Blackwater / Xe / IDS / Academi - R2

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Publicidad de Blackwater en el último Journal de IPOA.

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Un ejemplo de la manipulación de la información por parte del New York Times:

Mark Corallo, a former Department of Justice spokesman who did some PR work for Blackwater, gave a lengthy interview to the New York Times. On November 1, the Times ran a story quoting Corallo as speaking in derogatory terms about the company. The reporter pulled a lone quote out of context and ignored all the positive information, Corallo says in a lengthy piece published by National Review Online.

The full text appears below:

I woke up Thursday morning, checked the Blackberry, and found an e-mail from a television-producer friend asking about comments attributed to me by the New York Times about Blackwater USA. Remembering my lengthy conversation with a reporter about the security firm, I expected a thank-you call from my former clients. Then I read the story.

I’m not naïve and I’m no rookie in dealing with the media. But when one spends 40 minutes on the phone with a highly respected reporter, singing the praises of a company that does heroic service to our country, one expects those comments to be reflected in the story.When the Times’s John Broder called me about Blackwater, he wanted to know what I made of the company’s recent public-relations push.

My response was that it was long overdue: For far too long, the State Department gagged Blackwater, barring them from defending themselves from unfair attacks in the media and by liberal congressman trying to score political points with the MoveOn.org crowd. I explained that the men of Blackwater were true patriots, heroes who volunteered to go into harm’s way to protect the lives of American diplomats and elected officials, some of whom were attacking the very company that kept them safe overseas. Yet because the antiwar Left (most vocally supported by liberal Democrats in the House and Senate) wanted to score political points, they constantly accused Blackwater of being unaccountable and above the law. Nothing, I said, was further from the truth, and these so-called legislators should be ashamed of themselves for being ignorant of the statutes governing the conduct of security contractors overseas.

I went on at length about the vision and commitment of Blackwater’s founder and owner Erik Prince. Instead of spending the rest of his life relaxing on the interest from a sizeable inheritance, Prince decided to become a Navy Seal. While serving on active duty he realized that the Navy lacked the facilities to conduct the kind of training that would make our soldiers, sailors, and Marines even more proficient and skilled war fighters. When he left active service, he created Blackwater USA and dedicated his life to making America even safer.

I told Broder stories of bravery from Blackwater employees in Iraq, who suffered injury and death to save the lives of the American civilians in their care. I told him about the standards to which Blackwater holds its employees — standards that exceed those of our armed forces. I told him of their dedication to the rule of law and the Constitution.I told him of a cable from a State Department employee who literally watched Blackwater heroes die while rescuing her from enemy attack in Baghdad — how she owed her life to them and would never be able to repay them. I then told him that when Blackwater was being dragged before Henry Waxman’s oversight committee back in February in a blatant effort to help a civil lawsuit, the State Department would not allow them to even quote from that diplomat’s message in order to describe what Blackwater is really about.

I told Broder that our uniformed military are not trained to do personnel security missions — that it would be too costly and a waste of their time and talents. I reminded him that for every soldier deployed forward, it takes eleven support personnel behind them. Blackwater can support 50 security professionals with one support employee back in the States. I told him that for all the talk about the high cost of security contractors, the cost of having our soldiers do the job would be three or four times higher to the taxpayer. I told Broder that I stopped representing Blackwater for a number of reasons, chief among them my inability to help them under the State Department’s gag order. I told him of sitting in a meeting with the State Department’s contracting officer, who told the company’s representatives that if they so much as popped their heads up in the media, he would ruin them.

I did say that — as would be true of just about any corporation — there were some inside Prince’s organization (but not Prince or his senior team) who were unsophisticated in the ways of Washington and didn’t understand or particularly like the congressional-oversight process. I did say that there were a couple of guys who had a “cowboy mentality.” But those comments were in the context of the company’s image — a necessary one for business purposes. Let’s face it, nobody is going to hire a bunch of wimps or trust their lives to guys who aren’t willing to act with speed and determination under fire. So the cowboy tag was a double-edged sword. At the end of my conversation with Mr. Broder, he said that “after this story, the company ought to send you a check.” I told him I didn’t want money from Blackwater. I was just glad that I could finally tell their story, defend them, take a few hard whacks at the elected officials and bureaucrats who were so ungrateful to these brave men who were protecting them from an enemy that draws no distinction between uniformed military and civilians. I’m pretty sure that Dennis Kucinich would not have appreciated the things I said about his ignorant ranting, his uninformed accusations, his general idiocy.

A million people will tell me that I shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times mischaracterized my comments and omitted 99.9 percent of what I said because it didn’t fit the story the Times wanted to tell. They’ll tell me that I should have expected it and that I should never have trusted a reporter from the country’s leading left-wing newspaper. But I did expect more, and still do.

I’m not holding my breath for a retraction, but I am sorry I ever spoke to the New York Times about Blackwater. Blackwater is a great company that protects Americans in hostile environments. They haven’t lost a single one of the Americans in their care, despite suffering over 30 deaths and countless injuries. They are maligned daily for doing exactly what their government has asked them to do, and they do it better than anyone else in the business. And their main client — the U.S. State Department — refuses to tell the real stories of the real people who owe their lives to these heroes. I’m glad that Blackwater has decided to defend itself, even if it means losing contracts. I’m betting the State Department bureaucrat who threatened to ruin them can’t wait to “review” their contracts — another reason why one of the biggest outrages here is the inability to fire incompetent, abusive career civil servants. So today I’m again left wondering why Erik Prince doesn’t just fold up the tents and head to the beach. I know the answer — same reasons why guys who have seen combat over and over go back and face the fire. Those are reasons that the liberals and the media cannot comprehend.

— Mark Corallo, a consultant with Corallo Comstock, Inc., is a former DOJ spokesman who represented Blackwater in private practice in 2006.

Y unas cosillas de las que me he ido enterando los últimos días:

* Blackwater dejó IPOA debido a presiones del DoS, que no querian que Doug Brooks siguiera saliendo en los medios defendiendo a Blackwater. IPOA rompió la política del "no comments" impuesta por el DoS, que obligó a la empresa a empezar una campaña de infoops dirigida desde parte de las empresas de intel de Prince Group LLC.

* Greystone está en plena ofensiva de reclutamiento en Latinoamerica.

* Los Polar 200 y Polar 400 (dirigibles de reconocimiento) de Blackwater Airships están ya en fase de pruebas. Van a llevarse a un campo de maniobras de la US Navy para someterlos a varios ejercicios.

* El senador John Kerry (Dem.) ha divulgado el contrato de Presidential Airways con la US Navy para el apoyo en operaciones buque-costa en la zona de Indonesia y Filipinas.

* Ya están en Iraq los helicópteros de la Task Order 10.

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Un buen editorial de Hillhouse en el Christian Science Monitor, nombrando alguno de los detalles que ya hemos comentado aquí desde el día 16.

Don't blame Blackwater

The security firm acts according to its contract with the State Department.
By R.J. Hillhouse Hilo, Hawaii



One critical piece has been missing from the debate about Blackwater's behavior in Iraq. The security firm operates as should be expected – as an agent of the US State Department, which it is. It acts just as State has prescribed by contract. Giving the Defense Department (DoD) more oversight over Blackwater and other contractors in Iraq, a plan announced Tuesday, doesn't change that.

Since Blackwater was involved in a September shootout in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, the firm has come under intense criticism for what many call overaggressive tactics.

But the issue isn't an overly aggressive contractor. It's the State Department's zero tolerance for casualties of its employees in Iraq. Such an approach makes tragedies such as the September episode more common – and it marginalizes the lives of innocent Iraqis who just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Placing so many diplomats and civil servants on nation-building assignments in the middle of a civil war has a high price – perhaps too high, as officials at State have finally started to acknowledge.

The US government appears to tolerate a certain number of casualties from the all-volunteer military. But civilian employees are a different story. Images of dead diplomats being dragged through Iraqi streets or videotaped beheadings of civil servants, it's assumed, would undermine already tenuous public support of the war.

The very branch of the US government charged with fostering relations with the Iraqi government and people is responsible for the behavior that has helped erode support from the Iraqi populace. The State Department Diplomatic Security Service set up aggressive rules for the use of force for its contractors in what's called the Mission Firearms Policy. These rules are more aggressive than those used by the military for its contracted forces. In fact, the Secretary of State's Panel on Personal Protective Services in Iraq recommended last month that these guidelines be amended to require basic assurances: "due regard for safety of innocent bystanders," "every effort to avoid civilian casualties," and only aimed shots – a nod to the fact that pointing and spraying rounds isn't explicitly banned.

Since 2005, Blackwater has conducted more than 16,500 protective security details under contract with the State Department. In 1 percent of these missions, Blackwater operators discharged weapons. The government officials that Blackwater was guarding were present on some portion of these missions and, at the least, were tolerating Blackwater's aggressive behavior.

The State Department's responsibility, however, is much more straightforward than that. The Diplomatic Security Services' Regional Security Office maintains direct operational control of each mission performed by Blackwater. As Blackwater CEO Erik Prince described to CNN, "They [State personnel] dictate the missions, they dictate the vehicles, they provide the weapons, they tell us where to go and what to do."

The State Department contract requires that protective security details are trained in some of the very behaviors that Blackwater teams have been criticized for, particularly tactical motorcade operations that include offensive driving techniques such as ramming other vehicles.

It is doubtful that replacing Blackwater with another contractor, or even with diplomatic security officers, would make a difference in how the contract is performed. Aligning the Mission Firearms Policy with Central Command's guidelines for contractors is a good first step.

Transferring oversight of contractors from the State Department to DoD will allow DoD to monitor their previously unknown whereabouts – a longtime irritant to commanders in the field. But the change will have little effect on the instructions that firms receive from their State Department contracting officers. It would also worsen accountability: DoD's dismal record of vendor oversight includes Halliburton and the contractors involved in Abu Ghraib.

One of the gravest dangers of the government outsourcing $400 billion of its services is that it can shift responsibility for its actions to the private sector even if the blame is unwarranted. The State Department has launched internal reviews and let its chief of diplomatic security go. But the Bureau of Diplomatic Security's granting immunity to the contractors involved in the shootout is a troubling precedent, particularly since that bureau contracted with Blackwater and has been responsible for its contract monitoring.

Contractors need to be held accountable to the same standards and legal codes as federal employees are. Otherwise it becomes too easy for the government to outsource its own responsibility, then absolve the contractor when it gets caught. If there was any wrongdoing at the Blackwater shootout in Baghdad, the guilty should be held accountable.

However, the American public and Congress should not be distracted by the fact that the State Department's grittier work was outsourced to a contractor. They should not allow the government to let a contractor take the fall while it sidesteps accountability for a cold calculus that its diplomats and aid workers have to be protected at all costs – costs that may include some innocent Iraqi lives.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1102/p09s ... tml?page=1

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Nueva camiseta fetiche de Blackwater:




Personalmente no me gusta, unos bump stickers habrían sido mejor idea. Aparte, las de limitadísima edición "Ride for the Brand, Ride for Real" de 2006 tienen mucho más mensaje que estas

[Esteban]

No se yo si un logo donde se ve la planta de una pata de un animal es algo inteligente si vas a operar en un país musulmán... Fíjate a esos pobres de Public Affairs del USArmy que se les ocurrieron repartir balones de futbol con las banderas de los países que aspiran a jugar el mundial...incluyendo la de Arabia Saudí.

[pagano]

En la cultura musulmana y árabe hay tres animales tabú socialmente:
- cerdos,
- perros,
- monos.
Para ellos, es una ofensa por ejemplo que te comparen con un mono o que un perro entre en tu casa (los americanos han tenido muchos problemas en Irak cuando sus patrullas entra con perros bien sean detectores de explosivos o de defensa y ataque en las casas para registrarlas, de la manera que lo han tenido los israelíes en los territorios).
En cambio hay otros que son casi venerados:
caballo,
camello,
aves de presa, especialmente las de cetrería.

[Esteban]

Otro de los tabús es enseñar la planta de los zapatos. Y no digamos (imagino) si ésta corresponde a la pezuña de un animal (no digamos impuro). Supongo que si corresponde a un oso, habrá consejo de ulemas para analizar los precedentes.

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Típica foto que no aparecerá en la prensa...



Campamento de Blackwater donde atendieron a las más de 300 personas rescatadas de los incendios de California. Sin cobrar, sin contratos de por medio... y más de la mitad de ellos rescatados de una "acampada antiBlackwater".

Tuvo que ser curioso el ver a los antiPMCs poniendose las camisetas de BW, con el logo de la garra de oso

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Video de AP mostrando parte del campamento que Blackwater West ha montado para las personas que han perdido sus casas en los incendios del condado de San Diego

http://video.ap.org/v/Legacy.aspx?partn ... s&&f=INWAY

Es curioso que en lugar de un emplazamiento temporal al uso, los de BW han montado una especie de "bed & breakfast" desde el que las personas que perdieron sus casas y propiedades pueden trabajar (conexión a internet, teléfonos,...) y empezar a rehacer sus vidas, en lugar de quedarse allí comiendo raciones de emergencia por un tiempo indefinido.

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¿Preparados para ver una guerra abierta entre el Ministerio del Interior de Iraq y las PMCs en Bagdad? Me pregunto si la policía iraquí (sin armamento pesado, helos o blindados) se atreverá a intentar "asaltar" los recintos situados en la IZ, o si preferirán tender checkpoints para hacer registros a los convoys de contratistas. De todas formas lo tienen crudo, ningún contratista va a dejar que un policía iraquí -el 90% de ellos milicianos de Sadr- se le acerque y mucho menos que le quite las armas.

Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.

The tightening of the requirements followed a shooting in September by one of those firms, Blackwater, that Iraqi authorities said left 17 Iraqis dead.

“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”

During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.

Iraqi officials have created an elaborate computerized database to help recover the weapons and ensure that no more are lost, and officials took great pains on Wednesday to show the system to this reporter and his interpreter.

“We have 190,000 lost weapons because they were not distributed properly,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman. “So we built this database.”

Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before tracking systems were fully in place.

On Wednesday, Iraqi officials delicately placed blame for the loss of the weapons on the American military, saying that it had been impossible for the Iraqis to account for the weapons when they were not given necessary tracking information, such as serial numbers.

Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.

Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.

And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.

That dynamic was laid bare in the weeks immediately after the shooting on Sept. 16 in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The Iraqi government at first suggested that it would ban Blackwater, which has a contract to protect American diplomats, from working in Iraq. But the government was embarrassed when it discovered that its legal options were limited, and the United States — after placing a few new restrictions on the company — quickly sent it back onto the streets.

Based on its own investigation, the Iraqi government has concluded that the Blackwater guards who opened fire committed murder. An American investigation led by the F.B.I. has not yet publicly announced any results.

The outlines of a struggle for primacy on the streets also seem apparent in what the Interior Ministry says is a decision to insist that weapons carried by members of Shiite-controlled militias that protect certain neighborhoods must also be registered. Asked about the vast areas of Baghdad patrolled by the powerful Mahdi Army, which was founded by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, General Khalaf said that it too would be challenged.

“In the near future there is a campaign that will happen,” General Khalaf said. “We are delaying this campaign until we finish this database.”

Privately, Interior Ministry officials say that they had been surprised that the Iraqi investigators’ findings of culpability by the Blackwater guards had found such a sympathetic hearing elsewhere in the world, where for years there had been questions about the loyalties and capability of Interior Ministry officials.

In one sense, by emphasizing the new steps it is taking to control weapons, the Interior Ministry seems determined to leverage the respect shown for its investigators in such a high-profile case into an improved image over all. The strategy appears to be to concede that both American and Iraqi security forces have made mistakes in the past but that both were taking steps to put those problems behind them.

During one remarkable session on Wednesday, an administrative official at the ministry said that it had had problems with “ghost payrollers,” or fictitious employees, and political pressure in the past. But the official, Maj. Gen. Jihan Hussein, said that the ministry was squarely facing those problems.

“If you knew the pressures we have from members of Parliament to have their relatives employed by the ministry, you wouldn’t believe it,” General Hussein said.

But he said the ministry would not bow to those pressures. In a similar vein, Mr. Bolani said that the ministry’s strict new approach to weapons licenses would try to redress past mistakes.

And Mr. Bolani said he believed that legal action against Blackwater in Iraq was still possible in spite of immunity given to Western security contractors under Iraqi law. He said that third parties like nongovernmental organizations or the Iraqi Bar Association could bring suits on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shootings.

“We are fully aware that the people must be given their rights, and there are cases that will be brought against the criminals,” Mr. Bolani said.

Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting.

Las armas entregadas a los iraquíes están en manos de las milicias y vendidas por el Ministerio de Interior a los traficantes de armas, ¿y la culpa es de los americanos por entregarles armas? cojonudo, entonces ¿para qué serán los registros a las PMCs?

Con las de fuera de Bagdad no se atreverán, los convoys de Erinys, Aegis, EODT, Saber,... al primer checkpoint de la policía iraquí que les de el alto, o los arrollan o les vacían los cargadores encima. Los últimos que respondieron a la policía iraquí siguen desaparecidos.