: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070917/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

Blackwater license being pulled in Iraq



By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer 36 minutes ago

BAGHDAD - The Interior Ministry said Monday that it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad.
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The ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday incident.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight people were killed and 13 were wounded when security contractors working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad.

"We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities," Khalaf said.

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, provides security for many U.S. civilian operations in the country. Phone messages left early Monday at Blackwater's office in North Carolina and with a company spokeswoman were not immediately returned.

The Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesman said witness reports pointed to Blackwater involvement but said the incident was still under investigation. It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater was intended to be temporary or permanent.

U.S. troops are immune from prosecution in Iraq under the U.N. resolution that authorizes their presence, but Khalaf said the exemption does not apply to private security companies.

The U.S. Embassy said a State Department motorcade came under small-arms fire that disabled one of the vehicles, which had to be towed from the scene near Nisoor Square in the Mansour district.

An embassy official provided no information about Iraqi casualties but said no State Department personnel were wounded or killed. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media.

He said the shooting was being investigated by the State Department's diplomatic security service, and law enforcement officials working with the Iraqi government and the U.S. military.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki late Sunday condemned the shooting by a "foreign security company" and called it a "crime."

Tens of thousands of private security contractors operate in Iraq — some with automatic weapons, body armor, helicopters and bulletproof vehicles.

The contractors, including many Americans and Britons, provide protection for Westerners and dignitaries in Iraq as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war.

Many have been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys, but none has faced charges or prosecution.

Iraqi police said the contractors were in a convoy of six sport utility vehicles and left the scene after the shooting. A witness said the gunfire broke out following an explosion.

"We saw a convoy of SUVs passing in the street nearby. One minute later, we heard the sound of a bomb explosion followed by gunfire that lasted for 20 minutes between gunmen and the convoy people who were foreigners and dressed in civilian clothes. Everybody in the street started to flee immediately," said Hussein Abdul-Abbas, who owns a mobile phone store in the area.

The wartime numbers of private guards are unprecedented — as are their duties, many of which have traditionally been done by soldiers. They protect U.S. military operations and have guarded high-ranking officials including Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Baghdad.

They also protect journalists, visiting foreign officials and thousands of construction projects.

: The owners of Blackwater are big
contributors to George Bush.

They operate their own private
army in Iraq making huge profits
as a US military contractor.

Now, the Iraqi government has just told
Blackwater to pack their bags and leave
the country after some of their hired guns
murdered eight Iraqi civilians in cold blood.

Some background on Bush's private
army - which may soon be heading
home to North Carolina and in search
of a new mission.


http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/93.html

Dom kan ju alltid jobba åt den fascistiska regeringen, dom kanske kan vakta medborgarna istället och se till så att dom hittar till närmaste FEMA-camp..

Dom är ju vana med att behandla människor som djur. Vem vet, det kanske var planerat att Blackwater skulle åka hem, dom kanske behövs mer på hemmaplan i dessa tider. Undrar hur många av dessa Blackwater soldater som är icke amerikaner, kan tänka mig att det handlar om minst 50%..

www.blackwaterusa.com/about/ Lyssnade på tnrliven inatt och där gjordes jämförelsen med SS/SA (Hitlers livvakt).
Likheterna var slående, så vi får nog höra mer om den saken.

thanks: America
Date: Sep 18, 2007 7:01 AM


Bush on Blackwater USA

What gets me most is the first video, where George Bush can't answer the student's question about Black Water. I would understand if it were some obscure question about an issue that wasn't in the national spotlight and not receiving much attention, but this is a private company that the government has hired to fight in a war that George Bush himself promoted, initiated, and which has been pretty much the focus of his presidency. How can he not be able to answer it? Should make the average person wonder who's really in charge.


Blackwater, America's Private Army

Bush on Blackwater USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Z1tevub9I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJUEULWEP9c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMURFknyHaI

----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: nierika
Date: September 17, 2007 9:53 PM
Body: Blackwater is one of 100 private army companies.

Rumsfeld and Bush used over 150,000 private armed contractors as a hidden army to kill Iraqi civilians for 4 years.

The Iraqi government must prosecute any civilian contractor who uses excessive force against innocent human beings. There are many international War Crimes Tribunals preparing War Crime Prosecution against Bush the Elder, Dubya and Cheney. We must support any action to try these monsters as war criminals responsible for the deaths of millions since the 70's. This is beyond treason, they are genocidal beasts. Public execution is the only solution to achieve social justice and to prevent all of the Predatory Capitalists from ever hiding behind National Governments to harm humanity. I think we have had enough.

Blackwater will probably be replaced in Iraq by our very sparse National Guard forces from our country. The will not be here on US soil because they would never turn on us under executive orders.

Blackwater is only going to be returning to the USA and redirected into focusing the use of force against Americans when the next fraudulent election results in total chaos.

Martial Law will be enacted so that BushCrimeInc can escape to new lives on secret estates elsewhere as we will be under curfew 24/7 with our arms being seized, with no resources or communication like they did in the New Orleans dry run during Katrina.

Just be prepared to fend for yourselves November 2008...

Mer om Blackwater...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irQPa32vn2I

Does 'Blackwater' mean anything to you? Please attune...
RE: Blackwater, the privately owned mercenary army:

Words can't even describe how wrong this is...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsuKGlKOQas

Jeremy Scahill On Blackwater And Iraq

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPd3ZzrjGzw

Blackwater, Oil, and the Colonial Enterprise


http://www.opednews.com/articles/not_ ... ckwater_2c_oil_2c_and.htm

September 22, 2007

Blackwater, Oil, and the Colonial Enterprise

By John Nichols from The Nation

John Nichols Fri Sep 21, 2:49 PM ET

The Nation -- Blackwater USA's mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this week, and rightly so. The private military contractor's war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a big "perhaps," Blackwater's "troops" could come home before the U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense of these international rent-a-cops.

But it is not the specific story of Blackwater that matters so much as the broader story of imperial excess that it illustrates.

If Blackwater, with an assist from the U.S. government, beats back the attempt by the Iraqis to regulate the firm's activities -- as now appears likely, considering Friday's reports that the firm has resumed guarding U.S. State Department convoys in Baghdad -- we will have all the confirmation that is needed of the great truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: This is a colonial endeavor no different than that of the British Empire against America's founding generation revolted.

But even if Blackwater loses its fight to stay, even if the corporation is forced to shut down its multi-billion dollar, U.S. Treasury-funded operation in Iraq, the brief "accountability moment" may not be sufficient to open up the necessary debate about Iraq's colonial status. The danger, for Iraq and the United States, that honest assessment of the crisis will lose out to face-saving gestures designed to foster the fantasy of Iraqi independence.

It is not enough that Blackwater is shamed and perhaps sanctioned. A Blackwater exit from Iraq will mean little if its mercenary contracts are merely taken over by one or more of the 140 other U.S.-sanctioned private security firms operating in that country -- such as Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

Whatever the precise play out of this Blackwater moment may be, the likelihood is that the colonial enterprise will continue. That's because, in the absence of intense pressure from grassroots activists and the media, Congress is unlikely to go beyond a scratch at the surface of what is actually going on in Iraq.

The deeper discussion requires that a discussion about the substance that no less a figure than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan describes as the reason for the invasion and occupation of this particular Middle Eastern land: oil

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed that "colonialism was made for domination and for exploitation," and there is no substance that the Bush-Cheney administration is more interested in dominating and exploiting than oil.

Thus, while it is right to pay close attention to the emerging discussion about Blackwater's wicked work in Iraq, Americans would do well to pay an equal measure of attention to the still largely submerged discussion about an Iraqi oil deal that will pay huge benefits to the Hunt Oil Company, a Texas firm closely linked to the administration. How closely? When he was running Halliburton, Cheney invited Hunt Oil Company CEO Ray Hunt to serve on the firm's board of directors. Hunt, a "Bush Pioneer" fund raiser during in 2000 who went on to serve as

donated the tidy sum of $35 million to the Bush presidential library building fund.

The new "production sharing agreement" between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government puts one of the administration's favorite firms in a position to reap immeasurable profits while undermining essential efforts to assure that Iraq's oil revenues will be shared by all Iraqis. Hunt's deal upsets hopes that Iraq's mineral wealth might ultimately be a source of stability, replacing the promise of economic equity with the prospect of a black-gold rush that will only widen inequalities and heighten ethnic and regional resentments.

The Hunt deal is so sleazy -- and so at odds with the stated goals of the Iraqi government and the U.S. regarding the sharing of oil revenues -- that even Bush has acknowledged that U.S. embassy officials in Baghdad are deeply concerned about it. What Bush and Cheney have been slow to mention is the fact that Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, says the deal is illegal.

As with the Blackwater imbroglio, however, there is no assurance that the stance of the Iraqi government is definitional with regard to what happens in Iraq.

That is why it is disturbing that, for the most part, members of Congress -- even members who say they do not want the United States to have a long-term presence in Iraq -- have been slow to start talking about Hunt's oil rigging.

One House member who has raised the alarm is Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who in his capacity as a key member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked the committee's chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to launch an investigation into the Hunt Oil deal.

"As I have said for five years, this war is about oil," Kucinich, who is mounting an anti-war bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared on the floor of the House this week. "The Bush Administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up control of their oil. We have no right to set preconditions to Iraq which lead Iraq to giving up control of their oil. The Constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property for all Iraqi people."

With that in mind, Kucinich explains, "I am calling for a Congressional investigation to determine the role the Administration may have played in the Hunt-Kurdistan deal, the effect the deal will have on the oil revenue sharing plan and the attempt by the Administration to privatize Iraqi oil."

Waxman has been ahead of the curve on Blackwater, seeking testimony from the firm's chairman at hearings scheduled for early October.

But Waxman needs to expand his focus, and the way to do that is by heeding Kucinich's call for an investigation into the Hunt deal.

That inquiry should begin with two fundamental questions:

Who runs Iraq -- the Iraqis or their colonial overlords in Washington?

And, if the claim is that the Iraqis are in charge, then why is Ray Hunt about to start steering revenues from that country's immense oil wealth into the same Texas bank accounts that have so generously funded the campaigns of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

thanks: Steven
Date: Sep 26, 2007 4:12 AM



Iraq: Blackwater staff face charges



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



It is unclear how Iraqi courts will attempt to bring the contractors to
trial. A July report from the Congressional Research Service said the Iraqi
government has no authority over private security firms contracted by the U.S.
government.



The Iraqi government claims that as many as 20 civilians were killed by the
private contractors, who were guarding a U.S. diplomatic convoy.



Iraqi officials, who claim the shootings were unprovoked, dispute the U.S.
claim that the guards were responding to an attack and said on Saturday they had
a videotape that showed the Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation.




The incident prompted the Iraqi government to call for Blackwater's expulsion
from the country and sparked anger among ordinary Iraqis.


Watch a report on Blackwater's response to the allegations »



U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said earlier this week the

Blackwater employees involved in the incident were still in
Iraq.



The Interior Ministry official, who asked not to be named since he was not
authorized to talk to CNN about this matter, said criminal charges would be
formally filed against the Blackwater employees within a week.








Word that charges would be filed came as no surprise. One day after the
shooting, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said his government would punish
those responsible.



On Sunday, Rear Adm. Mark Fox, Communications Division chief for
Multi-National Force-Iraq, and Dr. Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the
Baghdad Security Operation, refused to comment on Iraq's plan to file the
charges.



But they gave some details on a joint U.S.-Iraqi commission that would
examine issues of security and safety in the aftermath of the shooting.



The commission -- to be co-chaired by Iraqi Minister of Defense Abd al Qadir
and Patricia A. Butenis, the Charge d'Affaires of the U.S. Embassy -- will
receive the results of both a State Department investigation and the separate
Iraqi investigation in the next few days, Fox and Sheikhly said.



Blackwater contractors are part of the estimated 25,000-plus employees of
private security firms who are working in Iraq, guarding diplomats,
reconstruction workers and government officials. As many as 200 security
contractors are believed to have been killed in Iraq, according to U.S.
congressional reports.



Blackwater USA security resumed its normal operations in Iraq on Friday after
a hiatus sparked by concerns among Iraqi and U.S. government officials over last
weekend's shooting.



Sheikhly said the Iraqi government has allowed Blackwater to again operate in
the streets of Iraq, because otherwise U.S. troops would have to be pulled from
the field to provide security, creating a security imbalance.

En artiket om Blackwater ( Svart Vatten )


Blackwater: Knights of Malta in Iraq
October 1st,


Blackwater is more than just a “private army”, much more than just another capitalist war-profiteering business operation. It is an army operating outside all laws, outside and above the US Constitution and yet is controlled by people within and outside our government whose allegiance is primarily to the foreign Vatican state. In other words, Blackwater is a religious army serving the Pope in Rome through the Order of Malta, which is itself considered under international law, as a sovereign entity with special diplomatic powers and privileges. Like Blackwater, the Order of Malta is “untouchable” because it is at the heart of the elite aristocracy.


http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/20 ... knights-of-malta-in-iraq/

Då är det värre än illa........ men väntat kanske..?

Blackwater. Murder For Hire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDe3nvLoD8

Korsriddarnas återkomst......
http://www.newswithviews.com/Marshall/wr6.htm