I didn’t see this at yesterday’s big Blackwater hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee, but another reporter friend watched this happen. Code Pink, the womens’ anti-war activist group that’s a fixture in congressional hearings, put out this press release about an incident yesterday between one of its members and More…
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing on Blackwater/Paravant’s subcontract with Raytheon and the Army to train Afghan security forces has just ended, but not before Blackwater pushed all the blame onto Raytheon.
Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s top contract compliance officer, told the panel that Raytheon instructed Blackwater to hide its shell More…
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) got Fred Roitz of Blackwater — sorry, “Xe Services,” the new name for the company — to say that Blackwater shell company “Paravant” came into existence shortly before “Paravant” got a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan security forces. But then Levin read from More…
The head of contract compliance for Blackwater, Fred Roitz, told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) that he has never known that hundreds of weapons Blackwater employees took from a U.S. military depot in Afghanistan called 22 Bunkers (or Bunker 22) have been explicitly designated by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of More…
Leave aside the fact that Blackwater/Paravant employees subcontracted to train Afghan security forces never received authorization from the U.S. military to carry guns in Afghanistan. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) wanted to clarify that Blackwater/Paravant at least informed the military when its armed guards moved around their battlespace.
“It was More…
Sen. George Lemieux (R-Fla.) wants to know which official at U.S. Central Command or anywhere else in the chain of command is “ultimately responsible for [ensuring] these contracts are being performed the way they’re supposed to.” Sensibly, he asked retired Col. Bradley Wakefield, a top former officer at Combined Security More…
Why did Blackwater/Paravant’s personnel carry weapons in Afghanistan for “personal use,” anyway? Brian McCracken, the former Paravant vice president, conceded to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) that it never received authorization from either the Army or U.S. Central Command, as it needed before carrying guns in a war zone. He nevertheless More…
The Senate Armed Services Committee right now is in a brief recess, but the likelihood of getting information out of two invited witnesses formerly employed by Blackwater is already looking pretty slim. One of them, Brian McCracken, a Raytheon employee who used to be an executive with the Blackwater arm More…
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s Blackwater-in-Afghanistan hearing is just getting underway, but here’s an early highlight, courtesy of the committee’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). When Raytheon, the contractor that hired a Blackwater arm called Paravant as a subcontractor to train Afghan troops, objected to Blackwater guards’ drunken firing More…
In advance of this morning’s big Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Blackwater in Afghanistan, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) wrote a diary for the Seminal on Firedoglake pushing a bill to restrict private security companies from performing inherently-governmental security functions:
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