Call it private sector "efficiency:"
The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials...
The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq...
Blackwater, based in North Carolina, has gained a reputation among Iraqis and even among American military personnel serving in Iraq as a company that flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions to protect the people they are paid to guard. After the latest shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that the company be banned from operating in the country.
"You can find any number of people, particularly in uniform, who will tell you that they do see Blackwater as a company that promotes a much more aggressive response to things than other main contractors do," a senior American official said.
Despite the growing criticism of Blackwater and its tactics, the company still enjoys an unusually close relationship with the Bush administration, and with the State Department and Pentagon in particular. It has received government contracts worth more than $1 billion since 2002, with most coming under the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, according to the independent budget monitoring group OMB Watch...
The company’s close ties to the Bush administration have raised questions about the political clout of Mr. Prince, Blackwater’s founder and owner. He is the scion of a wealthy Michigan family that is active in Republican politics. He and the family have given more than $325,000 in political donations over the past 10 years, the vast majority to Republican candidates and party committees, according to federal campaign finance reports.
Mr. Prince has helped cement his ties to the government by hiring prominent officials. J. Cofer Black, the former counterterrorism chief at the C.I.A. and State Department, is a vice chairman at Blackwater. Mr. Black is also now a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security issues to the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.
Something, though, doesn't add up: Blackwater's received over a billion dollars in government contracts, yet supposedly employs only 550 individuals full time, plus another thousand or so as independent contractors. That doesn't pass the smell test (I've heard, for instance, that private security forces comprise the second largest contingent of armed non-Iraqis...the largest contingent of course being American forces).
Neither does this rather unpleasant story detailing how the State Department is blocking a Congressional investigation of the firm, which is characterized by State as "a misunderstanding," which means we've truly stooped to banana republic levels at this point: "misunderstanding" means "stonewalling." That kind of stuff might be common in Guatemala--or Texas--but rule of law is supposed to mean something in the United States.
And the whole privitization of the military in general is just plain troubling. Ashley has commented on this. Lindsay Beyerstein has documented some first-hand encounters with Blackwater back when they were "providing security" in New Orleans...and shoot, I recall walking past several ninja'd-up types on my first few trips to the city late in 2005. They gave me the impression of being a death squad, or, at the very least, made-mafia types, able to shoot you at will, with ready-made excuses already in the pipeline.
Imagine what they can get away with over in Iraq.
Which makes Shrub's imperious petulance all the more infuriating: if he knew what Blackwater was capable of morphing into, then he reveals a deep contempt for basic democratic principles and genuinely embraces despotism. If not, then he's profoundly ignorant. Or perhaps he embodies more than a little of both.
Not good.
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