Hunt of the Sea Wolves

Mercury News

The U.S. will appeal a court decision dismissing manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security contractors involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday.

Biden’s announcement after a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani shows just how diplomatically sensitive the incident remains nearly three years later.

Blackwater security contractors were guarding U.S. diplomats when the guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraqi.

Biden expressed his “personal regret” for the shooting and said the Obama administration was disappointed by the dismissal. “A dismissal is not an acquittal,” he said.

Read entire story at The U.S. will appeal a court decision dismissing manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security contractors involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday.

Biden’s announcement after a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani shows just how diplomatically sensitive the incident remains nearly three years later.

Blackwater security contractors were guarding U.S. diplomats when the guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection. Seventeen people were killed, including women and children, in a shooting that inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraqi.

Biden expressed his “personal regret” for the shooting and said the Obama administration was disappointed by the dismissal. “A dismissal is not an acquittal,” he said.

Read entire story at Mercury News

Associated Press

Blackwater Worldwide’s legal woes haven’t dimmed the company’s prospects in Afghanistan, where it’s a contender to be a key part of President Barack Obama’s strategy for stabilizing the country.

Now called Xe Services, the company is in the running for a Pentagon contract potentially worth $1 billion to train Afghanistan’s troubled national police force. Xe has been shifting to training, aviation and logistics work after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.

Yet even with a new name and focus, the expanded role would seem an unlikely one for Xe because Democrats have held such a negative opinion of the company following the Iraqi deaths, which are still reverberating in Baghdad and Washington.

Read entire story at Associated Press

Navy Times

The man who built Blackwater USA into one of the world’s most respected and reviled defense contractors feels that he was thrown under the bus after serving the nation’s security interests for years.

Erik Prince’s company, which renamed itself Xe Services in February after an uproar over its Iraq operations, has worked closely for years with the CIA, the State Department and the U.S. military. But it became the target of a series of federal investigations and congressional probes, primarily for its Iraq work. Most recently, officials disclosed that the CIA tapped the company to work under a program to capture or kill terrorists.

The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune told Vanity Fair in an interview released Wednesday that Xe now pays $2 million a month in legal bills. The company is headquartered in Moyock in northeastern North Carolina,

“I put myself and my company at the CIA’s disposal for some very risky missions,” Prince told Vanity Fair for its January issue. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.”

Read entire story at Navy Times

ANI

The controversial US private security company, Blackwater, is reportedly running a covert recruitment drive through its website in Pakistan.

The company’s website, www.BlackwaterUSA.com, appears to be just like any other internet site, but when navigated deeper the real propaganda of the company is revealed.

The hidden pages of this site can only be accessed through four company executives’ references, The Nation reports.

It is in these hidden pages one can find application form for job applicants.

It is here that one can see the effort by this company to hire Pakistanis who speak Punjabi and Urdu - to add to their earlier requirements of Arabic, Farsi and Dari.

Incidentally, there is also a website named www.postbox1048, where requirements are posted for ‘Chauffeur (security)’ for Islamabad and Peshawar and are required to have knowledge of English as well as a HTV driving license.

It may be noted that besides expanding its Islamabad embassy, the United States is also planning to set up a consulate in Peshawar for which it is eyeing the bombed Pearl Continental Hotel.

Inquirer

An investigative report circulating online said the American military contractor Blackwater was training “mercenaries” of various nationalities, including Filipinos, at the Subic free port in Olongapo City.

Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) Administrator Armand Arreza, however, quickly denied the story.

In a video story posted August 28 on the Russia Today website, American investigative journalist Wayne Madsen claimed Satelles Solutions, a Blackwater subsidiary, was using a five-acre facility in the former United States naval base to train operatives for secret US-backed military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots.

Blackwater, founded by a former US Navy Seal

Read story at the Inquirer

The Economist

GEORGE BUSH’S “war on terror” left America with a scarred reputation and many disturbing questions. Barack Obama has said that he wants to move forward, rather than look back. That is understandable. The new president has an ambitious agenda. Prising open the lid on previous mistakes might unleash a political hornet-swarm. But this week, with Mr Obama bunkered on Martha’s Vineyard, an ugly past roared into the present.

On August 24th the Department of Justice released a report on the CIA’s interrogation of detainees abroad, written by the agency’s internal watchdog in 2004. More important, Eric Holder, the attorney-general, directed a prosecutor to review whether interrogators may have broken the law. The announcement is part of a growing push to address past wrongdoing, by both the government and private firms. On August 28th a federal judge will consider a suit charging Blackwater, a security contractor, with war crimes. Mr Holder’s announcement may even herald a new era of accountability. Those hoping for speedy reckonings, however, will probably be disappointed.

Read entire story at The Economist

AlterNet

Jeremy Scahill sparred with NBC political director Chuck Todd on Friday, forcefully criticizing journalists and lawmakers for treading lightly on Blackwater’s recently-revealed misdeeds.

Newly declassified memos this week showed that the CIA hired Blackwater, a private military security company, years ago as part of an effort to kill senior Al-Qaeda officials and other designated terrorists.

Scahill, who has written a popular book about Blackwater, had scathing comments about the organization, calling it “Erik Prince’s Christian supremacist fighting force to eliminate Muslims and destroy Islam globally, and then they bill taxpayers again for this killing that they’re doing and they’re not held to the same standard as soldiers.”

“There are Iraqi and Afghan people that are forced to face down against them, when, I’m sorry, the U.S. Congress does nothing to stop it,” he continued, “and journalists have done nothing to hold the White House accountable now, Chuck, or under Bush. This has not been an issue and yet it constitutes more than half of the fighting force in Afghanistan.”

Read entire story at AlterNet

ABC News

Susan Burke supported the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, during the 2008 US presidential campaign. But now that Obama is in office, she finds her views diverging widely from his.

Obama is opposed to investigating the excesses of the administration of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Burke, an attorney, favors an investigation. Obama has thus far avoided answering the question of whether the US Constitution was violated in Bush’s so-called “war on terror.” Burke wants an investigation to focus on precisely this question. Obama is looking forward, while Burke is looking back.

What Burke sees when she looks into the rearview mirror is indeed ugly. She sees 17 dead, including women and children, lying on Nisoor Square in Baghdad, killed on Sept. 16, 2007 by mercenaries working for Blackwater, a private American security firm. She sees Blackwater employee Andrew Moonen who, after a Christmas party in 2006, drove through Baghdad, heavily armed, and shot a man for no reason. She hears the shot, fired from a Blackwater helicopter, that killed an innocent man on Baghdad’s Wathba Square on Sept. 9, 2007.

Read entire story at ABC

AFP

The US Central Intelligence Agency hired the private security firm Blackwater to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to secret prisons in Asia for interrogation, the German weekly Der Spiegel says.

The newsmagazine cites a “memo” it said it had obtained, written by two former Blackwater employees whose identities are not revealed.

According to the memo, the CIA hired “Blackwater and its subsidiaries” to secretly transfer prisoners from the US detention centre in Cuba to “secret detention camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for interrogation.”

Read entire story at AFP

The Washington Post

The disclosure Wednesday of the CIA’s decision five years ago to let a private security contractor help manage its sensitive effort to kill senior al-Qaeda members drew congressional criticism Thursday on the eve of key decisions by the Obama administration that current and former intelligence officials fear could compound the spy agency’s political troubles.

Read entire story at The Washington Post