by
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium:
Sat., Oct 13, 2007
Filed under:
War Making and Oversight •
Congressional Oversight When Baghdad fell in 2003, Robert Isakson saw an opportunity. He took his disaster relief company to Iraq to work under another Coalition Provisional Authority contractor, a firm eerily named Custer Battles, after its founders Scott Custer and Mike Battles. Isakson brought over 10 years of experience to help Custer Battles build military bases and other large facilities.
Within a few weeks, however, his Custer Battles colleagues had run him out of town at gunpoint. According to Isakson, Custer Battles’ goons rounded up his team and dumped them outside the Green Zone, presumably hoping they’d be killed. The men survived the ordeal by paying a taxi driver several hundred dollars to hustle them from Baghdad, through Fallujah, and all the way into the safety of Jordan.
Read the full report…
See more tagged with: Blackwater, Custer Battles and Whistleblower
by
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium:
Fri., Oct 5, 2007
Filed under:
War Making and Oversight It’s hard to imagine a private mercenary business receiving any good press, but Blackwater USA might not have become the focus of such a large scandal if it had chosen a less menacing name. As it happens, it is now enmeshed in perhaps the largest oversight project of the 110th Congress—one that raises questions not only about the rights of government whistleblowers, but about Congress’ ability to protect them.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room teemed on Tuesday with one of Congress’ busiest oversight hearings since the Democrats took power in January. Dozens of cameramen huddled in an erratic arc around the witness table. Print media writers crammed into the crowded audience. And the vast majority of guests were forced to watch the proceedings on a television feed in a different room altogether. We’d all come to watch Chairman Henry Waxman’s promised whipping of the government’s largest private military contractor, Blackwater, and its CEO, the wealthy former Navy SEAL Erik Prince. His company has been implicated in, among other travesties, shooting a security guard of the vice president of Iraq, instigating the bloody battle of Fallujah, and, most recently, a Sept. 16 massacre in Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of 17 Iraqis.
Read the full report…
See more tagged with: Blackwater and Whistleblower
RSS Feed