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said Saturday that she knew nothing about the videotape and was contractually prohibited from discussing any details of the shooting.

This of course can’t be good.  Video evidence tends to change the way people view you, especially if it’s, say, killing people.  But it gets worse.

Khalaf also said the ministry was looking into six other fatal shootings involving the Moyock, North Carolina-based company, including a February 7 incident outside Iraqi state television in Baghdad in which three building guards were fatally shot.

Not only will this story not “go away” but it’s about to spawn a whole new mess of Blackwater tales, sordid and nasty.  More incidents will only lead to more nasty questions being asked by the media.

And it turns out Sunday that the other shoe dropped: the Iraqis will indeed file charges against Blackwater within the week.

The Iraqi government said it will file criminal charges against employees of security firm Blackwater USA who were involved a gun battle in Baghdad in which civilians were killed, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said Sunday.

The official said the charges will come within a week.

It is not clear how Iraqi courts will attempt to bring the contractors to trial.

Now again, the Bushies will protest that these PMC mercs are immune to Iraqi prosecution and should face US justice.  But frankly, a US court case would be a circus, one where the whole Bush PMC machine would go on trial daily for however long it took, and it would be a complete disaster for them.

It’s getting to the point where the Bushies are going to have to cut a deal here, and for once the Iraqis are holding all the cards, especially now that the news is out that the US was fully aware of the Blackwater problems and ignored them completely.

Senior Iraqi officials repeatedly complained to U.S. officials about Blackwater USA’s alleged involvement in the deaths of numerous Iraqis, but the Americans took little action to regulate the private security firm until 11 Iraqis were shot dead last Sunday, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

Before that episode, U.S. officials were made aware in high-level meetings and formal memorandums of Blackwater’s alleged transgressions. They included six violent incidents this year allegedly involving the North Carolina firm that left a total of 10 Iraqis dead, the officials said.

“There were no concrete results,” Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamal, the deputy interior minister who oversees the private security industry on behalf of the Iraqi government, said in an interview Saturday.

The lack of a U.S. response underscores the powerlessness of Iraqi officials to control the tens of thousands of security contractors who operate under U.S.-drafted Iraqi regulations that shield them from Iraqi laws. It also raises questions about how seriously the United States will seek to regulate Blackwater, now the subject of at least three investigations by Iraqi and U.S. authorities. Blackwater, which operates under State Department authority, protects nearly all senior U.S. politicians and civilian officials here.

U.S. Embassy officials did not respond to several requests to describe what action, if any, was taken in response to the six incidents involving Blackwater. Mirembe Nantongo, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, said the embassy always looks into anything “outside of normal operation procedures.”

So now people are expecting the Bushies to sweep this under the rug, because of course they have before.  The usual right wing tactics of “Well they’re clearly lying” cannot work here, because the Iraqi are our allies — allies the Bush machine put in power to begin with.  The usual canards of “liberal media” and “not reporting the good news from Iraq” and “They’re attacking our troops” simply do not apply to Blackwater at all.  The Democrats, the Iranians, Al-Qaeda, and the media (the usual right wing scapegoats) aren’t involved.  These are our allies accusing us of having a private army that is unregulated.  Literal loose cannons.  Those tend to be bad press.

So we’re at the point where the media is calling Bush out on making this case disappear…because they know this is a huge story and that last week’s killings were but the tip of a huge black iceberg in a red sea of blood.  The Bushies can’t get out of this one easily.  They can’t throw around their weight anymore with the Iraqi government, because if it looks like the Bushies are trying to duck this, the voters will destroy him.

Again, there’s been no White House response about this.  They don’t want near this issue.  It’s not going away.

Nor should it.

The Blackwater story continues to be splashed across the world’s front pages, but now the story has taken a very interesting twist…and it’s not a good one for the NC-based PMC.

A while ago I remarked that getting Blackwater OFF the front pages of the world press was paramount to the Bush noise machine, because further scrutiny into Blackwater and the tens of thousands of PMC troops America employs would only spell bad, bad news for the Bushies.

Indeed, four days after getting the boot, the firm resumed work in Baghdad.

The security firm Blackwater USA today resumed limited escorts of American personnel in the Iraqi capital after an incident in which eight civilians died, the US embassy in Iraq said.

As Blackwater guards returned to the streets of Baghdad after a three-day suspension, the Iraqi interior ministry said it planned to end immunity from prosecution for security contractors.

The interior ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf said the ministry had drafted legislation giving it tighter control over contractors and calling for “severe punishment for those who fail to adhere to the … guidelines”.

Iraq has said it will review the status of all security firms after what it called a flagrant assault by Blackwater contractors in which at least eight people were killed while the firm was escorting a US embassy convoy through Baghdad on Sunday.

The US and Iraq are planning a joint inquiry amid conflicting accounts of what happened. Blackwater said its staff acted “lawfully and appropriately” after coming under attack. But the Iraqi government insisted Blackwater had opened fire on innocent civilians.

It looks like the US has been able to strongarm the Iraqis into letting Blackwater stay…for now.  The Iraqis still want Blackwater to face justice, and they plan to end PMC immunity in the country, but of course now it’s a “joint Iraqi-US investigation” meaning the Iraqis will be told what to do like good little Quislings once again.  After all, power in any “democracy” comes from the barrel of a gun, and both Blackwater and the US have plenty of those.

But here’s where our story gets very odd.  I mentioned back in part one that I didn’t see any way out for the Bushies unless they threw Blackwater to the wolves.  At the same time, they weren’t going to let the Iraqis prosecute the company.  That leaves of course the option of the US prosecuting the firm…but that wouldn’t happen.

Or would it?

Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that employees of Blackwater — the security firm accused of shooting dead up to 20 Iraqi civilians — illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq, according to U.S. government sources.

Security operations by North Carolina-based Blackwater USA, which is hired by the U.S. State Department to guard U.S. staff in Iraq, were suspended this week amid concerns by Iraqi and U.S. government officials over the shootings in Baghdad last weekend. Normal operations resumed Friday, the State Department said.

One U.S. government official said the U.S. attorney’s office in Raleigh, North Carolina, is in the early stages of an investigation that so far focuses on individual Blackwater employees and not the company.

Another senior U.S. government official said the State Department had been cooperating with the prosecutors in the probe.

The first public hint that an investigation was under way came earlier this week in a statement from State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard in response to allegations that he blocked fraud investigations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 “In particular, I made one of my best investigators available to help assistant U.S. attorneys in North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of weapons into Iraq by a contractor,” Krongard’s statement said.

Neither the U.S. attorney nor Blackwater officials had been reached for comment by Friday evening.

The flow of illegal weapons in Iraq has been a major concern in recent months.

Now hold the phone here.  If Blackwater really was doing this, they were doing it with the tacit blessing of the US.  Arming the Iraqis as bribes has been part of our “surge” strategy for months now.  The US military recently “misplaced” hundreds of thousands of weapons and of course nobody bats an eye, but if Blackwater does it…and let’s keep in mind PMCs are there to do the dirty work our men and women in uniform can’t get caught doing…it’s news.

The question is why is this news?  Is it an effort by the US to perform a “controlled burn” on Blackwater, by involving it in an investigation it can measure the pace of, one that doesn’t involve killing civilians all over the front page and doesn’t involve the Iraqi government?  If so, it’s looking like this is going to be another example of the Abu Ghraib Defense:  it was a few bad apples all along.  Blackwater chiefs and most importantly the US government walk away from this.

Or is this an effort to “pile on” the already damaged company by those who are opposed to the next phase of Bush’s war?  After all, the media attention on PMCs in Iraq has now shifted to the next phase:  “What ELSE are these companies up to?”  People are asking questions, and those are questions the Bush Administration can’t afford right now.  When people start asking questions, the answers bring up bigger questions.  Either way, the Blackwater story just grew a whole new set of legs.

McClatchy has more.

Two former Blackwater employees have pleaded guilty in Greenville, N.C., to weapons charges and are cooperating with federal officials who are investigating Blackwater, which is based in the tiny town of Moyock in the northeastern corner of North Carolina.

Two sources familiar with the investigation said that prosecutors are looking at whether Blackwater lacked permits for dozens of automatic weapons used at its training grounds in Moyock. The investigation is also looking into whether Blackwater was shipping weapons, night-vision scopes, armor, gun kits and other military goods to Iraq without the required permits.

A former Blackwater employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the investigation includes a look at whether Blackwater shipped weapons from its Moyock headquarters to Iraq hidden in pallets wrapped tightly in shrink wrap.

Meanwhile, evidence in the original incident involving the deaths of 20 civilians continues to grow, enough so that the Iraqi government is preparing a possible case.

Iraq’s Interior Ministry has completed its investigation of last weekend’s shooting incident involving Blackwater USA security guards and has referred the case to a magistrate to determine whether criminal charges should be filed, a spokesman said Friday.

Abdel Karim Khalaf, the ministry spokesman, said the evidence collected in the case, in which 11 people died and 12 were wounded, includes videotape from nearby cameras. That tape indicates that the Blackwater guards fired first and weren’t responding to an attack, as Blackwater has claimed, Khalaf said.

It’s unclear what would happen if the magistrate decided to press charges in an Iraqi criminal court. Khalaf said the Interior Ministry would push to have the Blackwater guards face charges in Iraq, but current law exempts foreign security companies and their employees from Iraqi jurisdiction.

The Interior Ministry report also may be trumped by a U.S.-Iraqi commission charged with investigating the case. That commission is headed jointly by Iraq’s defense minister, Abdel Qadr al Obaidi, a Sunni Muslim, and Patricia Butenis, the No. 2 diplomat at the U.S. Embassy.

Granted, the Blackwater probe turned into a Friday Night News Dump(tm).  But that doesn’t mean the news has gone away.  This story isn’t over by a long shot.

The Blackwater story keeps growing in both the outrage it is causing and in the political importance of that outrage.  It’s also increasing in the amount of trouble it’s causing for the State Department and the US.

We’re starting to see reaction now from both sides of the argument.  You’d think when an entire country was accusing your company of killing its citizens, that you’d try to show some humility or even remorse.  But not our Blackwater, nope.

If anyone had any illusions about what the State Department’s reaction would be for employing Blackwater, or what Blackwater itself would say, those illusions were largely shattered on Wednesday.
The State Department’s official stance: The “witnesses” are lying, and it’s too hard to investigate a crime in Iraq anyway.

   QUESTION: But you still maintain that this was a defense action in response to an attack. This is — that’s not, apparently, what the Iraqis are saying.

    CASEY: You know, what I know and what Sean said yesterday is the convoy came under attack and there was defensive fire as a result of that.

    There are various — there are eyewitness accounts that say a whole variety of different things as to what the sequence was and where fire came from and all that. That’s what the investigation has to figure out.

    And I don’t — I don’t want to try and assert for you that things happened in a specific order of events, because I just don’t know that’s true.

    QUESTION: OK. This is different from an eyewitness account. This is the Iraqi investigation. So you’re discounting their investigation…

The battle lines have been drawn on Blackwater, and the response from the neocons is pretty breathtaking.  Reason number one why America has to tolerate PMC mercs in Iraq? You’d better if you want our troops home.

Iraqi government restrictions on security contractor Blackwater USA could mean a range of complications for US involvement in the country–potentially even undermining current plans to remove some troops on the ground,  reports the Wall Street Journal in a story by August Cole and Neil King, Jr.

After an incident on Sunday in which Blackwater security personnel killed Baghdad civilians during a fight with insurgents, the government of Iraq announced that it plans to deny the firm permission to continue operations.

“The incident may increase strains between the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki,” said the Journal. “The State Department relies heavily on Blackwater to guard its diplomatic compound within Iraq’s Green Zone and also to provide security for U.S. diplomats as they travel around Iraq. The work often calls for Blackwater to draw on its fleet of armed helicopters, which give it an arsenal that other security contractors lack.”

Coming at an “awkward time” for the White House, according to the Journal, the incident follows on the heels of an announcement last week that the US plans to withdraw as many as 30,000 troops by July.

“As the U.S. diminishes its military footprint,” Cole and King write, “it is almost certain to rely more heavily on private-security companies to guard the tens of thousands of nonmilitary U.S. personnel working in Iraq.”

“Security contractors, who are more lightly armed than their American military counterparts, play an important role protecting not just U.S. officials but also employees of the many companies working on rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure,” continued the Journal.”Blackwater is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq, with some 1,000 contractors there, most of them American. Picking up any slack should Blackwater’s operations be interrupted or cease would be a tall order for rivals.”

“The reason there is such a strong business for personal security details is that the United States military and the Diplomatic Security Service don’t have the manpower to fulfill the requirement,” Ray DuBois, a former undersecretary of the Army, told the paper.

Now that’s a hell of an admission.  With tens of thousands of PMC mercs in-country, we’re supposed to believe that the removal of Blackwater’s 1,000 troops will in fact delay the President’s “planned withdrawal of military troops”?  Are these Blackwater personnel that vital AND that irreplaceable?  If that’s the case, why isn’t the military handling it?

It’s because we’re in over our heads in Iraq…badly. We don’t have enough people, even with the surge and even with the MASSIVE influx of PMC mercs. We need all those personnel just to keep Iraq from falling completely apart, and keeping the Maliki government stable for the express purpose of having a base to use for future Middle East wars, and we can’t do it. We’re being told that 30,000 brave US troops made a difference in the surge, when the whole time we’ve been fighting on a shoestring and using tend of thousands of paid mercs to shore up our forces.

And if the Maliki government starts becoming a problem, and standing in the way? They start becoming the enemy too. It seems ludicrous, the government WE installed suddenly becoming the bad guys.

And yet that’s exactly what we’re being told: if the Iraqis kick Blackwater out, well then the Decider may not decide to bring our men and women in uniform home.  Once again we see the right using the left’s logical argument against America, in this case the argument that Iraq’s security situation is really much much worse than the government is admitting.

And now the government is basically admitting it.  They are admitting that we can’t walk around Baghdad without 1,000 Blackwater troops at all times.

The bizarre logic here escapes me. The surge is working so well that our own CIA agents — trained for months at “The Farm” in Virginia to learn how to kill a man with a ballpoint pen, and that sort of thing — are now afraid to walk out the front door without a bevy of allegedly trigger-happy men toting machine guns and firing indiscriminantly?

My God, what was it like in Baghdad before the awesome power of the surge?

Indeed, Will Bunch points out the towering hypocrisy coming from the Wet Your Pajamas crew.

Movements of key CIA station personnel in Baghdad–along with most State department diplomats and teams building police stations and schools–have been frozen for the second day in a row, according to a State department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Essentially, the CIA, State department and government contractors are stuck inside the International Zone, also known as “the Green Zone,” in Central Baghdad. Even travel inside that walled enclave is somewhat restricted.

Pajamas Media is the first to report that the CIA station is all but motionless–as meetings with informants and Iraqi government officials have been hastily cancelled.

So that’s the angle we’ll be hearing about for the next few news cycles:  if you don’t let America keep its barely tame PMC killers in-country, then you hate our troops, because of you we won’t be able to bring them home.  You hate America because you won’t let our diplomats get the protection they need to do their “diplomatic surge” job.  You’re a horrible person.

Think I’m overplaying?  Those accusations will be leveled at our Iraqi allies.

Commenting on this, Matt Yglesias opines, “I don’t think one need necessarily see this as an incredibly deliberate development.” It’s an accident, you see, that “has, increasingly, led our strategy to evolve in a divide and rule direction rather than a nation-building one.”

I beg to differ. This administration has no more intention of “nation-building” in Iraq than it has in Iran: in both cases, the “strategy” is nation destruction, which is, after all, what the military does best. Civilians build nations: soldiers tear them down. It’s elementary, my dear Watson, that our policy of fomenting civil war in Iraq is no “accident.” Iraq is useful to us for one reason and one reason only: as a launching pad for the next war.

That war won’t launch, however, with the Maliki government standing directly in its path, and so our former sock puppets will have to be ditched: that confrontation is coming. The Iraqis, however, would have to be brain-dead not to see this, so it looks to me like they’re about to pull off a preemptive strike: the expulsion of the Blackwater “private” security firm for alleged atrocities carried out against Iraqi civilians may be the first step, with the second step being a request from the Iraqis that the U.S. military follow in Blackwater’s wake (or, perhaps, just the threat of such a request).

Pat Buchanan posed the pertinent question some time ago when he asked: What do we do if and when the Iraqi government asks us to leave?

The answer is: depose them and install more compliant sock puppets, ones who don’t talk back (or bite the hand that manipulates them, to mix a metaphor). With Iyad Allawi, the CIA’s former fave rave, waiting in the wings, and the Lobby pushing furiously for a U.S. attack on Iran before Bush leaves office, the wheels of the Mesopotamian centrifuge are spinning faster and faster, and it won’t be long before the whole place comes apart at the seams…

Which suits the Americans just fine. A stable Iraq, with a more-or-less functional central government presided over by the Shi’ite majority, would not countenance an American attack on Iran or Syria. A country in chaos, however, has no choice but to stand by and watch.

And as usual, Justin Raimondo there has the truth of it.  Long term, this could be the event used to tie Maliki’s Shi’a government to Shi’a Iran, and behind all this, Iran is still the heart of the issue.  Time is growing short for Bush to hit Iran before he leaves office.

The Blackwater incident, and the Iraqi response to it, may be the excuse the Bushies have been looking for to get rid of Maliki and bring in Ayad Allawi (again), presumably in order to bless the US efforts in going after Iran.  Getting Blackwater and the PMCs off the front pages of America and getting “Maliki in bed with Iran” stories on is the goal.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Because the more the PMC issue stays on the front pages of America, the more Bush’s private army of barely legal thugs looms over America’s psyche, the psyche of a country founded in opposition to this kind of treatment, then the more chance there is of a critical mass finally being reached.

The Blackwater incident is clearly far more significant than I originally thought, and it’s just now coming around how important it could be to America’s and Iraq’s future…and Iran’s.

Let’s not forget that in the end, our government unleashed these killers on Iraq.

Few people not employed by Blackwater know more about the rising world of private military companies than Robert Young Pelton, author of Licensed To Kill, an exploration of military contracting in the war on terrorism. Pelton told me it’s a mistake to point a finger at Blackwater for Sunday’s debacle in Mansour without looking at the role of the State Department — which, after all, pays Blackwater to protect its diplomats. State doesn’t want to take chances with its peoples’ lives in the chaos of Iraq.

Blackwater’s rules of engagement “are set by State and are different than other security contractors who use the Military Rules of Engagement and Rules of Force,” Pelton says via e-mail. “State went from a kinder, gentler Rules of Force (they were told to shoot flares, throw water bottles or wave a flag to warn off motorists) to shoot if a threat is imminent with no warning shots required. They are supposed to use aimed shots and have to file a report if there is any discharge of a weapon.” The State Department has said that Blackwater fired warning shots in Sunday’s Mansour attack at an approaching car.

As quoted by the New York Times, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that security companies in the department’s employ will, when under attack, “respond with graduated use of force, proportionate to the kind of fire and attack that they’re coming under.” The rules of engagement for contractors in Iraq are much less restrictive than those for the U.S. military. An ex-Legionnaire named Anthony Hunter-Choat, who used to supervise security for the Pentagon’s contracting office in Baghdad, created the first rules of engagement for Iraq security contractors. According to Pelton, Hunter-Choat said in 2003, “if they shoot, shoot back.”

That’s a standard that, so far, hasn’t been met with objections from the State Department. “Its important to note that [State Department] or Embassy security details work in close conjunction with the State Department security staff (Diplomatic Security Services) and the U.S. military, so it’s incorrect to portray Blackwater as a lone actor in all of this,” Pelton says.

Is there any wonder why the Iraqis are pissed off enough to finally tell us to take these guys out of the country now?  Is there any real doubt as to the future plans for these PMC troops in regards to Iran?  The PMC issue is a critical point here, and much more attention needs to be paid to it by progressives, because lord knows the other side is going to literally use it as a weapon. Any future wars launched from Iraq will include PMC mercs, because America won’t tolerate losses of our “brave men and women” in uniform. Paid mercs on the other hand? Not so much sympathy there if lost, not so much sympathy for them being there as part of our Army. Bush’s plans require them, but they require them being there under the radar. The Iraqis just blew their cover, even though they’ve been the 800-pound armed gorilla in the room for 4 years now. Make no mistake, Blackwater on the front page is a direct threat to Bush attacking Iran. Even more so is the Maliki government directly threatening the war plans by making a stink over Blackwater (as they have every right to do). They’re just puppets after all, not real people, right?

This just keeps getting worse, and it’s going to get a lot worse quickly.

The Blackwater Security story keeps getting worse for the Bushies.  As I said in parts 1 and 2 of the story,  Blackwater is turning into the volcanic vent that’s spewing out all the bad blood between the Iraqis and the US PMCs, and by proxy, the US.

Now it’s looking like there’s much, much more to this story after a few days.  It’s not going to go away, and most importantly the story may allow for some serious debate about the war that finally includes the tens of thousands of PMC mercs America employs in Iraq, a virtual second army.

The question is now “How does having this private army on the front pages of the world press relate to Bush’s plans to hit Iran?”
Despite calls that Blackwater isn’t going anywhere due the pull they have with Bush, Maliki continues to play hardball.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on the U.S. to replace Blackwater, the security company that protects State Department staff in Iraq, after the firm was involved in a shooting incident he called a “criminal act”.

“The Americans should hire another company to protect their people,” al-Maliki said in a news conference aired today on state television. The “criminal act” wasn’t the first involving the company, he said.

If only the Dems had this level of spinal fitness.  Sure, replacing Blackwater with yet another PMC won’t make too much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but getting them out would represent a major victory for Maliki as the leader of a strong central sovereign government…after all, that’s the job we put him in, even as ridiculous as the notion of a “strong central government” in Iraq is.

Wouldn’t that be something, the Iraqis from all political and sectarian walks of life banding together politically over kicking out American mercs preying on all of them?

Regardless of the political aspect, the situation in Iraq concerning reports coming out of the Sunday firefight is looking increasingly grim for Blackwater.

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.

The report, by the Ministry of Interior, was presented to the Iraqi cabinet and, though unverified, seemed to contradict an account offered by Blackwater USA that the guards were responding to gunfire by militants. The report said Blackwater helicopters had also fired. The Ministry of Defense said 20 Iraqis had been killed, a far higher number than had been reported before.

A company like this really trades on its professional reputation, and the Iraqis are clearly saying that Blackwater’s reputation is mud.

“There was not shooting against the convoy,” said Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government’s spokesman. “There was no fire from anyone in the square.”

A State Department spokesman, Edgar Vasquez, said he had not heard of the report and repeated that the department was conducting an investigation supported by the American military. A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.

“Let these folks do the investigation and get all the facts,” Mr. Vasquez said, “and if department procedures were not followed, after the facts have been gathered we would decide what action to take.”

The shooting, which took place on Sunday, has angered Iraqi officials and touched off a harsh debate about private security companies, which operate outside Iraqi law, a privilege extended to them by Americans officials while Iraq’s government was still under American administration. Blackwater, which guards all top American officials here, had its work suspended, and Iraqi officials agreed to rewrite the rules to make the companies accountable.

“We do understand that the security companies are subject to high levels of threat and they do a good job at protection, but this does not entitle them to immunity from Iraqi laws,” Mr. Dabbagh said. “This is what the Iraqi government would like to review.”

This is almost too good, really.  There’s literally nothing the Bushies can do at this point without making the situation worse, and I’m seriously wondering if there’s any way they can get out of this without having to throw Blackwater to the gators.

If there is a way out, it’s the US protesting that the Iraqis are making things worse.

The alleged killing of Iraqi civilians by guards from contractor Blackwater USA will make it harder for all private security companies to operate in the country, officials from other firms involved in the work said Wednesday.

But they welcomed the idea that the shooting could prompt greater regulation of security contractors in Iraq, who are widely used by foreign officials and companies for protection, but are viewed by many Iraqis as mercenaries.

Anger is rising in Iraq over the shooting by Blackwater security guards near a State Department motorcade in Baghdad over the weekend. Details have not been released, and unconfirmed reports vary from Blackwater guards opening fire on a car that failed to follow an order to stop, to a gunfight between Blackwater employees and militants.

The Iraqi Ministry of Defense said 20 Iraqis were killed.

Gosh, it’s hard out there for a merc.  Those Raghead Sunzabitches keep trying to kill us, and we just don’t know why…

Well, the problem is if that doesn’t hold water for our troops, which really are an occupation force, then it holds even less for the army of PMC mercs in Iraq.  The Iraqis are staking out their territory and clearly Maliki is making political hay at Bush’s expense.  Indeed, the Bushies  are walking on eggshells in Baghdad.

The United States on Tuesday suspended all land travel by U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials in Iraq outside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, amid mounting public outrage over the alleged killing of civilians by U.S. security provider Blackwater USA.

The move came even as the Iraqi government appeared to back down from statements Monday that it would order Blackwater’s 1,000 personnel to leave the country — depriving U.S. diplomats of security protection essential to working in Baghdad.

”We are not intending to stop them and revoke their license indefinitely, but we do need them to respect the law and the regulation here in Iraq,” government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told CNN.

The U.S. order confines most American officials to a 3.5-square-mile area in the center of the city, meaning they can’t visit U.S.-funded construction sites or Iraqi officials elsewhere in the country except by helicopter. The notice didn’t say when the suspension would expire.

Many Iraqis dismissed Blackwater’s contention that its guards were attacked by armed insurgents and returned fire only to protect State Department personnel.

”We see the security firms … doing whatever they want in the streets. They beat citizens and scorn them,” Baghdad resident Halim Mashkoor said. ”If such a thing happened in America or Britain, would the American president or American citizens accept it?”

There’s your money quote right there.  Even the most rabid winger has to honestly say “There’s no way I’d tolerate foreign mercenaries shooting up my country or messing with my family.”  And I think this has the potential to really, really hurt the Bushies to the point where the dialogue on Iraq becomes based on the bad things we’ve accomplished in Iraq, not the good things.

If we need these mercs in there even with the surge, then the security situation in Iraq is not improving.  In fact, the “real” surge has been in mercs over the last year.  When you hear that the President escalated the conflict with another 30,000 troops, understand that the reason these troops were able to go out and do patrols is because the tens of thousands of mercs are holding the forts down.

And there’s virtually no oversight on the 150,000 mercs in the country.  The Iraqis want this oversight now.  Notice the only response from the Bushies so far has been through Condi Rice.

Condi Rice personally apologized to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for the killing of 10 Iraqis by Blackwater guards and promised that steps would be taken to ensure the tragedy was not repeated. The Iraqis are from all accounts absolutely furious about the Blackwater cowboys running around their country armed and dangerous and acting with impunity. The State Department, which employs Blackwater, is highly embarrassed and has ordered State Dept. personnel in Iraq not to circulate for the time being. Debate is raging over whether Iraq has the right to try the apparently trigger-happy civilian security men of Blackwater.

Now here’s the thing.  If the Bushies admit they need Blackwater and the PMCs in Iraq, that there’s a private army with no oversight in a foreign country killing foreign people with no consequences, then they are fucked.  The more America reads in the press that there’s “Bush’s private army” killing people in Iraq with no honor or justice or discipline that our troops are supposed to be subjected to, the more people will start demanding we yank the plug on this whole deal.

It’s one thing to say “support the troops”.  It’s entirely another thing to say “support Bush’s paid army of thugs”.  Bush has got to make this story go away ASAP for him and he knows this.  The fact you have yet to hear a White House response after 48+ hours should tell you everything you need to know:  the White House doesn’t want to touch this one.

But here’s some very sobering thoughts on the whole issue.  We’re already seeing some evidence today that Bush is still trying to hit Iran, the theory is an accidental war may pop up.  What better source of an “accident” then 150,000 PMC mercs in Iraq, with no oversight?

The left — and much of the old-school, realist right — fears that Bush means to bomb Iran sometime between now and next spring. Both would like to rally public opinion against the strike before it happens. The neoconservative right, meanwhile, is asserting that we will bomb Iran but that we need to get to it posthaste.

But both sides are advancing scenarios that are politically useful to them, and both sides are wrong. Despite holding out a military option, ratcheting up tensions with Iran about meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan, and deploying carrier strike-force groups in the Persian Gulf, the president is not planning to bomb Iran. But there are several not-unrelated scenarios under which it might happen, if the neocon wing of the party, led by Vice President Cheney, succeeds in reasserting itself, or if there is some kind of “accidental,” perhaps contrived, confrontation.

One of the reasons so many believe action is near is the well-known neoconservative preference that it be so. There is still a strong neoconservative faction within the Bush team, and their movement allies outside the administration, such as Michael Ledeen, John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz, have openly advocated striking Iran before it can develop nuclear weapons. The neoconservatives believe that in the end, Bush’s team will indeed launch a military strike against Iran, or will nudge Israel to do so.

Attention Congressional Democrats:  The time to strike on a withdrawal timetable is now.  This is the most off-balance the Bushies have been in a very, very long time.  They don’t know what to do.  The concept of the Iraqis actually standing up to Bush on anything has knocked the pilings out from under the house of cards.

If we don’t convince the Democrats to act, well…

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a “nearly inevitable” attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

They are doing exactly this during September and October in a series of meetings organized by the American Enterprise Institute on Iran and Iraq designed to reemphasize the case for hawkish, interventionist deployments in Iraq and a military, regime-change-oriented strike against Iran. And through Op-Eds and the serious political media, the “bomb Iran now” crowd believes they must undermine those in and out of government proposing alternatives to bombing and keep the president and his people saturated with pro-war mantras.

We should also worry about the kind of scenario David Wurmser floated, meaning an engineered provocation. An “accidental war” would escalate quickly and “end run,” as Wurmser put it, the president’s diplomatic, intelligence and military decision-making apparatus. It would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict — Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That kind of war is much more probable and very much worth worrying about.

The question is, what kind of monkey wrench is Maliki’s standing up to Blackwater truly going to turn out to be, the one that facilitates a true national effort towards getting us out, or being the catalyst that puts us on path to Tehran once and for all?