private mercenaries?

Naw, we play by the rules... Even our soldiers get punnished for their crimes, (when caught)...

That's the difference between us and the 'terrorists'... ;)

We don't believe in false Gods...or prophets for profit.

Does our God teach murder and illegal war for profits?

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

private mercenaries?

Naw, we play by the rules... Even our soldiers get punnished for their crimes, (when caught)...

That's the difference between us and the 'terrorists'... ;)

We don't believe in false Gods...or prophets for profit.

Does our God teach murder and illegal war for profits?

...oh, we worship profits and pray at the altar of the Military/Industrial Complex...

...it's just the godhead/figure is undecided, but in the mean time, send all
your checks and donations made out to Dogbytes or better yet, made payable to cash.

---

Account frozen...

;)

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

private mercenaries?

Naw, we play by the rules... Even our soldiers get punnished for their crimes, (when caught)...

That's the difference between us and the 'terrorists'... ;)

We don't believe in false Gods...or prophets for profit.

Does our God teach murder and illegal war for profits?

...oh, we worship profits and pray at the altar of the Military/Industrial Complex...

...it's just the godhead/figure is undecided, but in the mean time, send all
your checks and donations made out to Dogbytes or better yet, made payable to cash.

Hey! Dammit! Half those checks are supposed to be made out to me. What the hell, Dogbytes!

---

Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

private mercenaries?

Naw, we play by the rules... Even our soldiers get punnished for their crimes, (when caught)...

That's the difference between us and the 'terrorists'... ;)

We don't believe in false Gods...or prophets for profit.

Does our God teach murder and illegal war for profits?

...oh, we worship profits and pray at the altar of the Military/Industrial Complex...

...it's just the godhead/figure is undecided, but in the mean time, send all
your checks and donations made out to Dogbytes or better yet, made payable to cash.

Hey! Dammit! Half those checks are supposed to be made out to me. What the hell, Dogbytes!

As the politicians would say, "all deals are negotiable."

---

Account frozen...

It's all over the news and don't want to sway opinions in any way.

I figure if anyone is on top of the news and has a chance to review the links in that google search for blackwater, they will post their thoughts and data.

People will either be interested and informed enough to participate, or they won't, and the thread dies.

I don't conform well and am not paid for my posts here.


Our members are not stupid and know my style by now.

This is true Mr Gray. But.....

I am extremely limited on the time I have to check out links. It would be nice to know a little bit about what the link is about so that I could determine if it is worth taking up some of the limited time that I have right now.

Plus....I rarely watch the news.

---

Air Cold, the blade stops;
from silent stone,
Death is preordained

Calm Chaos Forums : Everyone Welcome

Just one click of the mouse and all the data you need to make a call on it is right in front of you.

I know you have an extra 500 nanoseconds Knightmare.

Check behind and under sofa cushions!


Scroll down and give it a click.


:)

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Main problem is that such "cowboys" just increase the hate towards the US in the region. It is disturbing when even Iraqui "puppet" politicians find drastic words.
Plus it's the taxpayer's money burned there (with little control).

Iraq: Blackwater staff to face charges

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The Iraqi government said it will file criminal charges against employees of security firm Blackwater USA who were involved a gun battle in Baghdad in which civilians were killed, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said Sunday.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/09/23/blackwater.probe/index.html?section=cnn_latest

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Blackwater = clowns

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MrGray,

I spent a lot of time on slashdot.org a few years back... I got 'Goatse'ed there way too many times to blindly click on a link anymore, anywhere. Please provide a summary of what you are linking to, or at least a few specifics of what you wish to discuss... Doing so helps to ease the paranoid fear of seeing 'Mr. Goatse's backside again.

Data

Thanks for the link, MrGray. Blackwater is now saying they're not going anywhere, and will remain in Baghdad to fulfill their U.S. government contract.

Now, the boys in the Pentagon, who carry Bush's water, are probably smart enough to keep plenty of bribe money on hand for the leadership people in Iraq, the ones who might get too uppity about Blackwater and decide to do something about the "security" firm militarily. What is not so sure, even in their (the Pentagon's) tiny minds, is what might go on in the Iraqis' ranks, vis a vis a revolt, overthrowing of their (more complicit than they) ranking officers.

Another possibility is that the Iraqi people have so internalized the absurd idea that any country can award sovereignty and liberty to another by invading (violating the sovereignty of), bombing it into the Stone Age, and contaminating it with depleted uranium dust for the remainder of Earth's existence, that they will do nothing of significance against Blackwater (which is nothing but mafia-like muscle for war criminal U.S. "diplomats" "working" in Iraq).

Genocide is genocide is genocide. Blackwater is knee deep in it, and if there is anything resembling justice consciousness remaining, after nearly 20 years now of Bush Crime Family atrocities and genocide against Iraq, we must investigate, arrest, indict, try, and imprison (Blackwater's and the United States)' senior officials, and former senior officials, and likewise punish any junior officials of either of these two criminal enterprises, to the extent the law demands.

MrGray,

I spent a lot of time on slashdot.org a few years back... I got 'Goatse'ed there way too many times to blindly click on a link anymore, anywhere. Please provide a summary of what you are linking to, or at least a few specifics of what you wish to discuss... Doing so helps to ease the paranoid fear of seeing 'Mr. Goatse's backside again.

I figured the name of the thread covered it but I guess not, for some. I planned on not posting in the political forums anymore but somehow just end up in here anyhow.

I figure it's easier not to post at all if people don't have the time or interest to click a link that I BBC'd by hand, and then whine about content. 2141 posts, all BBC'd by hand with great data on everything from Quantum Physics to comedy vids, and this is what I get. None of the links lead to anything but clean pages with the data advertised. Not one crap link.


Work your fingers to the bone what do you get?

Bony fingers. Bony fingers.


I'll be in the cafe' if anyone asks for me.


.

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Thanks, Simon.

Data

Thanks for the link, MrGray. Blackwater is now saying they're not going anywhere, and will remain in Baghdad to fulfill their U.S. government contract.

Now, the boys in the Pentagon, who carry Bush's water, are probably smart enough to keep plenty of bribe money on hand for the leadership people in Iraq, the ones who might get too uppity about Blackwater and decide to do something about the "security" firm militarily. What is not so sure, even in their (the Pentagon's) tiny minds, is what might go on in the Iraqis' ranks, vis a vis a revolt, overthrowing of their (more complicit than they) ranking officers.

Another possibility is that the Iraqi people have so internalized the absurd idea that any country can award sovereignty and liberty to another by invading (violating the sovereignty of), bombing it into the Stone Age, and contaminating it with depleted uranium dust for the remainder of Earth's existence, that they will do nothing of significance against Blackwater (which is nothing but mafia-like muscle for war criminal U.S. "diplomats" "working" in Iraq).

Genocide is genocide is genocide. Blackwater is knee deep in it, and if there is anything resembling justice consciousness remaining, after nearly 20 years now of Bush Crime Family atrocities and genocide against Iraq, we must investigate, arrest, indict, try, and imprison (Blackwater's and the United States)' senior officials, and former senior officials, and likewise punish any junior officials of either of these two criminal enterprises, to the extent the law demands.

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

September 27, 2007
Blackwater Tops All Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate
By JOHN M. BRODER and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.

Blackwater is now the focus of investigations in both Baghdad and Washington over a Sept. 16 shooting in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed. Beyond that episode, the company has been involved in cases in which its personnel fired weapons while guarding State Department officials in Iraq at least twice as often per convoy mission as security guards working for other American security firms, the officials said.

The disclosure came as the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had sent a team of officials to Iraq to get answers to questions about the use of American security contractors there.

The State Department keeps reports on each case in which weapons were fired by security personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq. Officials familiar with the internal State Department reports would not provide the actual statistics, but they indicated that the records showed that Blackwater personnel were involved in dozens of episodes in which they had resorted to force.

The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.

The State Department would not comment on most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the department’s spokesman, said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force.”

In 2005, DynCorp reported 32 shootings during about 3,200 convoy missions, and in 2006 that company reported 10 episodes during about 1,500 convoy missions. While comparable Blackwater statistics were not available, government officials said the firm’s rate per convoy mission was about twice DynCorp’s.

The State Department’s incident reports have not been made public, and Blackwater refused to provide its own data on cases in which its personnel used their weapons while guarding American diplomats. The State Department is in the process of providing at least some of the data to Congress. The administration and industry officials who agreed to discuss the broad rate of Blackwater’s involvement in violent events would not disclose the specific numbers.

“The incident rate for Blackwater is higher, there is a distinction,” said a senior American government official who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss a delicate, continuing investigation. “The real question that is open for discussion is why.”

A Blackwater spokeswoman declined to comment.

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, has gained a reputation among Iraqis and even among American military personnel serving in Iraq as a company that flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions to protect the people they are paid to guard. After the latest shooting, the Iraqi government demanded that the company be banned from operating in the country.

“You can find any number of people, particularly in uniform, who will tell you that they do see Blackwater as a company that promotes a much more aggressive response to things than other main contractors do,” a senior American official said.

Today, Blackwater operates in the most violent parts of Iraq and guards the most prominent American diplomats, which some American government officials say explains why it is involved in more shootings than its competitors. The shootings included in the reports include all cases in which weapons are fired, including those meant as warning shots. Others add that Blackwater’s aggressive posture in guarding diplomats reflects the wishes of its client, the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Still, other government officials say that Blackwater’s corporate culture seems to encourage excessive behavior. “Is it the operating environment or something specific about Blackwater?” asked one government official. “My best guess is that it is both.”

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former member of the Navy Seals, and is privately owned. Most of its nearly 1,000 people in Iraq are independent contractors, rather than employees of the company, according to a spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell. Blackwater has a total of about 550 full-time employees, the she said.

Its diplomatic security contract with the State Department is now the company’s largest, Ms. Tyrrell said, while declining to provide the dollar amount. The company also provides security for the State Department in Afghanistan, where it also has counternarcotics-related contracts.

In addition to the Sept. 16 shooting in the Nisour area of Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Blackwater employees had been involved in six other episodes under investigation. Those episodes left a total of 10 Iraqis dead and 15 wounded, they said.

Many American officials now share the view that Blackwater’s behavior is increasingly stoking resentment among Iraqis and is proving counterproductive to American efforts to gain support for its military efforts in Iraq.

“They’re repeat offenders, and yet they continue to prosper in Iraq,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who has been broadly critical of the role of contractors in Iraq. “It’s really affecting attitudes toward the United States when you have these cowboy guys out there. These guys represent the U.S. to them and there are no rules of the game for them.”

Despite the growing criticism of Blackwater and its tactics, the company still enjoys an unusually close relationship with the Bush administration, and with the State Department and Pentagon in particular. It has received government contracts worth more than $1 billion since 2002, with most coming under the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, according to the independent budget monitoring group OMB Watch.

Last year, the State Department gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq, reducing the roles of DynCorp and Triple Canopy.

The company employs about 850 workers in Iraq under its diplomatic security contract, about three-quarters of them Americans, according to the State Department and the Congressional Research Service. DynCorp has 157 security guards in Iraq; Triple Canopy has about 250. The figures compiled by the State Department track the number of shootings per convoy mission, rather than measuring against the number of employees.

Just in recent weeks, Blackwater has also been awarded another large State Department contract to provide helicopter services in Iraq.

The company’s close ties to the Bush administration have raised questions about the political clout of Mr. Prince, Blackwater’s founder and owner. He is the scion of a wealthy Michigan family that is active in Republican politics. He and the family have given more than $325,000 in political donations over the past 10 years, the vast majority to Republican candidates and party committees, according to federal campaign finance reports.

Mr. Prince has helped cement his ties to the government by hiring prominent officials. J. Cofer Black, the former counterterrorism chief at the C.I.A. and State Department, is a vice chairman at Blackwater. Mr. Black is also now a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security issues to the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.

Joseph E. Schmitz, the former inspector general at the Pentagon, now is chief operating officer and general counsel for Blackwater’s parent company, the Prince Group. Officials at other firms in the contracting industry said that Mr. Prince sometimes met with government contracting officers, which they say is an unusual step for the chief executive of a corporation.

No Blackwater employees, or any other contractors, have been charged with crimes related to the shootings in Iraq, although there are a number of American laws governing actions overseas and in wartime that could be applied, according to experts in international law. In addition, a measure enacted last year calls for the Pentagon to bring contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of American military law, but the Defense Department has not yet put into effect the rules needed to do so.

Separately, American officials specifically exempted all United States personnel from Iraqi law under an order signed in 2004 by L.Paul Bremer III, then the top official of the American occupation authority. The Sept. 16 shootings have so angered Iraqis, however, that the Iraqi government is proposing a measure that would overturn the American rule and subject Western private security companies to Iraqi law. The proposal requires the approval of the Iraqi Parliament.

In a sign of the Pentagon’s concern over private security contractors, Mr. Gates last Sunday sent a five-person team to Iraq to discuss with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, the rules governing contractors. “He has some real concerns about oversight of contractors in Iraq and he is looking for ways to sort of make sure we do a better job on that front,” Geoff Morrell, Mr. Gates’s spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England sent a three-page memorandum to senior Defense Department officials and top commanders around the world ordering them to ensure that contractors in the field were operating under rules of engagement consistent with the military’s.

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Account frozen...

MrGray,

I spent a lot of time on slashdot.org a few years back... I got 'Goatse'ed there way too many times to blindly click on a link anymore, anywhere. Please provide a summary of what you are linking to, or at least a few specifics of what you wish to discuss... Doing so helps to ease the paranoid fear of seeing 'Mr. Goatse's backside again.

I figured the name of the thread covered it but I guess not, for some. I planned on not posting in the political forums anymore but somehow just end up in here anyhow.

I figure it's easier not to post at all if people don't have the time or interest to click a link that I BBC'd by hand, and then whine about content. 2141 posts, all BBC'd by hand with great data on everything from Quantum Physics to comedy vids, and this is what I get. None of the links lead to anything but clean pages with the data advertised. Not one crap link.


Work your fingers to the bone what do you get?

Bony fingers. Bony fingers.


I'll be in the cafe' if anyone asks for me.


.

Sorry to hear you feel that way. I too am guilty of not clicking on links if I don't have a general idea of what they are. That is why I tend to post a synopsis of what ever I am linking to in case there are other lazy folks like me about..and if I have gone to the trouble of finding a link then it's worth going that extra bit to entice someone to click on it. :)

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Reality Internet Personality

MrGray,

I spent a lot of time on slashdot.org a few years back... I got 'Goatse'ed there way too many times to blindly click on a link anymore, anywhere. Please provide a summary of what you are linking to, or at least a few specifics of what you wish to discuss... Doing so helps to ease the paranoid fear of seeing 'Mr. Goatse's backside again.

I figured the name of the thread covered it but I guess not, for some. I planned on not posting in the political forums anymore but somehow just end up in here anyhow.

I figure it's easier not to post at all if people don't have the time or interest to click a link that I BBC'd by hand, and then whine about content. 2141 posts, all BBC'd by hand with great data on everything from Quantum Physics to comedy vids, and this is what I get. None of the links lead to anything but clean pages with the data advertised. Not one crap link.


Work your fingers to the bone what do you get?

Bony fingers. Bony fingers.


I'll be in the cafe' if anyone asks for me.


.

I click on the links because I'm reckless. But really if I know the poster and the thread has some clue I don't see that it's a lot of trouble to see what is there. Then the dialogue can begin.

Please don't leave the politcial forums Mr Grey. There aren't enough people with different points of view posting here.

Meh,

You guys do fine without me. If people don't click on links it means they will not get the data. If I feel lazy some days and people don't learn because they didn't get a write up then I chalk it up to the thinning of the herd. Some will choose to learn, and others will stare at a link.

Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon:

"Its like a finger, pointing at the moon. If you stare at the finger, you miss all the heavenly glory"


.

---

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Just from a german newspage:
FBI sends investigators to Iraq.
Blackwater received government contracts for over 1.000.000.000$ since 2001.
http://n-tv.de/860379.html

House approves bill allowing prosecution of contractors in Iraq:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071004/ap_on_go_co/congress_blackwater


By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 31 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The House passed a bill Thursday that would make all private contractors working in Iraq and other combat zones subject to prosecution by U.S. courts. It was the first major legislation of its kind to pass since a deadly shootout last month involving Blackwater employees.
ADVERTISEMENT

Democrats called the 389-30 vote an indictment of the shooting incident there that left 11 Iraqis dead. Senate Democratic leaders said they planned to follow suit with similar legislation and send a bill to President Bush as soon as possible.

"There is simply no excuse for the de facto legal immunity for tens of thousands of individuals working in countries" on behalf of the United States, said Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss