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:
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 Pentagon’s top civilian and military leadership made an unequivocal and at times emotional appeal Tuesday to end the decades-long ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, and spelled out a year-long process for securing uniformed and congressional support to change the policy.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates More…
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…
Marc Ambinder has a preview of what Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will tell the Senate Armed Services Committee today about the administration’s plans to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
Speaking of. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund’s blog:
We expect the Department of Defense to announce at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Feb. 2 that ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges were down by almost 30 percent last year. Indeed, the department may release the discharge numbers before the hearing. As we
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