When will the presidential candidates from either party acknowledge the existence and extent of private contractors in Iraq?

Peace,
st john

Oh, great!

Now they will be transferred back to the US just in time for extra-legal outsourcing of police functions. Have you noticed the sudden uptick in stories about 'understaffed' police departments around the country?

Just imagine what the Blackwater version of crowd control will be if we protest.

New Orleans was just the beginning.

Remember, employees of this firm are NOT subject to any laws - anywhere.

Great news. It will be interesting to see Blackwater try to squirm out of this one.

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http://antiwar.com
http://hungersite.com

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"The time for war has past."
The World Teacher
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This could get interesting. I notice that all the comments about pulling the license and prosecuting those involved come from officials in the Maliki government. How much that is countered or supported by the US government will be interesting.

Usually an AP article is just full of comments from unnamed US Gov officials. This one has no comments except some vague comments acknowledging there was an attack.

And of course the interesting sidebar is that no one is safe in Iraq. Not even State Dept officials with the most outlandish private security money can by. Just another day in an Indiana market.

Can the Iraqi government do that, revoke their ability to operate in Iraq? I thought the US is the occupying force and can do whatever it wants.

Please dear God let it be true that the Iraqis have the power to stop Blackwater.

Bet the commander in chief and his generals never saw that one coming - better get those draft papers dusted off!

How can a company be immune from responsibility?

Someone is pulling the wool over our eyes!

How can a company be immune from responsibility?

Easy - company law, incorporate your company somewhere with lax laws, make sure that place has no law regarding corporate manslaughter, etc, etc.

I just heard this news story on the radio. Wouldn't it be ironic if the al-Maliki government arrested the Blackwater mercenaries directly involved and turned them over to the Iraq Justice Ministry for a "fair" trial?

Condi is already on the case. Just heard she'll be calling al-Maliki tout suite. Love to be a fly on the wall for that convo....The CNN talking heads are in a lather with such questions as "What will the American contractors that Blackwater protects do?" "This is very serious", "Blackwater performs vital security functions" The spin is already spinning...

Ha. Just went to the Blackwater site (http://www.blackwaterusa.com/) and clicked on 'Contact Us'. Got 'Service Unavaiable'. Wonder why?

I think that every cent of profit they've realized should be re-distributed to the families of the innocents they've killed.

Blackwater are running black operations in Iraq. Their job is to make sure that chaos continues in Iraq so that 1: it can continue milking the US taxpayers for the exorbitant fees they charge, and 2) give the Bush admin all the reason to maintain forces in Iraq because they can't secure themselves.

Sometimes you have to sit and wonder why these two factions, sunnis and shias in Iraq, are fighting each other when they were living peacefully with each other for so long. There were a lot of inter-sect marriage during Saddam's time. What changed now. This smells like the same tactics being used by the Isrealis in dividing the Palestinians into two factions too. Hmmmm....a classic case of Imperial tactics.

The quote below is not entirely correct. The US military went in to Falluja, a town that suffered terribly in 1991. One incident alone, people were queuing up at a gas station to buy parafin for lamps, US planes flew very low and bombed the gas station. They knew exactly what they were doing. In the ensuing inferno, people rushed to help, including those from the local hospital. The planes again flew low, and bombed again - the helpers.

US troops were never going to be welcomes in Falluja. But they took over a school. A high building. Schooling is all, in Iraq. After all, it is 'the cradle of civilisation.' Not only did they take over and defile the school, paint crosses, pee and worse (news, websites) but took up on top of the building,where they could look down into people's yards, where the women, uncovered heads etc,flimsy clothes, in the heat and privacy of their home, sat, talked, washed, cooked.What a shoddy, shameful violation of privacy by the soldiers.

The incensed residents held a wholly unarmed demonstration outside the school protesting. Nineteen I think, were shot by the 'liberators'. At the same time, either that day or just after (doung this in haste, on top of head) General Abizaid was to visit. For what ever reason, he didn't, but Blackwater's mercenaries did. And they paid the price for the occupation of the school, the shooting of the demonstrators - and indeed for the fact that they were allies in an entirely illegal war and answerable to no authority.

Their killing and hannging over the bridge was appalling. But so are the occupation's brutalities without end. They, since they are in Iraq illegally, anyway, can avoid being brutalised, they can go. Iraqis have to live with what the invasion has unleashed, after they have lived together for a thousand years.

'The 2004 battle of Fallujah - an unsuccessful military assault in which an estimated 27 U.S. Marines were killed, along with an unknown number of civilians - was retaliation for the killing, maiming and burning of four Blackwater guards in that city by a mob of insurgents.'

If this results in the criminal prosecution of Blackwater thugs it will be quite a precedent. Perhaps Bush will be next, followed by Cheney, then other members of the White House cabal, then assorted neocons behind the scenes, then much of Congress, and of course the Pentagon, ETC.

Justice will then be carried out in accordance with Islamic law.

There can be no place in a Liberal democracy for private armies. Blackwater/ Black & Tans and gangs like them must be stamped out - they've no right to exist, anywhere.

Does Cheney want Blackwater in Iraq? Yes. Thats all you need to know.
I do have a good way of giving them their come-uppance. Send the whole Blackwater force deep into Iran, tell them to start shooting things up. Whoo boy, would'nt that be interesting to watch. Hmm..there could be a down side to that. They might qualify for workmans comp.

Blackwater, Dyncorp, Triple Canopy - I believe all these murderous mercenaries are banned by the Geneva Convention. These hired hit men don't work for free but are paid for by our congress. Perhaps, when it is time to rid the world of evildoers, We-The-People should start there.

This is the best news in a long time...and unexpected too. Gives me much hope that "unseen forces" are definitely involved.
Another bit of good news: OJ in jail without bail..and maybe imprisoned for 30 years.
YEAH!!

I'm wondering why some nation doesn't bring war crimes charges against the owner(?) and why not certain U S administration indiviuals. That would at least put some pressure on our government to change tactics.

Whatfools: Congress does not pay for these mercenaries. Taxpayers pay for them, as well as for Congress. They are indebted to us, the taxpayers for every cent they can burn. With no oversight to control the spending on privatized war machines the taxpayers will be paying for lord-only-knows what for the rest of their lives as well as their children and their children's children.

You can bet al-Maliki is being threatened with dethroning if he doesn't shape up and allow Blackwater to continue laundering those billions for the Bushgang...

This has been the best news i've read in awhile.

Hopefully the Bush administration will oppose this move by the "democratic" Iraqi government, and do everything in their power to try to stop it. That will just make the Bush admin look so bad.

and can we stop using the doublespeak and euphemisms.

These people are government hired and taxpayer funded mercenaries. That is the reality of what they do. Not a "security firm," or "private contractor." A private contractor is a (re)contruction company. And a security firm would, in a democratic society, be the police. Blackwater is neither.

Government hired and taxpayer funded mercenaries. And notice how nearly all Washington politicians, included Bush himself, and all his neo-con supporters have been absolutely silent and mum on this issue. They know it's wrong, and they know they're wrong.

Give me a break... the Iraqis are powerless against a powerful Bush contributor. Who do they think they are? A truly independent government not controlled by Bush? Blackwater will get a slap on the wrist and continue to operate there with impunity.

I'm sorry, did somebody say "Blackshirts"?

We have become what we despised most: FASCISTS!!!

And here are three people who LOVE GWBush and Crime Family:

1. The brainwashed by propaganda sheeple who still support Bush Co. Pity them.
2. Huge corporations, the actual force behind US policy. Fear them.
3. Hitler "Mein Gott they exposed the concentration camps on TV and the Americans still let it continue?" Watch him, else it's what we will become.....

will be interesting to see how long until they get re-instated.

Just why is a private security company guarding State Department officials?

Be nice to BlackWater American's - they know where you live.

The Iraq Blackwater Test
Written by Larry C. Johnson
Monday, 17 September 2007
by Larry C. Johnson

Depending on whether the Blackwater security firm stays in Iraq will inform us whether Prime Minister Maliki has any power or is just a U.S. puppet. My money is on the puppet. Over the weekend Blackwater contractors escorting a State Department/US Embassy Baghdad convoy got into a shoot out. Spencer Ackerman at TPM reports that:

Yesterday's incident involved an insurgent attack on a State Department convoy in the Sunni neighborhood of Mansour in western Baghdad. Blackwater personnel guarding the motorcade returned fire — "to defend themselves," according to a State Department official quoted by The Washington Post. A Post reporter on the scene in Mansour witnessed Blackwater's Little Bird helicopters "firing into the streets." Almost immediately, an Interior Ministry spokesman said the company's license to operate in Iraq would be revoked.
First problem. Blackwater does not have a license to operate in Iraq and does not need one. They have a U.S. State Department contract through Diplomatic Security. Instead of using Diplomatic Security officers or hiring new Security officers or relying on U.S. military personnel, the Bush Administration has contracted with firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and others for people capable of conducting personnel security details. State Department is not about to curtail the contract with Blackwater, who is tightly wired into Washington. Plus, State Department simply does not have the bodies available to carry out the security mission.Second problem. The Iraqi government has zero power to enforce a decision to oust a firm like Blackwater. For starters, Blackwater has a bigger air force and more armored vehicles then the Iraqi Army and police put together. As Spencer Ackerman reported, Blackwater's little bird helicopter (an aircraft normally used by U.S. special operations forces) that was firing mini guns at Iraqi targets on the ground this past weekend. I can only imagine how Americans would react if there were Russian, Chinese, Mexican, or French security firms running around the United States and getting into firefights in tough neighborhoods, such as South Central Los Angeles. We would just shrug our shoulders and say nothing. Right?

Yeah, that's what I thought. This incident will enrage Iraqis and their subsequent realization that they are impotent to do anything about it will do little to support the fantasy that the surge is working. There are some Iraqis who genuinely want to run their own country. But we are not about to give them the keys to the car. Blackwater is staying.

Pollinate

Just ask the Romans how well it worked out for them once their Mercenaries had to be "retired" and called off of duty?

Eh?

How in the hell did we end up with these guys? Send them back home to earn a real living like everyone else.

I think what also is worth noting is a recent article discussing how the DOD failed its accounting audit. Yet again, "$295 million appeared in the books, but nobody could account for where the money went." In fact, the accounting was so shoddy, that the audit could not be completed, and each department had to be given a "disclaimer" noting delinquency. The Dept. of Homeland Security also miserably failed its audit and too had to be issued "disclaimer" notices. And yet, the Bush Administration has to contract with mercenary businesses like Blackwater. The corruption is just sickening!!

BLIGH, we better listen to what MASTERSHAKE and JJPETER just wrote.

Wanted:

Big, brute, racist, 'merica lovin', pick-em up drivin', shot gun totin' white men with an ignorant mean streak running right down to their balls - for fun assignment overseas where you get to kill "ragheads" and 'ferinors' who speak jibberish, bow and scape to some evil god, and eat wierdo food.

Pay is commencerate with the above mentioned mean streak.

Send your resume to:

BlackWater Human Resources
1 BlackWater Way
Murdering Bay, NC 23443

To me this is not good news.
This is a setup. Soon we'll have 25,000 mercenary thugs here to control the protesting when we attack Iran.
Connect the dots. Do you really think al-Maliki ordered them out? He hasn't done a damn thing since he was 'elected'! The man is politically impotent.
We're pulling Blackwater out to work for Homeland Security. Things are about to get bad.

Can we kick them out of the US now too??

Contractor Shooting Incidents on Iraqis

Monday September 17, 2007 7:46 PM

By The Associated Press

A look at some of the incidents involving private contractors firing on Iraqi civilians:

- September 2007: Contractors believed to be working for North Carolina-based security firm Blackwater USA kill eight Iraqi civilians and wound 13 in a firefight after a bombing near a State Department motorcade in Baghdad. The Iraqi government says it is revoking the firm's license.

- May 2007: A Blackwater employee fatally shoots an Iraqi civilian deemed to be driving too close to a company security detail. A company spokeswoman says that based on incident reports and witness accounts, the employee acted lawfully and appropriately.

- December 2006: A drunken Blackwater employee fatally shoots a bodyguard for Shiite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, Iraqi and U.S. officials say. The incident is under investigation.

- 2006-2007: Two employees of Virginia-based Triple Canopy accuse their supervisor of shooting at Iraqi civilians for amusement after saying he was ``going to kill somebody today.'' The company fires all three employees for failing to immediately report incidents involving gunfire.

- 2005-2006: Former employees of Custer Battles, a Rhode Island-based firm, accuse co-workers of firing indiscriminately at civilians and crushing a car filled with Iraqi children and adults while trying to make their way through a traffic jam. The company denies the accusations.

- December 2005: Employees of London-based Aegis Defense Services post videos on the Internet showing company guards firing at Iraqi civilians from a moving vehicle. Aegis says the shootings were within profter they allegedly fired on U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. The guards are released after three days and sent back to the U.S. None are charged.

And so it goes. . . there are a lot of American made antichild landmines that need attending to. . . perhaps a redeploynent of thugs is in order.

Congress does pay for this atrocity with the borrowed tax money of our grandchildren. And all this time we thought that slavery was prohibited by our constitution. Ha.

Please consider contacting and encouraging all the Senators who are supporting legislation to investigate and oversee wartime contracts and their private contractors. Details and the latest list of supporters are at Senator Webb's website (scroll down to it) @ http://webb.senate.gov/

THANKS.

Isn't the latest 50 billion beggery from bush for the 'TROOPs' really for these murdering scum like BlackWater et all?

Not another thin, f'in dime!

Do you hear DEMOCRATS????

This is a goodnews to the people of Iraq and the peace and justice-loving poeple around the world. Unless this "contract killing machine" called Blackwater is banned from the land of Iraq and other countries such as Somalia, the merciless killings of innocent people will continue. Blackwater is a microcosm of the US in the world. The employess of the Blackwater are not accountable under Iraqi or the US law, like the US government for its genocidal crimes.

The following is an interview of Jeremy Scahill by democracynow.com on February 8 2007. This is about the Blackwater contractor killing an Iraqi guard eleven times.

"JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, we don't know. I mean, it's very shady right now. What we understand from a mixture of the news reports, the US embassy, and now Andrew Howell, is that this individual, this Blackwater contractor, was allegedly off-duty. We understand there may have been some alcohol involved with it. And as Katy says, the reports indicate that he may have shot this Iraqi guard as many as eleven times.
But what's important for people to understand is that there's no statute of limitations on murder in the United States. And what the US has done is totally gutted Iraqi law. So the Iraqi government, we understand, wanted to go after this guy and prosecute him. He killed a security guard for -- a senior Iraqi official, allegedly. And so when the Iraqi government started making rumblings that they potentially would prosecute him, well, he gets whisked out of the country by Blackwater. And, you know, Kucinich asks, is he going to be extradited to Iraq for murder? Andy Howell fumbles through -- "I am not law enforcement" -- mentions something about the FBI.
See, this is the very heart of what's wrong with the privatization of this war right now. There is a culture of impunity in Iraq. These guys are killed, and their numbers don't get counted. And they kill people, and they don't get prosecuted."

Jeremy Scahill in his new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" writes, "Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the 'global war on terror,' with its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 private contractors at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments." From Iraq to New Orleans, Blackwater has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy.

This reflects what the world mafia-don, the US, is involved in Iraq (and the rest of the world).

this is an interest stand taken by government of iraq. must be a surprise to bushco - i don't think this is the kind of "standing up" they were hoping to see.

blackwater, a company which is a disgrace for any country to allow to operate on its soil, was involved, if you recall, with a lawsuit launched in the us by the families of four blackwater employees who were killed by ied and then dragged through the streets of baghdad and then hung in the street, as they say, for the sport of the crows.

the families argued in court that the company did not provide enough workplace safety, an interesting argument given the locale, and as such they were entitled to compensation.

blackwater hired the famed ken starr - the blowjob prosecutor of the clinton era - and in his address to the court mr star tried to make the point that giving any compensation whatsoever to these families for their loss would "send a chill through the war profiteering community".

and i am not making this up.

in his book, the assassins gate

http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Gate-America-Iraq/dp/0374299633

by george packer:

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

he clearly covered the legal status of the private contractors who felt they were subject to no law, anywhere.

wonder how this is gonna wash now.

i can hardly wait to see the delegation from blackwater go into cheney's bunker to say that, "wah, we are being treated unfairly."

i also wonder if maliki can make this stick

The following interview with Jeremy Scahill highlights the link between the American rightwing evangelical christians and the US "contract killing machine", the Blackwater.

"Erik Prince (the founder of the Blackwater) comes from a very wealthy rightwing Christian dynasty in the town of Holland, Michigan. His father was a man named Edgar Prince, who was a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalist. He built up an empire called the Prince Manufacturing Corp., and they manufactured auto parts, serviced the auto industry. And, in fact, what the company is perhaps best known for was for creating the now-ubiquitous lighted sun visor. So when you pull down the visor in your car and it lights up, that's the Prince family's invention. And it was a very profitable business.
And so, young Erik Prince grew up in this very heady atmosphere that mixed the sort of free-market gospel with the literal Christian gospel. His family, they were strict Calvinists. And Erik Prince was political at a very early age and watched as his father used his company as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of what we now know as the religious right in this country, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994. His father gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Young Erik Prince was in the first crop of interns to serve at the Family Research Council. They gave significant funding to James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family, which is now sort of the premier evangelical organizing network in this country, the "prayer warriors."
And what's interesting is that Erik Prince's sister Betsy married into another powerhouse Michigan family, perhaps the single greatest bankroller of the Republican Revolution: Dick DeVos's Amway Corporation. Erik Prince's sister married Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway fortune. And Amway was a company that sold home services products and sort of was accused of running the operation like a cult and using their marketers to not only sell their products, but to sell their political agenda, the rise of the sort of Christian right and Republican Revolution. And so, this marriage of these two families was sort of typical of the merging of the monarchist families in old Europe."

www.democracynow.org, March 20 2007.

mairs writes: "Please dear God let it be true that the Iraqis have the power to stop Blackwater."

Not only does the Iraqi government (such as it is) have the power to stop Blackwater; they also have the power to kick the Americans out. The war would end virtually overnight if Maliki took this action. But he's scared for his own security and needs the Americans there for his own protection.

But his action against Blackwater could win him some points with Iraqis. If it does, he might just have the nerve to tell the Americans hasta la vista, baby.

Did Malaki also not once say that Iraq can survive without the American presence? In fact, did he not once say that Iraq would be better off without the American presence?

That's the best news I've heard come out of Iraq since the fighting started.
Finally, the so-called "private" security company paid with our tax dollars, appears about to be taken to a court of law and held accountable for their lawless behavior. I wonder if Bush will be able to keep this from happening.
These are the people who should be held in the prison at Quantanamo. Most, if not all of these people are the true terrorists. I hope Iraq puts a stop to this gang of mercenaies before we have them walking around our own country.
"Let's fight them over there before we have to fight them over here."

With the erosion of US power, you'll find brutal manifestations of organized crime mixed with deeply religious narcissism. Dangerous, dangerous developments like Blackwater, need exposure to the light of day and the intervention of justice before they further ferment and inflict more damage on all of us. Erik Prince is that guy you knew in high school, lucky like the Beatles, and very useful for his dangerously short sited convictions. A lot of kids were wearing combat fatigues and going to see Rambo II back in the 80s, and quoting those passages in the Bible about "laying waste" and all those other excuses for violence. It's time we outlaw Blackwater here, pull their "license", demolish the compound, dedicate the areas as wildlife sanctuaries free of militants.

Blackwater Ban "Inevitable"
By Noah Shachtman September 17, 2007 | 2:16:29 PMCategories: Mercs
"It was inevitable," That's P.W. Singer's reaction to the Iraqi government " banning" military contractor Blackwater from the country. For years, no one has followed the rise of these privatized soldiers more closely than Singer, a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow and author of the ground-breaking Corporate Warriors. Companies like Blackwater have been roaming Iraq without oversight or management for years. Of course the Iraqi government was going to lose patience. Here is Singer's take:

Details are still fuzzy on the incident that lead the Iraqi government to act against Blackwater. But it may be almost irrelevant to the results. Initial reports from the U.S. embassy are that a Blackwater USA convoy that was guarding State Department employees came under fire in the Mansour district in Baghdad. A vehicle was disabled and a lengthy gun battle broke out. Witnesses are reporting that it lasted at least 20 minutes. The Iraqi Interior Ministry is reporting that 8 Iraqi civilians were killed and 13 wounded in the crossfire. There will likely be lots of claims back and forth about whether the shootings were justified or not, whether who was killed were primarily insurgents or civilians, etc. and likely everyone will have their own spin. It will be interesting to see whether any video finds its way out.

The only thing we do know is that the Iraqi Government is not happy it all, with the Iraqi Prime Minister (who is Shia, so no pre-disposed to covering up for a Sunni attack) blaming the killings on the company's employees and describing it as a "crime." The Iraqi Interior Ministry says it is pulling the license of the company to operate in Iraq and will try to prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting.

Still, even before all the details come to light, a few things are clear:

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

No one has kept an exact count of the incidents, but some notable examples include:

The Aegis "trophy video," in which contractors set video of them shooting at civilians to Elvis' "Runaway Train," and put it on the Internet.

The alleged joyride shootings of Iraqi civilians by a Triple Canopy supervisor (which became the subject of a lawsuit after the two employees, who claim to have witnessed the shootings, lost their jobs).

Armed contractors from the Zapata firm detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also U.S. Marines. Again, they were not charged, as the legal issues could not be squared. Private military firms may be part of the military operation, but they and their employees are not part of the military -- nor its chain of command or code of justice.

Abu Ghraib, where reported 100% of the translators and up to 50% of the interrogators at the prison were private contractors from the Titan and CACI firms respectively. The U.S. Army found that contractors were involved in 36% of the proven abuse incidents and identified 6 particular employees as being culpable in the abuses. However, while the enlisted U.S. Army soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were properly court martialed for their crimes, not one of the private contractors named in the U.S. Army investigation report have yet been charged, prosecuted, or punished, with the U.S. Army feeling that it did not even have jurisdiction to do so if it wanted.

The inevitable part was not just the shootings, but the government's reaction, which has been on the horizon for a while. The Iraqi government is supposedly a sovereign state, so it is not surprising that at some point it would start to act like one, trying to enforce its monopoly over violence against other armed organizations on the ground.

2) Pay attention to the politics. The underlying politics to this are important to understand. Private contractors are a visible and especially disliked part of the US presence in Iraq. So a good way for Iraqi government officials, who are often depicted as stooges of the US, to try to burnish their nationalist credentials is to go after the contractors. They can look like it is standing up to the big bad outsiders, but not do so against US troops. As AFP noted, "Monday's action against Blackwater was likely to give the unpopular government a boost, given the contractors' widespread unpopularity."

3) That it was Blackwater is unsurprising. As illustrated by the examples listed above, Blackwater is not the only company working in Iraq. Indeed, the L.A. Times recently reported that there may be over 160,000 private contractors working in Iraq, as many as the overall number of US forces even after the "surge." However, Blackwater has been one of the most visible, for an industry that typically tries to avoid the limelight. So, if an example was going to be made, it was a likelier target than say, for example, an unknown British or Bulgarian company.

More importantly, there is perhaps greater tension between Blackwater and the Iraqi government than others. This is not just because armed Blackwater guards are the contractors that most often senior Iraqi government officials would run into in their daily dealings with their U.S. counterparts, but because a more recent incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi Vice President. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country and, 9 months later, has not been charged with any crime. Imagine the same thing happening in the US, an Iraqi embassy guard, drunk at a a Christmas party, shooting a Secret Service agent guarding Vice President Cheney, and you can see some potential for underlying tension there.

4) This is what happens when government fails to act. The problems with the absence of oversight, management, doctrine, and even law and order when it comes to private military contractors have been known for a while. Heck, I wrote a book about it back in 2003, before the Iraq invasion. While the industry has boomed, vacuum of policy and strategy has continued for years. In June 2006, fore example, the Government Accountability Office reported that "private security providers continue to enter the battle space without coordinating with the U.S. military, putting both the military and security providers at a greater risk for injury."

Complaints are also coming from U.S. officers in the field about the underlying harm that the lack of policy is having. For example, U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor is one of the most influential military thinkers on counterinsurgency. In 2007, he told Jane's Defense Weekly that the US military needs to take "a real hard look at security contractors on future battlefields and figure out a way to get a handle on them so that they can be better integrated - if we're going to allow them to be used in the first place...if they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious, whatever it may be, they may be operating within their contract –to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to your side. I would much rather see basically all armed entities in a counter-insurgency operation fall under a military chain of command."

Yet, nothing much has happened. Indeed, the only real action was limited efforts in the Congress. In Fall 2006, Senator Lindsay Graham slipped into the 2007 Defense Bill a clause that could potentially place contractors and others who accompany the U.S. military in the field under the U.S. military's Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). That is, he changed the law defining UCMJ to cover civilians not just in times of declared war but also contingency operations. Almost 10 months later, however, no Pentagon guidance has been issued on how this clause might be used by JAGs in the field. So, its impact so far has been like a tree falling in the forest when it comes to incidents like this.

More broadly, there have been several recent efforts at bringing some transparency and oversight to the U.S. side of the industry. Key players have been Representatives Jan Schakowsky and David Price, and Senator Barack Obama (Obama's bill, the "Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007," essentially brings together the reforms sought by Schakowsky and Price on the House side). These have not yet passed into law, but may in the upcoming debates. Whether the executive branch will use them though returns us back to the problem of inaction on Graham's bill.

The point is that the U.S. government has paid for the industry for years, but try to ignore the accompanying responsibility for the consequences. In lieu of our own inaction, the Iraqi government has stepped in, perhaps in a way that we may not be happy with.

Of course, there is an underlying irony. There are reports that the "license," that the Iraqi government is supposedly revoking, doesn't exist. The Iraqi Interior Ministry is the entity that every contractor is supposed to register with, but it is also the organization that the recent panel led by retired General James Jones described as "dysfunctional" and "a ministry in name only."So many companies have been unable to register and many contractors have even had to resort to using their business cards as if they were official IDs. It will be interesting to see if this included the very company hired to guard senior US leaders in Iraq.

5) Over outsource and you paint yourself into a corner. This is what happens when you hollow out your operations. Blackwater has a contract to guard State Department employees. Now, the question must be asked, if the company cannot do so, what happens next?

Tongue in cheek, one could say that we all learned last week that: (a) the U.S. has enough extra military forces in Iraq and (b) the security situation is getting better. So, if this is true, then what's all the fuss?

Of course, we all know that the whole Kabuki play last week in Congress was false and that the security situation is atrocious and State personnel still need to be guarded. Back in the day, all of these roles would have been filled either by military forces or State Department diplomatic security. But our military forces are stretched thin, and the government's diplomatic security force has been hollowed out at the same time that the need for it has expanded (please note: a consortium of companies led by Blackwater got a $1 billion contract to do the global State Department diplomatic security job last year, so it was never a lack of money that was the cause of the hollowing).

So, in the short term following such a market failure, we will likely have to either 1) ignore the Iraqis' wishes and just keep on using Blackwater contractors as before, 2) find another company to step in and quick-fill take on these roles in lieu of the firm, or 3) negotiate with the Iraqis to find terms under which the firm might continue to carry out the operation (such as promising a joint investigation, payments to civilians etc.). Obviously, none of these is a great solution in the short term and none solve the long-term problems. But those are the terrible cards we have in our hands right now. But again, we can't blame anyone else for having such bad cards when it comes to military outsourcing. We dealt these cards to ourselves.

As we now see in Iraq and elsewhere, the privatized military industry is a reality of the 21st century. This entrance of the profit motive onto the battlefield opens up vast, new possibilities, but also a series of troubling questions – for democracy, for ethics, for management, for law, for human rights, and for national and international security. At what point do we begin answering them?

-- P.W. Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at The Brookings Institution. He is the author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. His writings are available at pwsinger.com.

blackwater starting wage 150k up to 250k. no tax.

Where is the World court when you need it?