Trump Pardons 20, Including Contractors Who Killed Civilians

 Trump issued a series of 20 pardons and sentence commutations this week — among the most shocking were 4 men behind a 2007 massacre in Iraq that left 14 innocent people dead.

Blackwater's Erik Prince: Iraq, privatising wars and Trump

Mehdi Hasan challenges the Blackwater founder on his firm's role in Iraq and his new plan to privatise the Afghan war.

Blackwater Founder To Open Training Camp In Xinjiang China

Erik Prince the founder of Blackwater USA which is infamous for its actions in Iraq. Which among other incidents involved a mass killing in a public square in Baghdad.  Several of those involved were convicted of killing, among others, two Reuters Journalists.  Now he's going to open a training camp in Xinjiang. a Provence in Western China which is home a large Muslim minority.  China has, in recent years gone to extreme measures to suppress the population with internment camps.

 Deal is controversial because of sweeping security crackdown that has detained one million Muslims

A Hong Kong-listed security firm run by Erik Prince has signed a deal with authorities in China to build a training centre in Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims have experienced a huge security crackdown.

Frontier Services Group, which specialises in providing security and logistics for businesses operating in risky regions, said it had signed a deal to run a training base in the city of Kashgar, according to a statement posted on its Chinese website.

The firm was founded by Erik Prince, a former US Navy SEAL and the brother of US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

But its presence in Xinjiang is controversial because of the sweeping security crackdown Chinese authorities have launched in the restive far-western region, including reported mass incarcerations.

Up to one million Uighurs and members of other mostly Muslim minority groups are held in extrajudicial detention in camps in Xinjiang, according to a group of experts cited by the United Nations.

Who Better To Conduct America's Drone War: Than Private Contractors

During the second Iraq war the American Defense Department came to the utterly brilliant conclusion that it would be just wonderful if they outsourced large portions of the war effort to private security firms.  It didn't workout so well.  But, instead of learning anything from that disaster the Pentagon has once again become reliant on private security firms to help it prosecute its drone wars.  You, know those little undeclared   conflicts in such places as Yemen, Somalia and  Pakistan.  Of course it'll be the perfect symbiotic relationship.  Until the usual f-up and innocent people are killed. Wait, that's already happening.  

Corporate staff are reviewing top-secret data and helping uniformed colleagues decide whether people under surveillance are enemies or civilians

Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.

While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in supplying analysts for combing through intelligence material has remained almost entirely unknown until now.

Approximately one in 10 people involved in the effort to process data captured by drones and spy planes are non-military. And as the rise of Islamic State prompts what one commander termed “insatiable” demand for aerial surveillance, the Pentagon is considering further expanding its use of contractors, an air force official said.

The problem is the ratio of contractors to government personnel

Laura Dickinson

Companies that stand to reap the benefits include BAE Systems and Edward Snowden’s former employer Booz Allen Hamilton.

Military contractors: Mercenary or necessary?

The jailing of four former Blackwater guards reignites the debate over the outsourcing of war.

From opportunistic guns for hire on the fringe of domestic conflicts to a global force operating within a multi-billion dollar industry. The world of the military mercenary has become big business.

Private companies have taken on an increasing range of responsibilities as war is outsourced, from security and intelligence analysis, to training and combat roles.

It has been a controversial issue, and the US State Department has offered assurances that it has strengthened rules governing private security firms in the wake of a 2007 shooting in Iraq in which 14 civilians were killed.

A court in Washington, DC on Monday sentenced a former Blackwater guard to life in prison and three others to 30 years each for their role in the mass shooting in Baghdad.

The prosecutor described it as an "unprovoked ambush of civilians".

The incident cast a spotlight on the use of private contractors in conflict zones, and raised questions about oversight and accountability.

Jeremy Scahill Criticizes Media Coverage of Conflict In Gaza-video

“When you look at what’s happening right now in Gaza, this is a massive massacre and one epic series of war crime after war crime, child after child being killed,” Scahill told host Alyona Minkovski. “And most news organizations are forced to acknowledge that the Palestinians and its children and whole families are being killed. They’re forced to because cameras are there; they’re forced to because there are reporters on the ground reporting on that.”

But, he added, “if you step back and you look at the way that this is always framed over these weeks of Israel’s constant bombardment of Gaza, it’s as though Hamas and Israel are sort of two equal military powers fighting one another.” Considering Israel has its Iron Dome missile-defense system in place to protect its citizens, Scahill said this was a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

Jeremy Scahill is an American journalist and author who wrote Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

Blackwater's Top Manager Threatened To Kill State Department Investigator

From Crooks and Liars

According to newly released documents by The New York Times, Blackwater knocked down a probe by the State Department looking into their operations in Iraq by threatening to kill the investigator.

From The New York Times: Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater:

WASHINGTON — Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.

American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.

After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”

“The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves,” the investigator, Jean C. Richter, wrote in an Aug. 31, 2007, memo to State Department officials. “Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law,” he said, adding that the “hands off” management resulted in a situation in which “the contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control.” Read on...