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Article: Drowning in Blackwater: How Weak Accountability over Private Security Contractors Significantly Undermines Counterinsurgency Efforts
- Article from:
- The Army Lawyer
- Article date:
- July 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Superintendent of Documents Jul 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Blackwater's an extraordinarily professional organization and they were doing exactly what they were tasked to do: protect the principal. The problem is in protecting the principal they had to be very aggressive, and each time they went out they had to offend locals, forcing them to the side of the road, being overpowering and intimidating, at times running vehicles off the road, making enemies each time they went out. So they were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.1
I. Introduction
On 16 September 2007, a five vehicle convoy transporting American diplomats departed from the Green Zone, the heavily-protected ...