'Blackwater' gets new US contract

[JBeukema]

Despite US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's campaign promise to no longer award military contracts to Blackwater - the now renamed notorious security contractor - the US state department has recently awarded the company another lucrative contract.
Blackwater was renamed Xe after a string of legal cases against the company in the US and in Iraq.
Wired.com reports that while neither Xe nor Blackwater appear on the list of eight firms hired for the Worldwide Protective Services contract (a group of contracts combined into one), one of the company's fronts, International Development Solutions LLC (IDS) is on the list.
In total, the contract for all eight companies is worth $10bn.
"When I am president I will ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors," Clinton said during her presidential campaign in 2008.
Indeed, Clinton was the only co-sponsor in the US senate of the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, introduced in 2007.

'Blackwater' gets new US contract - Americas - Al Jazeera English

 

[waltky]

CIA's link to Blackwater revealed...

Exclusive: Court Docs Reveal Blackwater’s Secret CIA Past
Mar 14, 2013 - It was the U.S. military’s most notorious security contractor—but it may also have been a virtual extension of the CIA.

Last month a three-year-long federal prosecution of Blackwater collapsed. The government’s 15-felony indictment—on such charges as conspiring to hide purchases of automatic rifles and other weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—could have led to years of jail time for Blackwater personnel. In the end, however, the government got only misdemeanor guilty pleas by two former executives, each of whom were sentenced to four months of house arrest, three years’ probation, and a fine of $5,000. Prosecutors dropped charges against three other executives named in the suit and abandoned the felony charges altogether.

But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn’t the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents—some declassified—that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater’s defense strategy—and it’s a fascinating one: to defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA—which was already widely known—but that it was in many ways an extension of the agency itself.

Founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, heir to an auto-parts family fortune, Blackwater had proved especially useful to the CIA in the early 2000s. “You have to remember where the CIA was after 9/11,” says retired Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who served as the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2004 to 2006 and later as the ranking member of the committee. “They were gutted in the 1990s. They were sending raw recruits into Afghanistan and other dangerous places. They were looking for skills and capabilities, and they had to go to outside contractors like Blackwater to make sure they could accomplish their mission.”

But according to the documents Blackwater submitted in its defense—as well as an email exchange I had recently with Prince—the contractor’s relationship with the CIA was far deeper than most observers thought. “Blackwater’s work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked,” Prince told me recently, in response to written questions. “In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.”

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[nitroz]

tbh, I prefer to have someone who is ruthless.

 

[whitehall]

No shit. The media goes crazy about Blackwater contracts during a republican administration but it's fine during a democrat administration.