Who is blackwater

Donald Trump has pardoned the four contractors jailed over the killing of 14 civilians. Trump pardons ex-campaign aide and disgraced Republican lawmakers. Read more. Reuse this content. By Tara Copp. More In Flashpoints. America and its foes remain in the way of a landmine-free future: report The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has been issuing the report annually since In Other News. Army found that contractors were involved in 36 percent of the proven abuse incidents from and identified six particular employees as being culpable in the abuses.

However, while the enlisted U. Army soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse were properly court-martialed for their crimes, three years later not one of the private contractors named in the U. Army investigation reports has been charged, prosecuted or punished. In another incident in , armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.

Again, they were not charged, as the legal issues remained murky. Blackwater is thus not the only company to be accused of incidents that negatively impact the battle to win hearts and minds. But Blackwater has earned a special reputation among Iraqis. Much of this stems from the highly visible role it has played in escorting U.

Iraqi government officials claim that there have been at least seven incidents of civilian harm in which the company has been involved. The most notable that has been reported in the press was on Christmas Eve , when a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi vice president. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country. Nine months later, he has not been charged with any crime.

Imagine the same thing happening in the U. In May , there were two more reported shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors, including an Interior Ministry employee, which led to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police. Thus, many felt the great tension between the firm and the locals would soon erupt. As far back as , for example, Brig. Karl Horst, deputy commander of the U.

Over the course of two months, he found 12 shootings that resulted in at least six Iraqi civilian deaths and three more wounded. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. They are planting hatred, because of these irresponsible acts.

Jack Holly is a retired Marine colonel who, as director of logistics for the U. Army Corps of Engineers, has worked with several firms in Iraq. As an example of the costs to key efforts, he described how Iraqi employees of the national rail system were so intimidated by Blackwater escorts that they refused to meet with State Department officials there to help them with the reconstruction effort. These perceptions of a contractor force run amok help to undermine the very justification for the U.

As an Interior Ministry official said of the Blackwater contractors hired by the U. We have seen what they do in the streets. This statement is by an official ostensibly working with the U. Much like the Abu Ghraib affair, the episode in which the civilians were killed by Blackwater employees may have been an anomaly.

But it proved to be a perfect fact around which adversaries could wrap their wider propaganda. For example, the same week that the Blackwater shooting incident occurred, radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr was planning the withdrawal of his coalition from the government.

The global war on terrorism is not a traditional military conflict made up of set-piece battles, but rather made up of a series of small wars and insurgencies in places ranging from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Egypt, where the U. As the newly revised foreword to the famous U. They frequently are the main effort simply because of the criticality of the functions they perform. Unfortunately, here again contractors have proven to be a drag on efforts to explain and justify the already highly unpopular U.

The Blackwater episode resonated negatively not merely inside Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world. Every single media source led with the episode in the days that followed, focusing on how the U. The Al-Jazeera satellite news channel reported on the U. They are famous for shooting indiscriminately at vehicles or pedestrians who get close to their convoys.

No foreign mercenary can plead similar motivation, so all of them should go. What is telling about this episode is not merely the reaction in the press, but also how the contractor responded after the news broke. Then a spokesperson in North Carolina issued a two-paragraph statement via e-mail, only targeted at a U. It continued to not to take any press calls.

You could, however, continue to buy Blackwater apparel on the Web site, ranging from baseball caps to baby clothes. When the history books are written about the Iraq war, they will point to several critical turning points in U. Certain to make the list are the battle for Fallujah, the revelation of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and now the shootout in Baghdad that left as many as 20 civilians dead, the entire country seething and U.

What will distinguish these accounts from histories of past wars is the new common denominator for each of these incidents: the private military industry. In developing a counterinsurgency operation, the ideal is that a strategy is developed and then implemented. As Gen. What is not expected is for a third force to cause the strategy to be jettisoned, before it even has a chance to succeed.

The recent Blackwater incident is not the first time that decisions made by the firm have diverted American strategy and resources, taking the U. According to the U. There, they learned their mission would be a repeat of the first one. The second planned incursion in Libya, like the earlier one, ran aground. The mercenaries deployed to Egypt and then arrived in Libya. They had been told that they had a clear path to Tripoli, but the Turks, who back the government in Tripoli, were protecting the city with air defenses that could shred a helicopter as well as surface-to-air missiles.

The mercenaries, realizing they had no chance of success, quickly left. Libya has attracted soldiers of fortune from around the globe, sort of like the Star Wars cantina for mercenaries. Prince has been fascinated with Libya for years, in part because the United States has a limited footprint there. He is in many ways an echo of Trump: a relentless self-promoter, brimming with a confidence in his own capabilities and a belief that there is no problem he cannot solve — despite the failures from Nisour Square on.

Prince paints himself as continually undercut by unscrupulous enemies in the Democratic Party, but some of his colleagues say his problems are of his own making.

Prince has hung on to the Blackwater trademark for all these years, and he recently announced that the company is once again providing security services, although Prince was vague about the details. Want more Rolling Stone? Sign up for our newsletter. Erik Prince's Private Wars. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu.

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