Inside the Beltway
Nov 11, 2008 Industry News
Written by John McCaslin and published on The Washinton Times website
11 November 2008
INTO BLACKWATER–As Erik Prince rattles off history’s roster of “privateers,” or independent contractors who helped shape, secure and ultimately spread American democracy — Revolutionary War naval fighter John Paul Jones to the “Flying Tigers” of World War II — a U.S. Coast Guard search-and-rescue helicopter swoops down over a lake outside his office window and evacuates four souls in distress.
Erik Prince, Chairmen of Blackwater Worldwide
A hundred yards beyond the orange-and-white chopper, green smoke pours from a bombed-out vehicle carrying an American diplomat, who lies injured on the ground. Within seconds, a security team in three four-wheel-drive vehicles speeds in reverse to rescue the official and his entourage.
In the distance one hears the fire of semi-automatic M-4 Carbines — today’s weapon of choice in the war against terrorism, although Mr. Prince labels the box-cutter “the most cost-effective weapon in history” — and from behind a stand of trees the reverberation of more powerful munitions.
This, I come to realize, is a typical morning at Blackwater Worldwide’s 7,000-acre headquarters and training facility in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. Here on any given day training is provided to 750 people — 35,000 per year.
Founded by Mr. Prince in 1998, Blackwater has provided instruction to virtually every branch of the U.S. military (not to mention America’s allies), including 135,000 U.S. Navy personnel, 8,000 U.S. Coast Guardsmen, even cadets of West Point.
“We fill the gaps,” explains the 39-year-old Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seal whose title is chairman and CEO of Blackwater. A graduate of Hillsdale College (his Michigan family previously owned the automobile-parts manufacturer Prince Corporation), he equates Blackwater’s emergence to FedEx, which “evolved due to the lack of capabilities and responsiveness of the USPS” [U.S. Postal Service].
“Who do you trust with your overnight package?” Mr. Prince points out.
One Blackwater official put it this way: “When they finally get Osama bin Laden, somebody from Blackwater will be within 50 feet of where he is found.”
During my tour of what is the largest private technical training facility in the United States, I encounter SWAT teams from several local police departments and members of the Canadian Armed Forces’ elite counter-terrorist/special ops unit — or so I gather from their uniforms.
Blackwater’s aviation mechanics, meanwhile, are busy in one aircraft hangar installing the newest high-tech equipment in two Royal Jordanian military helicopters. Soon, Blackwater will begin training Pakistani soldiers and Afghan border police, and providing armed escorts for commercial vessels sailing through the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.
Needless to say, Blackwater Worldwide (formerly Blackwater USA) has come a long way since it was awarded its first major U.S. government contract following the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors. Life-size replicas of Navy ship hulls float on a lake here, where Blackwater’s instructors, many of them ex-military, teach sailors how to thwart future bombing attempts.
Blackwater’s primary mission — delivering security, capacity and hope to populations ensnared in conflict — is accomplished thousands of miles from this Carolina swamp. The security firm deploys more than 2,000 civilian contractors in 15 countries — “most places you would not want to visit,” notes Mr. Prince — to assist international relief organizations (if indeed they are in place) in providing humanitarian aid, particularly medicine, food and water.
“Butter, not guns,” Mr. Prince stresses. In 2007 alone, Blackwater undertook 11,000 missions, including providing security to the U.S. government, primarily the State Department.
All of which presents inherent risks. In 2004, four Blackwater contractors in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, their charred bodies hung from a Euphrates River bridge; and on Sept. 16, 2007, 17 Iraqis in Baghdad were killed by Blackwater when it detected an ambush of a State Department convoy.
As a result of the latter shooting, which remains under federal investigation, Mr. Prince was summoned to Capitol Hill to testify about Blackwater’s contracts (reportedly worth more than $1 billion since 2001) with Uncle Sam and what government oversight exists with the security firm’s overseas operations.
“We perform no offensive missions,” Mr. Prince insists (albeit he concedes Blackwater easily beat the National Guard to New Orleans to airlift stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina). Indeed, he is insulted by accusations to the contrary.
One Blackwater official, who requests anonymity, tells me: “Blackwater is defined in the press, and by extension the public, by two events that resulted in the loss of human life. The first, Fallujah, resulted in the loss of four Blackwater lives. The second, on 16 September 2007, resulted in the loss of 17 Iraqi lives.
“The irony here is that it is a company that was founded and exists to save lives. Everything done is in the interest of safety: training troops to defend themselves; building armored personnel carriers to keep troops alive in battle; building airships for surveillance to detect the bad guys; teaching cops how to effectively and safely rescue a hostage; helping people in executive-protection roles avoid an ambush in a vehicle; building an aviation division capable of performing rescue missions in war zones and natural disasters. The list goes on.
“My point is that the press quantifies the loss of life, but fails to account for the sparing of life because of Blackwater. In Katrina alone, 128 people were pulled to safety before a contract was ever awarded. In more than 20,000 diplomatic missions, no one protected by Blackwater has ever even been seriously injured.”
Tags: Blackwater, Erik Prince, OBL
Triple Blasts Kill 28 in Northern Baghdad
Nov 11, 2008 Middle East, World Events
BAGHDAD — A synchronized triple-bombing in northern Baghdad killed 28 people early Monday, an Interior Ministry official said, which would make it the deadliest attack in Baghdad since June, when a car bombing killed 51.
The bombers struck a main street of a mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhood in the Adhamiya district about 8:15 a.m., when the street was bustling with street cleaners and commuters heading to work.
Bombs planted in two parked cars exploded about five minutes apart, an Interior Ministry official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. As a crowd gathered in the chaos, a suicide bomber darted into it and detonated his explosives.
Two local hospitals reported that a total of 49 people had been brought in for treatment, some with serious injuries. The Interior Ministry said 68 had been wounded.
The American military later reported much lower casualty figures: seven killed and 37 wounded. Such discrepancies are not uncommon in the hours after a violent attack.
The bombings, along with a suicide attack in Baquba on Monday, seem to be part of an rise in violence after a relatively quiet few weeks here. On Sunday, at least 12 Iraqis were killed in a spate of attacks, many of them in provinces outside of Baghdad where Iraqi-led security operations had recently taken place. On Saturday, at least 11 people were killed in attacks in Baghdad and Anbar Province.
The Associated Press counted at least 19 bombings in Baghdad this month as of Sunday, compared with 28 for all of October and 22 in September. At least 44 people were killed in Baghdad bombings from Nov. 1 to this past Sunday, compared with 95 for October and 96 in September, The A.P. found.
An hour after the blasts in Baghdad on Monday, shattered glass and pools of blood covered the street between two large restaurants. One sold shawarma sandwiches, a popular snack, and chunks of grilled meat were strewn across the road, along with torn-open canisters of cooking gas.
A burst sewer pipe leaked murky water, and a municipal bus was badly damaged, its white plastic seats splashed with blood.
Ganiya Kareem, 60, who had been walking with her grandson, a toddler, said she had seen “a bus turned into a lump of coal.”
Hamza Abdul Kareem, 37, an army sergeant, said that until Monday his neighborhood had been “peaceful and beautiful.” That morning, he said, he saw a young mother sitting in the bus with a baby in her arms, both dead.
In Medical City, a hospital in central Baghdad where many of the wounded were taken, Ahmed Abdul Kadr, 13, a day laborer, lay dazed on a bed in the ground-floor emergency room, his green cotton shorts caked with blood.
Ahmed said he had come to the capital the week before from his home in Hilla, to the south. He found work as a ditch digger and was helping to excavate a stretch of pavement when the first explosion knocked him flat.
“I was digging together with one man, but he died right there,” Ahmed said. “My legs are filled with shrapnel, but I’ll be all right. I’m going to go home for a while, but then I’ll come to Baghdad and find another job.”
Also Monday, a young female suicide bomber blew herself up at a checkpoint near Baquba, north of Baghdad, killing four and wounding 15, a local security official said. The bomber seemed to have sought to attack members of the Awakening movement, a Sunni counterinsurgency group, who were operating the checkpoint. Two of the dead and seven of the wounded were Awakening members.
Security officials in Diyala Province, of which Baquba is the capital, said that only the head and the feet of the bomber had been recovered, but that she appeared to be about 15 years old.
She was the second female suicide bomber to strike in Iraq in two days. On Sunday, a woman blew herself up at a hospital in Anbar Province, killing another woman.
In Baghdad Province, the Iraqi government has begun taking over the payment of tens of thousands of Awakening members, a group of mostly Sunni Arabs who have worked with the Americans to fight Islamic extremists. Until Oct. 1, they were paid by the United States military.
The Iraqi payouts began this week in west Baghdad, and will continue later in the month in other areas.
At a joint American and Iraqi outpost in the Jihad neighborhood, scores of Awakening guards received 354,000 dinars, the Iraqi equivalent of their old $300 monthly salary under the Americans.
Staff Col. Ali Aboud Thamer, the Iraqi commander of Jihad and Furat districts, said he was “very happy.” As he spoke, the Awakening guards, very likely including former insurgents who once fought his own men, lined up at a table piled with fresh bills, some saluting as they were handed the cash.
Also on Monday, negotiations continued between Iraq and the United States over a long-term security agreement. Iraq’s spokesman said changes proposed by the United States last week were “not enough” and his government had asked Washington for revisions if it wanted the pact approved, The A.P. reported.
The spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, did not specify which points the Iraqis found unacceptable.
A State Department spokesman said the United States had not received an official response and had no comment.
For the American military to remain in Iraq, an agreement must be approved by Parliament before a United Nations mandate expires on Dec. 31.
Pakistani militants seize coalition Humvees
Nov 11, 2008 Asia, World Events
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) — Pakistan-based militants launched back-to-back assaults on convoys carrying food and military supplies in a mountain pass in northwest Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.
The Monday morning attacks took place about 30 minutes apart in the Khyber Pass, a mountain pass that links Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is located in Khyber, one of seven semiautonomous tribal agencies along the Afghan border.
Around 60 to 70 armed militants seized 13 trucks — 12 carrying wheat into Afghanistan as part of a World Food Programme convoy, and one transporting Humvees to the U.S.-led coalition, Khyber Agency officials said.
Authorities dispatched two helicopter gunships, which fired on the raiding militants. The firing killed one person and wounded another, but could not foil the hijacking, officials said.
Local tribal leaders are now expected to hold talks with the militants to try and secure the return of the trucks and their supplies.
Because Afghanistan is landlocked, many supplies for NATO-led troops fighting Islamic militants there have to be trucked in from Pakistan. Officials said militants aligned with the Taliban and al Qaeda have carried out similar attacks in the past in the Khyber Pass region.
The Pakistani central government has little control in the area, and it is believed to be a haven for militants.
Kenya: Somalis Kidnap 2 Nuns
Nov 11, 2008 Africa, World Events
World Briefing | Africa
Heavily armed Somali gunmen stormed across the Kenyan border on Monday and kidnapped two Italian nuns from a remote town in northeastern Kenya, witnesses and local authorities said. The attackers struck before dawn and then raced back across the border into lawless Somalia. Kidnapping has become a lucrative business in Somalia, and several Western aid workers are currently being held captive. But kidnappers rarely strike inside Kenya, and the Kenyan government said it was now sending more security forces to the border areas.
Tags: afr, Kenya, Kidnapping, Somalia
