Armed Forces claim disappeared FARC computer was 'useless' .

[naaman fletcher]

5. Blackwater

The Blackwater case is as follows:

The State Department has huge security needs (or, they think they do) around the world. They put out contracts for those. There are 4-5 companies that specialize in it. While at the top of the security teams are ex-seal types, the vast majority of the security teams are low-level guards recruited in third world countries. The big one right now is Uganda. These guys get paid 600-800 dollars per month, although they have no expenses. So, Ugandan guy takes the job, gets trained in Uganda, then goes overseas for two years and makes what is for Uganda, good money.

I know all this, by the way, because when I was living in Kenya a guy in my apartment building worked for one of these companies. He was bidding on a large contract using Kenyans, and lost to a company using Ugandans.

Anyway, Blackwater wanted to get in on these large scale projects and was looking for a nation to source this sort of labor and settled on Colombia. I think the thought was that the Colombians would be paid the same, but be better guards as there were large numbers of ex-soldiers and police in Colombia needing employment. Whereas in Africa even your average soldier is not well trained or disciplined.

Anyway, under the ITAR rules for arms sales, training is considered a military good. So, not only can you not sell weapons to a foreign country without state department approval, you also can't provide military training.

Blackwater was fined for going to Colombia and training guys (they had won a contract) without state department approval.

Here is where it gets a bit tricky though: The contracting officer who gave blackwater the contract certainly at least knew that the labor was being sourced from Colombia. Also, it is hard to believe that the Blackwater people simply forgot to dot there i's and cross their t's.

So, their fine seems pretty high for something that on the surface was not really a big deal. That is, even if Blackwater neglected to get state department approval, Colombia is not on the ITAR blacklist so punishment typically should have been minimal.

So, possibilities include that the charges were part of the ongoing feud between the CIA and Erik Prince, OR, perhaps Blackwater was training these guys for someone else... perhaps Dubai or Bahrain.