State Department awards Blackwater $1bn contract
The US State Department has awarded the notorious private security corporation Blackwater more than $1 billion in funding.
The funding comes one week after the State Department’s chief investigator revealed he was threatened to death by a Blackwater official in Iraq in August 2007, The New York Times reported.
The investigator said project manager Daniel Carroll told him “that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”
Officials at the American embassy in Baghdad later asked the government investigators conducting the Blackwater probe to stop the investigation and leave.
It was a few weeks later, in September, when Blackwater guards shot and murdered 17 Iraqi civilians. Four of the security guards are now on trial in the US for the killings of Iraqi civilians.
Surprisingly, Blackwater’s funding remained unhindered even after threatening government investigators.
Records show that the company received over $269 million in funding between the date the threat was reportedly made, August 21, and the end of September, from the State Department.
In return, Blackwater provided training and protective services for the department in Iraq, Afghanistan, China and the United States.
Most of those expenditures were approved after the massacre of the Iraqi civilians.
The firm and its subsidiaries have been awarded by the State Department over $1.3 billion since early fall 2007 for operations around the globe.
“In the years following the events of 2007, we reviewed our practices of managing contractors and made improvements to increase oversight and ensure that operational control remains with direct-hire State Department employees,” a State Department spokesman said, when asked why Blackwater continued to receive contracts. “Though we must always ensure that competitive contracts remain fair and open, the safety of our personnel is the highest priority, and we always take into account the past performance and abilities of each contractor.”
The company and its subsidiaries have changed their names several times and the ownership once since 2007, owing, in part, to their efforts to shake bad publicity.
The Huffington Post reviewed the federal government’s spending database and found the companies linked to Blackwater contracts. The companies included Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, Inc., Blackwater Security Consulting LLC, U.S. Training Center, Inc., Academi Training Center and International Development Solutions.
