(h/t Andy K)

Erik Prince's company Blackwater (now known as XE) has been embroiled in controversy for years. Company employees have posted videos online of their own ruthless behavior and abuses against Iraqi citizens, and can be heard laughing off camera. We're now finding out that this brutality most likely came from the top, down from Prince himself -- former employees are finding their consciences and telling horrifying stories about their former boss:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Read on...

VetVoice:

The Pentagon has provided $30 billion in contracts to KBR during the Iraq War. Apparently that's just the Basic Troop Support Package, however, because it's not enough money to keep the contractor from electrocuting a dozen troops in showers and elsewhere throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. [..]

The New York Times piece goes on to explain:

The Army has provided little detailed information about the electrocutions, other than to say late Friday that 10 soldiers had been electrocuted in Iraq. A House committee has also reported that two marines died similarly.

One former KBR electrician was quite frank about what's going on:

And Mr. Bliss, who saw a soldier standing next to him in Qalat, Afghanistan, receive a severe shock from an electrical box that was not supposed to be charged, said his KBR bosses mocked him for raising safety issues. They were "not giving the Army what it needed," he said, "and not giving the soldiers what they deserved."

PERRspectives Blog: The NY Times was sitting on the McCain/lobbyist story when it endorsed the 'straight talker' in the GOP primary last month.

Buck Naked Politics: Defense contractor sentenced for bribery

Vagabond Scholar: Torture Watch

The Big Picture: The Banker's Bailout

The Road to Surfdom: The price of freedom

Minnesota Monitor: Republicans at the Science Museum of Minnesota: A chance to learn?

hi kids, skippy the bush kangaroo here, with today's round up:

continuing with the economic questions of the week: how's the dollar doing? how's your health care plan? how are your stocks? how are your bonds?

here's more - everything, in fact - on the minneapolis bridge collapse. here's the number of contractor deaths in iraq. here's the scenic route thru san diego. here's how saddam hussein is like barry bonds. and here's actual journalism!

from the blog round up department of domesticity: is our babies learning? what are they learning from their heterosexual parents? plus, of course a son can serve his country by getting his dad elected president! and, i now pronounce you yao and wife.

then there's always the la county registrar who is more concerned with diebold's profits than voting integrity. and is that marmoset in your hat or are you just happy to see me?

in case you were wondering what tunes he grooved out to, they found hitler's record collection. and since it's instapundit's blogiversary, let's all have some ice cream!

that's it for today, kids! send your tips to skippybkroo at aol dot com in blogtopia, and yes, i coined that phrase!

I don't know about you, but I've had a sneaky suspicion since this story broke that we weren't getting the whole story...

Herald Sun (Australia)

Roy Lynn Oakley, 67, worked for Bechtel Jacobs, a contractor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US nuclear research facility created in the 1940s to develop a nuclear bomb.

Mr Oakley was charged with taking US government data and hardware and agreeing to pass it to another person.

ABC television said he was arrested trying to sell it to an undercover agent.

It was unclear how the low-level contract worker, who did maintenance work and escorted visitors at the Oak Ridge National lab in Knoxville, Tennessee, managed to access the classified documents.[..]

Mr Oakley had reason to believe that equipment would be "utilised to injure the United States and secure an advantage to a foreign nation,'' the Justice Department statement said.[..]

The US Department of Energy said the materials posed no threat to people who may have come across them.

I think I might have to write a diet book based on blogging about Republicans, because this story has sure sickened me to the point of not eating again. Dear God, what would you say to the children of the victims of 9/11? "Daddy loved you very much and you can think of him every time we drive on West 64th to Amsterdam Drive"? It's just sickening.

Kansas City Star: (h/t Sisyphus Shrugged)

The pulverized remains of bodies from the World Trade Center disaster site were used by city workers to fill ruts and potholes, a city contractor says in a sworn affidavit filed Friday in Manhattan Federal Court.

Eric Beck says debris powders - known as fines - were put in a pothole-fill mixture by crews at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., where more than 1.65 million tons of World Trade Center debris were deposited after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it onto tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts," Eric Beck said.

Beck was the senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling, a private contractor hired to sift through debris trucked to Fresh Kills after the trade center attacks. Before the arrival of Taylor's equipment at Fresh Kills in October 2001, the debris was sifted manually by workers using rakes and shovels.

Beck's affidavit was filed by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims who are suing the city in hopes of creating a formal burial place for debris that they say contains human remains.

"It's devastating," Norman Siegel, an attorney representing the families, said of Beck's statement. "When the 9/11 families found about this, they were wiped out."

No wonder the FDNY wasn't too happy with Giuliani. What a way to honor our fallen heroes.

I can't find any independent verification of this, but if this is true, I have several areas of concern. This just seems like there is way too much potential for severe compromising of your individual privacy. Am I reading too much into this? Would you want all of your personal information collected and sent to a private company? As a victim of identity theft in the past, this makes me very, very nervous.

Wired (h/t OK)

A program to standardize state driver's licenses to create a de facto national I.D. should use a third-party -- most likely a private contractor -- to verify that a person is eligible for a driver's license or state identification card, according to a document provided to 27B by a privacy activist. The document appears to be a portion of the rules that Homeland Security is proposing for the program, which are currently being evaluated by the Office of Management and Budget before they are presented to the public for comment.
According to the document (.txt) that Bill Scannell of UnReal ID says he got from a government official (but which 27B has not yet verified), DHS suggests that there are three models for states to follow to insure that a person has the right documents and does not have a driver's license in another state. One is to let them figure out how to communicate with each other. The second is to create a federated model, where a central service includes pointers to records in all the states' databases which all have a standard lookup interface. This is similar architecture to the one used for trucking licenses, where a state can find information about an applicant by checking a central clearinghouse that doesn't store all the records, but simply knows where to look for records.
The third, and favored option, according to the document, is to have a centralized service, likely a private company, that vets anyone seeking to get a driver's license. The state would collect the necessary information -- including social security numbers, certified birth certificate and possibly fingerprints -- send it along to the service, which would then check all the states, run the name against watchlists, verify the social security number through the immigrant-verification program known as SAVE and verify birth certificate information through EVVE.

From Reuters:

A former CIA contractor was found guilty on Thursday of assaulting an Afghan prisoner who later died in a case that raised new questions about the treatment of detainees by U.S. interrogators.

David Passaro, a former Special Forces medic, was convicted on one felony charge of assault causing serious injury and three misdemeanor counts of simple assault. He was the first civilian to be charged with abusing a detainee in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During a trial that started on August 7, prosecutors said Passaro beat Abdul Wali so badly he pleaded to be shot to end his pain. Wali died of his injuries two days after the interrogation in June 2003.

Let's hope this is a sign of things to come. With this conviction, his superiors should now be dragged into court and convicted as well. It will probably never happen.....

Raid

"Federal agents Friday morning raided the home of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who stepped down this week from the No. 3 post at the CIA amid accusations of improper ties to a defense contractor named as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham...read on"

"Already trying to avoid the media, Longboat Key Republican Katherine Harris is now canceling campaign stops in Southwest Florida as questions swirl about her ties to a Washington, D.C., defense contractor at the center of an ongoing national bribery scandal....read on
In honor of her hiding-I'm re-posting her spot on H&C-from August 9th, 2005

A blast from the past:

Katherine Harris Shakes her Booty

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Newshounds provides the play by play as she talks about her five day "listening" tour:

"It was a Hannity & Colmes segment (8/9/05) ostensibly about her just-announced candidacy for the US Senate but Katherine Harris (the Cruella De Vil of the 2000 election) kept shaking her over-sized chest so often throughout the interview that I couldn't help but conclude that what she really wanted the audience to check out was something other than her politics...read on"