Jumpin' Jack Flash?

The helicopter was hovering over a Baghdad checkpoint into the Green Zone, one typically crowded with cars, Iraqi civilians and United States military personnel. Suddenly, on that May day in 2005, the copter dropped CS gas, a riot-control substance the American military in Iraq can use only under the strictest conditions and with the approval of top military commanders. An armored vehicle on the ground also released the gas, temporarily blinding drivers, passers-by and at least 10 American soldiers operating the checkpoint.
“This was decidedly uncool and very, very dangerous,” Capt. Kincy Clark of the Army, the senior officer at the scene, wrote later that day. “It’s not a good thing to cause soldiers who are standing guard against car bombs, snipers and suicide bombers to cover their faces, choke, cough and otherwise degrade our awareness.”
Both the helicopter and the vehicle involved in the incident at the Assassins’ Gate checkpoint were not from the United States military, but were part of a convoy operated by Blackwater Worldwide, the private security contractor that is under scrutiny for its role in a series of violent episodes in Iraq, including a September shooting in downtown Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.
None of the American soldiers exposed to the chemical, which is similar to tear gas, required medical attention, and it is not clear if any Iraqis did. Still, the previously undisclosed incident has raised significant new questions about the role of private security contractors in Iraq, and whether they operate under the same rules of engagement and international treaty obligations that the American military observes.
“You run into this issue time and again with Blackwater, where the rules that apply to the U.S. military don’t seem to apply to Blackwater,” said Scott L. Silliman, the executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at the Duke University School of Law.
Officers and noncommissioned officers from the Third Infantry Division who were involved in the episode said there were no signs of violence at the checkpoint. Instead, they said, the Blackwater convoy appeared to be stuck in traffic and may have been trying to use the riot-control agent as a way to clear a path.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10blackwater.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
(Maybe they are just practicing riot control for when they return to America?)

Blackwater, other mercenary groups, under serious scrutiny..

Thanks once again to Spencer Ackerman at TPMMuckraker for pointing us to this story:

Remember that recently-impaneled grand jury looking at Blackwater's Nisour Square shootings? Turns out it's not just about Blackwater. Four years into the occupation, prosecutors are attempting to build the first criminal case against private security companies -- who up until now worked in a system rigged to ensure unaccountability.
The Washington Post:
"The Washington grand jury has issued subpoenas to several private security firms, including Blackwater, a legal source briefed on the probe said yesterday. Authorities are seeking company "after-action" reports and other documents that may shed light on specific incidents, he said. (Buy Shredder Company Stock This Week!)
The source, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, declined to say which incidents have been targeted, but he said the investigation ranges well beyond Blackwater. Private security companies in Iraq "have been shooting a lot of people," he said."
That's an understatement.
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/

Blackwater hearings today!

Blackwater USA, the private security contractor under scrutiny for its role in a deadly Baghdad shootout last month, has fired 122 of its armed guards in Iraq since it started protecting U.S. diplomats there three years ago, congressional investigators said Monday.The firings, most frequently for weapons-related incidents, amount to about 15% of Blackwater's current workforce in Iraq. None of those fired has been subject to any legal proceedings or other sanction, the investigation found. The disclosures came in a memo about the investigation by aides to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills). He is chairman of the House oversight committee, which is holding a hearing on Blackwater today. Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, is to appear. The detailed allegations, which the committee said were backed by thousands of documents, depict a security firm that almost routinely opens fire in Iraq's streets, occasionally attempts to cover up its transgressions and is frequently protected from censure and prosecution by its State Department overseers.The memo describes incidents in which Blackwater guards eagerly rushed to battles involving U.S. soldiers; plowed their armored trucks into civilian vehicles for no apparent reason; and left scenes of violence without assisting wounded civilians.In the 15-page memo, Waxman's staff says State Department officials ignored misconduct by Blackwater. And in one high-profile incident, the memo says, State officials were directly involved in making sure that a Blackwater employee who had been accused of killing an Iraqi guard while intoxicated was flown out of the country less than 36 hours after the Christmas Eve shooting.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-blackwater2oct02,0,3271039.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml

Blackwater security contractors in Iraq have been involved in at least 195 "escalation of force" incidents since early 2005, including several previously unreported killings of Iraqi civilians, according to a new congressional account of State Department and company documents. In one of the killings, according to a State Department document, Blackwater personnel tried to cover up what had occurred and provided a false report. In another case, involving a Blackwater convoy's collision with 18 civilian vehicles, the firm accused its own personnel of lying about the event.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/01/AR2007100100882.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

History Channel on West Virginia

Anyone who saw the History Channel coverage of the old West Virginia story hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus last night might remember the thugs who worked for the coal mining robber-barrons, the ones who murdered so many union workers in cold blood back in the 30’s. Yhose thugs were the Blackwater of the depression era.
I have to admit, I was more than impressed with Cyrus’ presentation.
I will never again be able to use the term “redneck” in a durogatory fashion, and let me take this public forum to apologize for ever using it negatively in the past.

The truth is, The Rednecks were populist heroes, not dumb hicks (well, OK, most of us are dumb hicks in the eyes of anyone from NY or LA.) And they were defending their families and their way of life from those Blackwater type bullies.
Seriously, folks, if you missed it, you missed one of the best history lessons I’ve seen in quite a while.

Also, just a passing observation, but it sounds like these Blackwater thugs are tweakers, they sure seem to have have the uncontrolled outburst rages.
Considering that Blackwater is now planning to come back here and get into the drug enforcement business, who wants to bet it won’t be long til’ Robocop is sniffing out the smoke and raiding people’s homes.

They plan to return here and make “drugs” the old/new boogey man, so they can wreak havoc on our own society with impunity that comes from stupidity and greed.

Why are we allowing Blackwater to even have a license?

These Blackwater ops, like the goons in Billy ray’s history lessons, ARE THE DEVIL!

Evil, plain and simple, to quote my old pal Buckaroo.

Laugh while you can, monkey-boy.

How "white" is Blackwater?

had another "duh" epiphany watching Jeremy Scahill's flicks from Iraq, (which I embedded below, thanks to The Nation, for the loan) and some of the news coverage about it...
Here's the $64,000 question..
Are all the Blackwater goons white? Or most of them...
Just think "Erik Prince, North Carolina, KKK," and the implications are startling, if not frightening.
IS this band of mercenaries an expression of the old south racist agenda? If so, their return, AS A UNIT, to this country represents a very dangerous and disconcerting potential.
Considering that the Republican candidates won't even talk to minority groups, and the evidence of a very deliberate move to the right down in Jena, one might assume they have written-off the ethnic vote.
So how much of a leap is it to the conclusions I've drawn here?
I don't even need a tin-foil hat for this one...
And I think it would behoove all the blogs to converge on the Republican candidates' obvious racist direction in this long season of lies.

then there's this:
Iraq Probe of U.S. Security Firm Grows
Blackwater, Accused of Killing 11 on Sunday, Cited in Earlier Deaths
By Joshua Partlow and Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 22, 2007; Page A01
BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 -- Iraq's probe into a deadly shooting by Blackwater USA in Baghdad last weekend has expanded to include allegations about the security firm's involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.

The incidents include the killing of three guards at a state-run media complex and the shooting death of an Iraqi journalist outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, (doesn't that just prove they are state-sponsored terrorists?) said Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, chief spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

Iraqi officials say these violent encounters have made them increasingly frustrated with Blackwater's conduct in Iraq, but the government backed away Friday from its attempt to expel the company. Blackwater has said its guards acted appropriately in the weekend incident, but it did not respond to requests for comment Friday on the other episodes cited by Khalaf.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102271.html?wpisrc=newsletter

More than a million Iraqi displaced..

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semi autonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The Red Crescent compiled the figures from reports filed as recently as the end of August by tens of thousands of relief workers scattered across all parts of Iraq who are straining to provide aid for an estimated 280,000 families swept up nationwide in an enormous and complex migration.

...the new figures show that the migration is not neatly dividing Baghdad along the Tigris, separating Sunnis who live predominantly on the west bank from Shiites, who live predominantly on the east. Instead, some Sunnis are moving to the predominantly Shiite side of the river, into neighborhoods that are relatively secular, mixed and where services are better, according to Red Crescent staff.

Just last week within Baghdad itself, a Sunni tribe of 250 families that lived in Dora, one of the most violent neighborhoods, was forced to flee. Rather than going to an area where they would be with others of their sect, they went to their neighbors to the south, in Abu Dshir, a Shiite area. They were welcomed by the local tribe and given places to stay in people’s homes, according to field staff both for the Red Crescent and the International Office for Migration, an intergovernmental agency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/world/middleeast/19displaced.html

Blackwater shoots first, asks no questions later... victims include infants.
BAGHDAD, Sept. 18 — A preliminary Iraqi report on a shooting involving an American diplomatic motorcade said Tuesday that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman’s call to stop, killing a couple and their infant. The report, by the Ministry of Interior, was presented to the Iraqi cabinet and, though unverified, seemed to contradict an account offered by Blackwater USA that the guards were responding to gunfire by militants. The report said Blackwater helicopters had also fired. The Ministry of Defense said 20 Iraqis had been killed, a far higher number than had been reported before.
In a sign of the seriousness of the standoff, the American Embassy here suspended diplomatic missions outside the Green Zone and throughout Iraq on Tuesday.
“There was not shooting against the convoy,” said Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government’s spokesman. “There was no fire from anyone in the square.”
A State Department spokesman, Edgar Vasquez, said he had not heard of the report and repeated that the department was conducting an investigation supported by the American military. A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.
...
In video shot shortly after the episode, the child appeared to have burned to the mother’s body after the car caught fire, according to an official who saw it.

In interviews on Tuesday, six Iraqis who had been in the area at the time of the shooting, including a man who was wounded and an Iraqi Army soldier who helped rescue people, offered roughly similar versions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/world/middleeast/19blackwater.html

Blackwater gets their walking papers from Iraq.

Iraq has cancelled the licence of the private security firm, Blackwater USA, after it was involved in a gunfight in which at least eight civilians died.
The Iraqi interior ministry said the contractor, based in North Carolina, was now banned from operating in Iraq.
The Blackwater workers, who were contracted by the US state department, apparently opened fire after coming under attack in Baghdad on Sunday.
Thousands of private security guards are employed in lawless Iraq.
They are often heavily armed, but critics say some are not properly trained and are not accountable except to their employers.

More like tens of thousands...So now when they back here, what will they all do for a living?