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Salon features what seems to be quite a comprehensive article on the Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater, the so-called ’security’ company more aptly described as the biggest and most ruthless band of mercenaries doing America’s bidding. And following the history of christianity rather than the essential teachings of that religion, links are close between the christian right, the US government and that band of state sanctioned killers.

When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being trigger-happy. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 “escalation of force incidents”; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.

Today the State Department announced that Blackwater personal will from now on be accompanied by government agents during their missions; their vehicles will also have to be equipped with cameras and microphones - all supposedly to “gather factual information” on future Blackwater engagements. Given the history of the relationship between company and the State Department as well as the US administration in general, both effectiveness and sincerity of these measures are rather doubtful. US senator Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, alleged the Department arranged for Blackwater to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater employee to write State’s initial “spot report” on the Sept. 16 shooting incident - a report that did not mention civilian casualties and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.

The State Department’s protective actions though are just a small reflection of the overall deep entanglement between the Bush gang, christian right-wingers, prominent Republicans and Blackwater, a coziness that has paid handsomely for the mercenary company:

• From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than US$1 million to more than US$500 million
• Canadian Robert Young Pelton, author of “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror,” has reported that one of Blackwater’s earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid US$5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard
• Harper’s Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and “meets with senior people” inside the CIA
• Prince’s most important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert Paul Bremer, former head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq; in August 2003, Blackwater won a US$27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer; in charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger’s consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s
• Blackwater was recently one of five companies awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as US$15 billion
• Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely; according to Jeremy Scahill, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army“, the company had made roughly US$73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after the hurricane hit

And while Blackwater made hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to the American government’s largess, employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the “security” company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater’s luminaries with their professional - and political - résumés.

Erik Prince, founder and CEO:

• Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11
• His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the ‘Family Research Council‘ (FRC), one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the current Bush administration
• Erik Prince’s mother Elsa has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian-right organization, Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family‘ (James Dobson is a stalwart of the Christian conservative movement); she currently runs the ‘Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation’ (EEPF - with her son Erik being a vice president); between July 2003 and July 2006, the EEPF gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to ‘Focus on the Family’
• Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the ‘Council for National Policy‘ (CNP), the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson; the EEPF gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006
• Erik’s sister Betsy married into the Amway founding DeVos family, one of the country’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes; she chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006
• Erik Prince and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees; through his ‘Freiheit Foundation’ he gave $500,000 to ‘Prison Fellowship Ministries‘, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000; in the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the ‘American Enterprise Institute‘, a neo-conservative think tank; during college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher; Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle have visited Blackwater’s Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the ‘Alexander Strategy Group‘ (ASG), a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House Majority Leader Tom Delay; ASG partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of Prince’s

Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel:

• In 2002 Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defense Department’s inspector general; Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting spending in history: as of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 “prime contracts” worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to Blackwater; Schmitz reported directly to the secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Schmitz has close ties to the Republican Party establishment; is father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman, and his brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush’s deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993; Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese
• Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight
• According to an October 2005 article in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff’s multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the decision before sending the final report to Congress
• In September 2005 Schmitz went to work for Blackwater

J. Cofer Black, vice chairman:

• Black spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with Rob Richer (below); at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a role in which he convinced Bush that the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11
• Black is a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer Bush likes; in one briefing for example, Black told Bush, “When we’re through with [terrorists in Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs”; Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden’s head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to Bush; Black’s Afghanistan presentation earned him “special access” to the White House
• Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush administration’s interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies; the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary renditions - operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture - fell under Black at the CTC
• Black later became the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism with the rank of Ambassador at Large from December 2002 to November 2004, where one of his roles was to begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece; in 2003, the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams
• In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what Harper’s Silverstein termed a “revolving door to Blackwater” from the CIA; in addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior advisor for counterterrorism and national security

Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence:

• From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA’s Near East division and the agency’s liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan
• In 2003, he briefed Bush on the nascent Iraqi insurgency
• In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for clandestine operations
• He left the agency for Blackwater in the Spring of 2005, effectively taking the agency’s relationship with Abdullah with him; the CIA is pissed off: it had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan’s intelligence services; there was an obvious quid pro quo: in exchange for the training, Jordan would share information; Jordan has now hired Blackwater’s intelligence division, headed by Richer, to do its spy training instead
• Rob Richer is currently CEO of Cofer Black’s Total Intelligence Solutions

Fred Fielding, former outside counsel:

• Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider, to represent the company against the families that sued Blackwater after four of their family members and Blackwater employees were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004
• From 1970 to 1972, Fielding was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel; he is also widely regarded as Deep Throat, the unnamed source for articles written by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
• Under Reagan, he served as White House counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States
• After the 2000 election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission
• In January 2007, Bush chose him as White House counsel.

Ken Starr, outside counsel:

• Fielding represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February 2005; after he left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented Blackwater till October 2006; Blackwater then hired another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials, Ken Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California
• Starr was appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush and was on Bush’s shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court
• He is best known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton; he revealed the intimate details of Clinton’s affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton’s impeachment by Congress
• Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security firm; in 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of Blackwater, asserting that the company was “constitutionally immune” to the lawsuit; Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24; in December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court; the motion was denied in February

For more information ob Blackwater see also the following two Salon articles: What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Maybe nothing and America’s shadow army in Iraq.

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Now playing: Brothers Keepers - Tryin’ Times; Paris - Inspiration - Truth Universal; VNV Nation - Testament; Paris - ThrowYaHandzUp - Dead Prez, Sun Rise Above, T-K.A.S.H. - via FoxyTunes

This little clip is part of a research project looking at what is community. There’s huge body of written material on what this terms entails; Wikipedia provides quite an eclectic overview on the subject. The research project in question here focuses on video sharing on YouTube and in the video blogging community. Although this is hard to believe, many people still argue about whether online groups can be communities. In asking people at SouthTube whether YouTube is a community, participants provided quite interesting (and, fortunately for the researcher, heuristic) answers.

What I find particularly interesting is how technological devices and methods add a new dimension to the traditional notion of community - something that is particularly well highlighted during the last few seconds of the video clip above. At the same time though, technology surprisingly did not get much mention in what people thought constitutes community! People talk about connecting and feeling connected, communication, togetherness and cohesiveness, helping others in need or YouTube being a microcosm representing the macrocosm of society, but technology and its tools are simply being taken for granted.

I guess it’s the same with factors like travel or transport infrastructure, which are quite essential in shaping the kind of communities we have nowadays but to which most people pay little attention to when reflecting on what makes up community. What the clip seems to show is that people focus very much on place, event and present when defining community; it’s the concrete experience that provides the basis for the definition, not so much the abstract reflection on the bigger picture. Not untypical probably when we look at why people are so unaware of what creates other societal phenomena - from the political system to economy to wars.

The referred-to YouTube page provides an opportunity to contribute to the research.

Agagin, it’s been around for probably six months now, but I’ve only seen it today. For aspiring guitar heroes and frequent international travellers, the DeVillain Centerfold could be just the right thing. Its ingenious folding mechanism makes it perfect for overhead lockers - which is not surprising, given that it was designed by an airline pilot: the Swede Fredrik Johansson (who also happens to be a guitarist).

Sick and tired of shoehorning his passion onto planes and being laughed at in music stores for asking for folding guitars, Johansson’s efforts led not only to the creation of what was thought to be impossible - the Centrefold, but also to the birth of the DeVillain Guitar Company, a bunch of woodworkers, computer nerds, pro musicians, luthiers, problem solvers, marketing people and design freaks with a common love for music. It is made of Honduras mahogany (rainforest timber?) and fits into a backpack that you can take just about anywhere. The folding mechanism is made of aircraft-grade aluminum (unsurprisingly) and the strings roll up into the guitar. This baby goes from backpack to unfolded guitar in 20 seconds, excluding the time for tuning it up. You’ll have to have quite a bit of spare dough though to afford one - at A$3,800 (at the current, rather advantageous exchange rate).

Explore the undersea world with the C-Quester personal submarine. The funky Dutch-made electric submersible, launched earlier this year, can dive up to 50m and has its own air supply, so no scuba experience is necessary. Beneath the waves it can cruise at up to 4 knots (7km/h); it can stay underwater for two-and-a half hours straight or 36 hours in the event of an emergency. The vessel’s high-strength pressure hull allows the pilot to submerge in a totally dry cockpit and surface straight from the maximum depth without risk of decompression problems. The one-seater version is 2.8m long, and the 3.4m model seats two. Custom paint jobs are offered. The entry model C-Quester come with a price tag of around A$170,000 plus the costs for the yacht to launch it.

Something personal again: Linchen neurologically makes a leap forward by learning to lift up her head … very sweet