Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to More…
That’s what Laura Rozen is hearing:
Controversial defense contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe, is being told that it is likely to win a major contract to do police training mentoring and logistics in Afghanistan, a source tells POLITICO.
All it took was a) shots fired at Afghan civilians on a Kabul road; b) bribes to foreign officials that amount to hush money; c) credible accounts of unlicensed weapons shipping; d) secret raids alongside the CIA on suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan; and of More…
The Iraqi government shows signs of increasing impatience with Blackwater guards getting hired by other private security firms:
A top Iraqi official said Wednesday that guards formerly employed by the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide must leave the country within days.
The only one on the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning who says the defense budget should be on the table for President Obama’s spending freeze is a former Navy secretary — Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). Saying that there’s no reason military spending should be “sacrosanct,” Webb urged Defense More…
Blackwater/Xe: an unkillable contracting force, a permanent fixture on the landscape. It can barely lose a contract after killing Iraqi civilians. And now Justin Elliott at TPM has this catch:
A Xe official told the Commission on Wartime Contracting Friday that the company has contracts for security as
The news on Friday that Blackwater Worldwide (now known as Xe Services) participated in clandestine CIA operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that included targeted killings, kidnapping and “extraordinary renditions” raised more questions than it answered.
After all, we already knew that the U.S. government has relied More…
In case you missed it, Blackwater founder Erik Prince outed himself as a CIA asset in an extraordinary Vanity Fair interview. Prince complained that powerful forces within the government were throwing him under the bus with anonymous press leaks about the private security company’s connections to very sensitive CIA More…
Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater’s most dogged journalistic pursuer, has an absolute monster story in The Nation about the Joint Special Operations Command contracting out very sensitive drone-strike spotting and terrorist-snatch operations to Blackwater. It’s a huge piece, so read the whole thing. There’s a ton of detail in here, and More…
It turns out that expanding your contracts with the government after killing people and paying hush money can attract congressional scrutiny. The New York Times:
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote in a
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