Is a Blackwater Cover-Up Underway? FBI and State involved.

Wouldn't it be grand if the DoJ, FBI, and DoS could be trusted?

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AP: FBI Launches Investigation of Blackwater Shooting
By Paul Kiel - October 1, 2007
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004340.php


To the rapidly growing number of overlapping probes (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004265.php) of Blackwater (some more probing than others), you can add this one (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2007/10/fbi_to_probe_blackwater_role_i.php):

Amid questions of reckless behavior by U.S contractors, the FBI is sending a team to Iraq to investigate the role of Blackwater USA in last month's shoot-out in Baghdad that killed 11 Iraqis, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said the agency was making the move at the request of the State Department ......

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Email Shows State Officials Doing Blackwater Damage Control
By Spencer Ackerman - October 1, 2007
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004338.php

In addition to Blackwater's Erik Prince, the House oversight committee will hear testimony from top State Department officials -- including the Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield -- about Blackwater's contracts with State. Material found by the committee's Democratic staff suggests that State officials helped create an environment where Blackwater guards could use deadly force with minimum reprisal.

After an infamous December incident wherein a drunken Blackwater contractor shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, one U.S. embassy official wrote to another:

Will you be following in up Blackwater to do all possible to ensure that a sizable compensation is forthcoming? If we are to avoid this whole thing becoming even worse, I think a prompt pledge and apology -- even if they want to claim it was accidental -- would be the best way to assure the Iraqis don't take steps, such as telling Blackwater that they are no longer allowed to work in Iraq.

Blackwater by The Numbers
By Spencer Ackerman - October 1, 2007, 2:42PM

Tomorrow morning, the House oversight committee will hear testimony (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004207.php) from Erik Prince, the owner of embattled (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004196.php) private-security company Blackwater, about his company's operations in Iraq. Blackwater is in the news right now for the disputed shootings on September 16 in Baghdad that left 11 Iraqis dead. But the committee's Democratic staff has put together a compendium (pdf http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071001121609.pdf) of questionable incidents and practices that Prince will surely be asked about tomorrow. Here's a sampling:

* Blackwater has been involved in 195 "escalation of force" incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 shooting incidents per week. From January 2005 to April 2007, Blackwater employees used their weapons 168 times, ..........

God I hope things change before our Republic is lost completely.