But maybe not this time.

In August, Stacy DeLuke, a Blackwater spokeswoman, told me the company planned on bidding on WPS when it came up for renewal this year. According to Jeremy, though, they haven’t put in their bid yet:

Among the companies listed as “interested vendors” to bid on the contracts are the predictable list of industry giants: L-3 Services, SAIC, USIS, Northrop Grumman, and DynCorp. Two lesser-known firms in particular that have expressed interest in the contracts jump out: Instinctive Shooting International and Evergreen International Aviation.

Read on for Jeremy’s full report on Instinctive Shooting International. But it’s surprising to see that Blackwater hasn’t offered a bid yet. I called the company but was told that everyone who could speak to me has left for the day. No luck with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which controls the contract, yet either. Hopefully tomorrow will bring clarity on this.

The Project on Government Oversight, the good-government group that discovered ArmorGroup’s State Department-abetted negligence, has obtained a report from the State Department investigating the department’s management in handling its contract with Triple Canopy for embassy security. POGO was good enough to pass the report on to me. Labor standards are such that Triple Canopy guards often worked ten or eleven consecutive days on average, with some working 39 days in a row without a break.

Here are some highlights of how State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which controls the contract, is managing your money and protecting American diplomats in what remains a warzone.

Embassy Baghdad has not adequately planned for a reduced Department or Department of Defense (DoD) presence in Baghdad, resulting in a projected unnecessary cost of approximately $20 million to the U.S. Government for site security over the next two years. Of this sum, the Department would incur approximately $12 million and DoD would incur more than $8 million in unnecessary costs.

Remember that everything the U.S. is supposed to be doing in Iraq is predicated on the 2011 troop withdrawal. I’ve heard from former administration officials that the embassy is lax in its political mission in Baghdad. Apparently that attitude has some spillover effect.

This will be familiar:

DS does not ensure that [Triple Canopy] personnel have required English language pro?ciency.

The report further finds that DS did not carry out the random language checks they were supposed to have carried out. True story: when I visited the embassy in 2007, the Triple Canopy guards were very nice people from (if I recall correctly) El Salvador, who made up for their lack of English with warm attitudes. I saw one guard actually reading a Teach-Yourself-English handbook on post in the Green Zone. Clearly DS’s negligence with ArmorGroup’s English-challenged guards is hardly an isolated case.

This might be my favorite:

The contracting of?cer’s representative in Baghdad does not verify either the guards’ attendance at their posts or the accuracy of personnel rosters (muster sheets) before they are submitted, to ensure contractor charges for labor are accurate. In addition, DS does not ensure that personnel have required English language pro?ciency.

DS lacks standards for maintaining training records. As a result, Triple Canopy’s training records are incomplete and in disparate locations making it dif?cult for the Bureau to verify whether all personnel have received required training.

And yet the IG’s overall conclusion is “The Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) generally manages the Triple Canopy contract well.” The last State Department Inspector General to take such a sunny interpretation of contract security in spite of the accumulated evidence resigned in disgrace.

POGO executive director Danielle Brian comments in a prepared statement, “How could State not have learned their lesson after the public flogging they got for their handling of the Kabul contract?…This report again raises an important point about whether State can properly manage Embassy security contracts in a war zone.”

The ones whom McChrystal hires surely will. But what about the firms hired to protect the new State Department personnel on their way to Afghanistan? State Department security contractors like Blackwater Xe, Triple Canopy and DynCorp have been tied to more population-alienating abuses than the ones who work for the Defense Department. And McChrystal and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus — who dealt with the complications posed by buck-wild State Department security contractors in Iraq — won’t have control over them. The next Worldwide Personnel Protective Services contract, awarded to firms pledging to protect U.S. diplomats, will be a test of Petraeus’s oft-cited new “wingman” partnership with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And this doesn’t say anything about security firms hired by private corporations doing business in Afghanistan. How to coordinate them into McChrystal’s battle plan?

It’s not just State Department employees who come with their own security details outfitted with huge SUVs and pointed weapons. Afghan government officials now travel in similar fashion, leaving drivers flummoxed about what to do to get out of the way. Some convoys pull up to sedans and point guns at the drivers, others set up checkpoints with varying rules on how not to get shot and still others simply close off roads that Afghans once traveled freely on.

When there’s foreign dignitaries coming through the capital city of a war-torn country, there’s going to be contracted security. And those security contractors do not typically feel any need to make nice with the locals. Instead, to keep the locals at a safe distance — safe for the dignitaries, that is — from the officials they guard, the contractors use fear, intimidation and, on occasion, violence. Already we’re seeing Blackwater Xe affiliates firing on unarmed civilians for the crime of driving too closing to them while the contractors had been drinking. More security contractors in Kabul raises the awful prospect of another Nisour Square.

Relatedly, in a few weeks, the State Department’s security contract, known as the Worldwide Personal Protective Services deal, gets re-awarded. I’ll be paying close attention to whether State looks to switch over contractors from the Xe-DynCorp-Triple Canopy triad it currently employs.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, recently issued a directive asking his subordinate commanders to reduce the use of civilian contractors on at least 50 bases and small installations across Iraq and, where possible, provide employment to Iraqis instead. …

“This initiative supports our desired end state of a stable, sovereign, and prosperous Iraq,” General Odierno wrote in a directive dated Jan. 31. “It’s the right thing to do, so let’s move out.”

Odierno’s asking his commanders to cut their reliance on contractors — there are about 150,000 of them in Iraq, according to the Christian Science Monitor’s Gordon Lubold, which include 37,000 Iraqis — by five percent each quarter. He apparently made a point in his directive of criticizing the military’s reliance on contractors, and candidly told commanders that their troops may need to take up the shortfall. Whatever will happen to KBR’s Sri Lankan ice cream scoopers at the dining facility at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty?

The directive is outside the question of what will happen to private security contractors, since that’s not under the military’s jurisdiction. And there the big thing to watch during the transition to full Iraqi control is who bids on the State Department’s Worldwide Private Personal Security contract when it comes up for renewal in September. It’s currently split between Blackwat– sorry, Xe, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, but in January the Iraqi government announced it won’t accredit the-company-formerly-known-as-Blackwater and it’s unclear if DynCorp and Triple Canopy want the contract now that the Iraqi government put a provision in the Status of Forces Agreement stipulating that all contractors fall under its legal jurisdiction.

Beyond that particular contract, I recently spoke with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, which might jocularly-but-uncharitably be called the mercenaries’ lobby, about what he thought about the future of private security in Iraq. Thanks to the improved security picture, “more businesses are in Iraq, and they hire private security,” Brooks said. “The large scale [operations are] diminishing, and the small scale is picking up.” Bodyguard work for businesses might be the future of private security, Brooks mused, comparing the situation to Colombia, where private security firms protect big shots from the various militias and terrorist groups.

Update: As Doug suggests in comments, I phrased that last part a bit poorly, but he seems to have read it as me quoting him as saying that PSCs were protecting militiamen and terrorists. What I meant to say, in accordance with our interview, was that they protect the big shots — from commercial interests, etc. — from the dangers of Colombian militiamen and terrorists. Apologies for the confusion.