Sickening

When will the senseless killing stop?

From 'US drone attacks jeopardizing war on militancy':

Pakistan's president warns the US that its drone attacks, killing mostly civilians, will undermine the national consensus supporting the war on militancy.

President Asif Ali Zardari said on Thursday that relations between Washington and Islamabad should be based on respect, mutual trust and mutual interest.

Zardari made the comments during a meeting with a US delegation in Islamabad on Thursday, a day after US drone attacks killed at least 13 people on the border with Afghanistan.

US drones carried out more than 50 such attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas last year, killing hundreds of people — mostly civilians.

From Ex-Blackwater mercenaries charged with murder:

Two former mercenaries of the notorious US security firm Blackwater (now known as Xe Services LLC) have been charged with the 2009 murder of two Afghan civilians in Kabul, the Justice Department says.

Justin Cannon, 27, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, have been charged with second-degree murder after opening fire on the two civilians.

Blackwater changed its name to Xe after it was faced with international condemnation following an incident in which its mercenaries in Iraq opened fire on unarmed civilians in September 2007, killing more than a dozen people.

These things do not make me feel safer. They do not make me feel more secure. They simply make me feel sick to my stomach.

Update: 
The Blackwater Kabul Shooting Case: What Do We Know?

Employed Criminals Funded By Tax Dollars, But Who The Fuck Cares?

Digby comments on this.

From Technicalities by digby:

To me, this is fairly easy even though I think that these Blackwater contractors were likely guilty. If the Bush Justice department broke the law in the course of their prosecution (probably on purpose, mind you) then the judge had no choice but to dismiss these charges. It's the way our system works. But the case brings up an interesting problem: what if the government doesn't really want to prosecute some criminals because they've employed them to commit the crime?

When Things Go Wrong

From Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan by Jeremy Scahill:

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

Henry Waxman And Blackwater

From Waxman’s Strategy for Undoing Blackwater by Matthew Schwarzfeld:

Blackwater Worldwide may have misrepresented its size to obtain small business contracts, the House oversight committee announced on Monday. The finding is the result of an investigation by the Small Business Administration (SBA), and it's just the first of three reviews of the controversial security contractor requested by Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA).

Unlike a number of investigations by the FBI and the committee itself that have focused on the conduct of Blackwater's guards in Iraq and Afghanistan -- for instance, the allegedly unprovoked shooting of Iraqi civilians -- Waxman appears to be taking a new tack: scrutinizing the contractor's employment practices to make it ineligible for future federal contracts.

Read the rest here.