Luitingh used to work for an apartheid era government agency called South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau. That agency was an internal security agency tied to the deaths of government opponents.

While the cooperation between the two agencies itself is not big news, the bigger question of ‘why Somalia?’ is. Here’s how the Times explains it:

With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. This has created an opportunity for private security companies like Saracen to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war.

The country has become a source for piracy as well as a source for Al Qaeda recruits and activities. In fact, as the Times points out, the country is mostly controlled by the Shabab.

An African Union memo from Jan. 12 indicates Prince “is at the top of the management chain of Saracen and provided seed money for the Saracen contract.”

The State Department has expressed concerns about Saracen International because of its lack of transparency.

As for Prince, a native of Holland, he is living in Abu Dhabi in part to prevent the numerous lawsuits against Blackwater from reaching into his personal fortune.

The Central Intelligence Agency has hired Xe Services, the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, to guard its facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to an industry source.

The previously undisclosed CIA contract is worth about $100 million, said the industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the deal, which is classified.

“It’s for protective services … guard services, in multiple regions,” said the source.

That’s the second nine-figure contract Blackwater has pulled down this week. The State Department gave the company — whose guards have killed unarmed Iraqis and Afghans, taken guns from the U.S. military without authorization, and established shell firms to win contracts – $120 million to guard consulates in Afghanistan. And that’s outside the more lucrative Worldwide Protective Services contract that Blackwater still wants to bid on. It might even get a piece of a contract to train the Afghan police, after taking rifles intended for those very cops and signing the receipt slip “Eric Cartman.”

Answer of the day: why, what a stupid question.

Adm. Dussault, I know your mandate doesn’t have to do with State Department contracts, but you might want to spare some time. These guys are operating in U.S. military battlespace, after all.

We are canceling all Young Eagles events until the club review is completed. This includes: Opening Day with the Phillies, U.S. Training Center, YE’s Leadership Summit and Gold Cup. If there are others in the pipeline, they are also on hold until further notice.

The “U.S. Training Center” event was to be held at a Xe (formerly known as Blackwater) facility.

U.S. soldiers train Afghan police in Herat. (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

An obscure Army contracting office with ties to the private security firm Blackwater has formally lost control of a lucrative contract to train Afghan police, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan confirmed to TWI.

[Security1] The office, known as the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office or CNTPO, came under criticism from the Government Accountability Office earlier this month for having only a marginal relationship to the training of Afghan police. CNTPO has responsibility for the military’s counternarcotics efforts, not the training of foreign military forces, and only received control over the contract after the U.S. military last year moved to take it away from the State Department and sought to rapidly award the contract to one of the five companies with which it does business — one of which is Blackwater.

That bureaucratic shift prompted a protest from State’s contractor, DynCorp, which stood to lose millions from the switch and argued that a counternarcotics office was an improper choice to award a contract for police training services. On March 15, the Government Accountability Office agreed, formally saying that the military’s solicitations were “outside the scope of [CNTPO's] existing contracts” according to a top GAO procurement official, Ralph O. White. But GAO also did not formally say that CNTPO had to be stripped of its contract authority, creating confusion over the future of the contract.

According to several officials, the U.S./NATO military command in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan security forces, known as NTM-A or CSTC-A, have decided keeping CNTPO involved would invite the same complaints that prompted GAO to scotch a contract worth up to $1 billion. “NTM-A/CSTC-A has seen the GAO ruling, is reviewing it and evaluating how to proceed in a manner that most effectively meets legal requirements and advances the key goal of helping to train an effective Afghan National Police Force,” said Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman.

Reached in Kabul for comment, Lt. Col. David Hylton, a spokesman for NTM-A/CSTC-A, confirmed that “we’re reevaluating how to proceed.” Hylton added that every aspect of the contract was up for discussion within the command, and he guessed that no decisions would be made about even how to move forward with the bidding process until mid-April at the earliest.

The contract first garnered attention last month, when CNTPO’s connection to Blackwater appeared in a late-February Politico story. The same day the story ran, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report accusing Blackwater employees of improperly taking hundreds of rifles and pistols for personal use out of a U.S. military weapons depot in Afghanistan intended to supply those very same Afghan policemen.

Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, observed that the military “tried to fit a square peg into a round hole” by giving a counter-narcoterrorism office awarding duties for a police training contract. “The best case scenario now is that this [contract] will operate through an open process that will allow anyone to come to the table,” Amey said.

CNTPO initially got the contract because its existing relationships with the five security contractors meant that it could rapidly award a bid for a mission identified by the military as vital to the U.S. war effort, a process that entailed restricting the eligible pool of bidders. “If the government has an immediate need, it could conduct a limited competition with vendors with proven capabilities” to meet the contract requirements, Amey said.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has identified that need as immediate. “There’s a shortage of trainers,” McChrystal said at a press briefing on March 17. “And we have been very unequivocal in our statement of that, both to Washington, D.C., and of course, more appropriately, to NATO.”

DynCorp’s old contract with the State Department expires in August. Hylton said NTM-A/CSTC-A had not yet made a decision on whether to seek a temporary extension of DynCorp’s contract. Col. John Ferrari, a senior officer in the training command’s programs directorate, was in charge of the decision-making process for the revised contract.

A spokesman for DynCorp, Jason Rossbach, said that the company — which the Iraq inspector general has criticized, along with the State Department, for negligent book-keeping over the police-training contract — awaited the outcome of NTM-A/CSTC-A’s contract restructuring. “We’re interested in bidding, whatever the government decides to do,” Rossbach said.

So they don’t just keep illicitly-obtained arms in Afghanistan, it appears.

Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services, had something of a setback earlier this month after the Government Accountability Office ruled that the U.S. military had to restructure a contract Blackwater sought to train Afghan policemen worth up to $1 billion. I’ll have more on that contract soon.

Xe Services LLC disagrees with several statements and opinions in the on-line article by Spencer Ackerman yesterday (“DynCorp Wins Its Bid to Stop Blackwater’s Next Afghanistan contract — For Now”), but the statement that the company “stole guns intended for the Afghan police from a U.S. military depot near Kabul” is factually wrong and warrants correction. No guns were stolen. As documents released by the Senate Armed Services Committee (“SASC”) demonstrate, the company obtained weapons from “Bunker 22,” which is an Afghan National Police weapons and ammunition storage facility (including weapons coalition forces seized from insurgents or discovered in caches often dating back to the Soviet occupation) whose operation is managed by U.S. military personnel. The company obtained these weapons with the knowledge and assistance of U.S. military personnel managing the facility. Therefore, these weapons could not have been stolen.

What Blackwater’s attorney neglects to point out is that the company’s employees obtained weapons from Bunker 22 from the U.S. military under false pretenses. Gen. David Petraeus affirmed to the committee that Blackwater was never authorized to carry guns kept at Bunker 22 (“there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers”), commensurate with the broader fact that Blackwater employees in Afghanistan under Army subcontract were never allowed to carry weapons for their personal use. On at least one occasion, a person identifying himself as a Blackwater employee signed for hundreds of guns using the name “Eric Cartman,” apparently after the sassy “South Park” character who, appropriately, does what he wants without regard for authoritah. What’s more, according to committee chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) at the February hearing, Blackwater is still in possession of 53 guns from the U.S. military command in Afghanistan that it was never authorized to possess in the first place.

If Blackwater would prefer I write that it “took weapons from the U.S. military in Afghanistan under false pretenses” to writing that it “stole” those weapons, I am happy to oblige the company.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first Senate hearing exclusively devoted to Blackwater. The previous big Blackwater hearing came before the House oversight committee in 2007, and it mainly resulted in forcing the State Department’s conflict-of-interest-laden inspector-general, Cookie Krongard, to resign in disgrace after misrepresenting his ties to the company before the panel.

From the looks of the witness list, there may be some real disclosures: Paravant’s ex-program manager, John R. Walker, is slated to testify, as is its ex-vice president Brian C. McCracken. So are a host of retired military officials, including the former head of the effort to train Afghan security forces, retired Col. Bradley Wakefield. A former Blackwater vice president for contracts, Fred Roitz, has been invited, but it’s unclear whether he’ll appear.

It’s worth pointing out that to the best of my knowledge, there was no Senate hearing devoted to scrutinizing Blackwater’s multi-million dollar contracts with the government after its guards shot and killed 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in September 2007.

A top Iraqi official said Wednesday that guards formerly employed by the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide must leave the country within days.

The statement by Interior Minister Jawad Bolani — made in an interview with the Associated Press — could lead to the expulsion of as many as 250 guards who once worked for Blackwater and who now work for other security firms in Iraq. The Interior Ministry controls the country’s police forces and licenses private security companies.

Yeah, this is right before the March 7 Iraqi national election, though, so who knows if Bolani is for real here. Many an Iraqi demand about Blackwater has fallen by the wayside.

Meanwhile, in other Blackwater/Iraq news…

A Xe official told the Commission on Wartime Contracting Friday that the company has contracts for security as well as for training Afghan police and a “drug interdiction unit.” Xe is also in the running for more work in Afghanistan. The comments of Xe Vice President Fred Roitz were first reported by the Virginia Pilot.

Face, meet palm. And remember: the State Department has yet to announce the award of the next round of its contract for protecting diplomats in war zones. Blackwater/Xe wants to keep its piece. This isn’t a CIA-connected private security company, it’s a George Romero character.