As his performance over the past week suggests, Rep. Darrell Issa's response to the tragic deaths of American citizens in the Middle East apparently depends on which party controls the White House. After all, in February 2007 Issa mocked the families of four Blackwater contractors slaughtered in Fallujah. Now, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has accused former CIA Director David Petraeus of carrying water for the Obama administration's supposed Benghazi cover-up. That would be the same General David Petraeus Issa charged six years ago was being targeted by Democrats "as part of an ongoing partisan smear campaign against U.S. efforts in Iraq."

Appearing on Meet the Press with host David Gregory on Sunday, John Boehner's Benghazi Grand Inquisitor suggested that Petraeus and the members of the independent Accountability Review Board did President Obama's bidding on the Benghazi probe:

GREGORY: Chairman, my reporting of the immediate aftermath of this talking to administration officials is that CIA Director David Petraeus made it clear when he briefed top officials that there-- that there was a spontaneous element to this, that it was not completely known that this was a terrorist attack right away. You don't give any credence to the notion that there was some fog of war, that there were-- there were conflicting circumstances about what went on here.

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Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has been a tireless opponent of U.S. Government spending on military contractors in general and Blackwater/Xe in particular, largely due to their rampant, wanton, violent behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not news. She consistently opposes them. But in October, she reacted strongly to the release of a new videogame based on Blackwater and licensed by Blackwater's Erik Prince. Here's the trailer:

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This is a true faith-bender. Blackwater, the former Erik Prince "security company", has negotiated a $42 million settlement with the Department of State. Having taken their gulp of medicine, they will now be eligible for even more contracts with the Department of State. How does that work, exactly?

New York Times:

The violations included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, according to company and government officials familiar with the deal.

The settlement, which has not yet been publicly announced, follows lengthy talks between Blackwater, now called Xe Services, and the State Department that dealt with the violations as an administrative matter, allowing the firm to avoid criminal charges.

Amazing, though not even close to the end of Blackwater/Xe's troubles. Among the other legal actions pending:

Those include the indictments of five former executives, including Blackwater’s former president, on weapons and obstruction charges; a federal investigation into evidence that Blackwater officials sought to bribe Iraqi government officials; and the arrest of two former Blackwater guards on federal murder charges stemming from the killing of two Afghans last year.

Of course, Blackwater blackguard Erik Prince is now living in Dubai. We do have an extradition agreement with Dubai, don't we?

But no worries for Blackwater. They'll still be entitled to bid for federal contracts.

In June, the State Department awarded Blackwater a $120 million contract to provide security at its regional offices in Afghanistan, while the C.I.A. renewed the firm’s $100 million security contract for its station in Kabul. At the time, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, defended the decision, saying that the company had offered the lowest bid and had “cleaned up its act.”

Against the weight of those charges and the absurdity of those newly-awarded contracts, there is this: Roger Clemens was indicted this week for lying to Congress. Unfortunately, he can't bid for government contracts to cover his legal fees. Oh, and let's not forget this: Tom DeLay gets off, and not in a good way.

Justice isn't blind. It's absent.

Scott Horton (and The Nation) report that Prince is planning to blow this popstand and move to the United Arab Emirates, where we don't have an extradition treaty. Of course!

Jeremy Scahill reports that the reclusive Blackwater owner, Erik Prince, has travel plans on his horizon.

Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world’s most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince’s top deputies were hit with a 15-count indictment by a federal Grand Jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince’s longtime number two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy, and Prince’s former legal counsel Andrew Howell.

The Blackwater/Erik Prince saga took yet another dramatic turn last week, when Prince abruptly announced that he was putting his company up for sale. While Prince has not personally been charged with any crimes, federal investigators and several Congressional committees clearly have his company and inner circle in their sights. The Nation learned of Prince’s alleged plans to move to the UAE from three separate sources.

One Blackwater source told The Nation that Prince intends to sell his company quickly, saying the “sale is going to be a fast move within a couple of months.”

The report of a move to Dubai makes a lot of sense in context. Prince may be trying to liquidate major holdings so he can move his money offshore, too, in advance of possible claims by victims of Blackwater violence.

I discuss the legal issues, including extradition, deeper into Scahill’s article.The question is now pretty simple: what is the Justice Department going to do about all of this? If they really are preparing a case against him, they’re going to look like chumps if they let him skip the jurisdiction before they have a chance to act. On the other hand, there are no clear signs yet that Prince has been advised he is a target in any of the pending federal investigations, so he has as much right to pull up stakes and move to an overseas tax shelter as the next massively wealthy auto-parts heir.

Empowering a private company run by end-times fundamentalists to work as military mercenaries in Iraq - what could possibly go wrong?

RALEIGH, N.C. – The former president of Blackwater Worldwide and four other former officials at the embattled security firm were indicted Friday on federal weapons charges, partially the result of a raid two years ago by agents that rounded up 22 weapons, including AK-47s.

The indictment issued Friday charges Gary Jackson, who left the company last year in a management shakeup, along with four other former workers. The charges against Jackson include a conspiracy to violate firearms laws, false statements and possession of an unregistered firearm.

Also indicted were former general counsel Andrew Howell, former executive vice president Bill Mathews, Ana Bundy, who at one point had oversight of the firm's armory, and Ronald Slezak, who was hired to oversee documents related to the company's status as a firearms dealer.

The charges open a new front of the government's oversight of the sullied security company. Several of the company's contractors have previously been charged with federal crimes for their actions in war zones, but the company's executives have so far weathered a range of investigations.

I've never seen Sen. Claire McCaskill quite so fired up about, well, anything:

A committee investigation of the company revealed that contracting personnel acquired hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47s, from a facility in Kabul that stores arms for use by the Afghan police. The contractors were not authorized to be armed.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill says if members of the U.S. military were involved in such actions they would face immediate and serious consequences.

"If one of the Army had gone out there with an AK-47 they were not supposed to have on top of a moving vehicle and shot a guy in the head and paralyzed him something would have happened in that chain of command," said Claire McCaskill.

"And if they had kept somebody on the force that had been using cocaine, that had been drunk, that had been charged with larceny that had done all these things these guys had done, they went out and killed Afghan people in the spring of 2009, something would have happened to them if they were in the military."

Senator McCaskill says most Afghans do not distinguish between private American contractors and members of the U.S. military.

She says reckless behavior by contractors is jeopardizing the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

"And what is killing me about this problem with Blackwater is we have two sets of rules and one image," she said. "And as long as we have two sets of rules and one image we are in trouble on this mission."

Obviously, this is going to do wonders for our image in Iraq:

WASHINGTON — In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of five former Blackwater security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 wounded.

The judge cited misuse of statements made by the guards in his decision, which brought to a sudden halt one of the highest-profile prosecutions to arise from the Iraq war. The shooting at Nisour Square frayed relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration and put a spotlight on the United States’ growing reliance on private security contractors in war zones.

Investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault near the crowded traffic circle on Sept. 16, 2007. The guards contended that they had been ambushed by insurgents and fired in self-defense.

A trial on manslaughter and firearm offenses was planned for February, and the preliminary proceedings had been closely watched in the United States and Iraq.

But in a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”

In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.

I think Marcy Wheeler makes the single most compelling argument here about the precedent of a private health insurance mandate:

And for those who promise we’ll go back and fix this later, once we achieve universal health care, understand what will have happened in the meantime. The idea, of course, is to establish some means to get people single payer coverage (before Lieberman, this would have been through a public option or Medicare buy-in) and, over time, expand it.

In fact, this bill will move toward single payer, too–though not the kind we want. For the large number of people who live in a place where there is limited competition, this bill will require them to get health care through the oligopoly or monopoly provider. It’ll work great for the provider: they will be able to dictate rates. But the Senate bill allows these blossoming single payer providers to keep up to 25% of the benefit in profits and marketing costs, and pass little of that benefit onto citizens. If we make private corporations our single payer, how are we going to convince them to cede control when we ask them to let the government be the single payer?

The reason this matters, though, is the power it gives the health care corporations. We can’t ditch Halliburton or Blackwater because they have become the sole primary contractor providing precisely the services they do. And so, like it or not, we’re dependent on them. And if we were to try to exercise oversight over them, we’d ultimately face the reality that we have no leverage over them, so we’d have to accept whatever they chose to provide. This bill gives the health care industry the leverage we’ve already given Halliburton and Blackwater.

It’s the 9.8% tithe that bothers me the most. But for those who think we can fix it, consider this, too. If the Senate bill passes, in its current form, it will mean that the health care industry was able to dictate–through their Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson–what they wanted the US Congress to do. They will have succeeded in dictating the precise terms of legislation.

Now, that’s not the first time that has happened. It certainly happened on telecom immunity. It certainly has happened, repeatedly, on Defense contracting (see also Randy Cunningham). But none of these egregious instances of corporations dictating legislation included a tithe–the requirement that citizens pay corporations to provide their service, rather than allowing the government to contract the service.

This is a fundamentally different relationship we’re talking about–one that gives corporations vast new powers. And the fact that–with one temper tantrum from Joe Lieberman–the corporations were able to dictate the terms of this new relationship deeply troubles me.

When this passes, it will become clear that Congress is no longer the sovereign of this nation. Rather, the corporations dictating the laws will be.

I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don’t understand is the nonchalance with which we’re about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.

We’ve seen our Constitution and means of government under attack in the last 8 years. This does so in a different–but every bit as significant way. We don’t mandate tithing corporations in this country–at least not yet. And it troubles me that so many Democrats are rushing to do so, without considering the logical consequences.

The Reality-Based Community: Precaution, uncertainity, insurance, and morality

Emptywheel: Blackwater, the next installment

Attackerman: Wonder why people think Netanyahu is an enemy of peace?

43-Ideas-Per-Minute: Adventures in Tweeting: Black Lke Me

Crackpot Press: Meghan McCain: So disappointing

HOLY CRAP: GOP likes Christmas...Christianity and the Crash...Serenity Prayer...Hot, steamy Mormons...Jesus writes to 'Christian' America...Miracle...Warren speaks...Is the Tobacco Industry Pro-Life?...Baghdad goes miserable...Freethought of the Day...Second Circumcision...SCOTUS to hear Religious discrimination case...Stealing Christmas...Proselytizing Sheriff

Rep. Mike Pence has been on the forefront of pushing this Van Jones scandal created by Glenn Beck (good to see he gets his walking papers from such an impeccable source, isn't it?), calling for his resignation and saying that Jones' "extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this Administration or the public debate."

But as Jeremy Scahill points out, Pence isn't bothered by the extremist views of Erik Prince of Blackwater/Xe, who has contributed thousands of dollars to Pence:

On Friday, Pence, who describes himself as “Christian, Conservative, Republican, in that order,” said Jones’s “extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.” Beyond the obvious here (the hate-filled rhetoric we see every day from racist, right-wing wackos, including those in public office), it is an interesting comment considering that Pence is an extremist right-wing evangelical Christian who has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Blackwater’s owner, Erik Prince. Prince has also donated to Pence’s Political Action Committee “Principles Exalt a Nation.” In December 2007, three months after Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, Pence and his Republican Study Committee, which serves “the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives,” organized a gathering to welcome Prince to Washington. “Not only has Mr. Prince personally been targeted by partisan warfare repeatedly over the past months, but the use of contracting throughout the government has been under attack by this Congress,” Pence’s committee’s statement said. Should Pence resign for cavorting with and accepting campaign cash from a man who allegedly “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” in the words of a former employee?

I think it's time for the majority party to start acting like one. If Republican-controlled Congress could set aside time to debate condemning MoveOn.org for their Gen. "Betray Us" ad, then the Democratic-controlled Congress ought to be making sure that the double standard of IOKIYAR no longer stands.