Biden: Come Back to Where Blackwater Rescued Me

In dramatizing his February 2008 trip to Afghanistan "where my helicopter was forced down," Senator Joe Biden omits an important fact: His rescuers were the private security men of Blackwater Worldwide.

"If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where Bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me," said Biden in a taunt against Senator John McCain and supporters of winning the war in Iraq. "Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are."

But, Senator, can you tell us who rescued you? We can.

Biden huffed that he would ask his Republican counterpart, Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, about "the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down." He made it seem like terrorists forced down his aircraft.

Actually, it was a snowstorm that prompted the forced landing. That's what Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), who accompanied Biden and Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) on the aborted helicopter flight, told the Associated Press at the time.

ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper clarifies the issue. But his Googling of the incident didn't reveal that Blackwater contractors serving their country in a hostile location were the ones who rescued the senators and a three-star general.

If Biden asks Palin about "where my helicopter was forced down," Palin should ask Biden in return to praise Blackwater for saving him and taking him to Bagram Air Base.

Last February, Senator Kerry didn't try to make it look like enemy fire forced down the helicopter. "The weather closed in on us," he told the AP from safe refuge in Turkey. "It went pretty blind, pretty fast and we were around some pretty dangerous ridges. So the pilot exercised his judgment that we were better off putting down there, and we all agreed. . . We sat up there and traded stories."

Tapper adds that Kerry joked, "We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn't have to do it … Other than getting a little cold, it was fine."

New Video Explains Low-Altitude Air Drop Service

A new Blackwater video describes the company's Low Cost-Low Altitude (LCLA) air drop service, which the US military is using to supply the troops in Afghanistan. We've posted some great amateur videos of the Blackwater C-212s delivering pallets of ammunition to US Army forward operating bases, but this one is an official product of the company. Some excellent video footage, and a great description of exactly what the taxpayers getting for their money: Pinpoint, rapid parachute delivery of food, water, ammunition and supplies to troops in remote areas too risky for helicopters and inaccessible for the Air Force's large cargo planes.

Watch closely and you can see the Blackwater pilots' evasive maneuvering to avoid Taliban groundfire. This is an extremely dangerous service performed by American military veterans who crew the planes.

On the Ground Training Afghan Counternarcotics Police

Blackwater is training Afghanistan's new counternarcotics police - the men and women on the front lines to combat both the illegal drug business and to take away a big source of funds for the Taliban and, presumably, al Qaeda.

I haven't seen anything else like it in the above video. This stuff is new. Some of the highlights are what appears to be a main lobby of Afghanistan's new Counter-Narcotics Training Academy. On the wall are painted the flags of the "nations and organizations" that made the academy possible. Look at the emblems, one by one: Afghanistan, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, United Nations, Blackwater . . .

The Blackwater logo among those flags: The Afghans and Coalition members on the ground appear to have quite a different opinion of the company, working with its people up-close, than does most of the American public.

The video shows how Blackwater is helping Afghan women integrate into the counternarcotics police; how it trains new police recruits in law and safety as well as paramilitary CN tactics; how it mentors the new police out in the field; and how it conducts live-fire exercises. These guys and women are heavily armed: they're training to go out against not only heavily armed drug gangs, but against the Taliban.

The video ends with images of some of the results of the training and mentoring: world's biggest drug bust that took place last month at Spin Bolduk, a haul so big that British warplanes had to be called in to incinerate it from the air.

Congressman Henry Waxman and others want to put a stop to such activity by putting Blackwater out of the federal contracting business.

Here's a direct link to the YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YLSYosNcM8

Obama Campaign Still Won't Talk About Blackwater Help

The Obama campaign still isn't answering questions about whether the presidential candidate accepted security protection from Blackwater Worldwide during his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. Citing Paul Bedard's column in US News & World Report, London's Daily Telegraph reports,

A tight-lipped Anne Tyrrell, spokeswoman for Blackwater, said she could neither confirm nor deny that the company had been involved in the visits by the senators to Afghanistan or Iraq.

My request to Bill Burton, Obama's national spokesman, for comment on the Bedard story - including whether the alleged quote or its sentiment was genuine - went unanswered.

But a source familiar with Obama's security arrangements told me that Blackwater, along with the Secret Service, did pull security for the three senators in Afghanistan, though not Iraq.

Deceiver describes this as Obama's "Rosie O'Donnell moment" That's maybe a tad harsh but it will be interesting to see whether Obama's public position on Blackwater changes as a result of his up-close time with their personnel in Afghanistan.

Obama Got Blackwater Protection in Iraq & Afghanistan; Says 'Blackwater Is Getting a Bad Rap'

Blackwater did indeed protect Senator Barack Obama in Afghanistan and Iraq last week, impressing the presidential candidate so much that he was overheard saying, "Blackwater is getting a bad rap."

This amazing piece of news is being reported by Paul Bedard in US News & World Report.

Bedard writes in his "Washington Whispers" column on July 25,

Sen. Barack Obama has not been a fan of private police like Blackwater in war zones, and some news outlets even reported that they were spurned for his trip last week to Afghanistan and Iraq. But Whispers confirms that Blackwater did handle the Democratic presidential candidate's security in Afghanistan and helped out in Iraq. What's more, Obama was overheard saying: "Blackwater is getting a bad rap." Since everything appeared to go swimmingly, maybe he will take firms like Blackwater out of his sights, the company's supporters hope.

I'm sure there's a lot more where this came from. Obama's conversion on this is a really big deal. Was he struck by seeing up-close the professionalism of the private volunteers who protected him? Or perhaps did Gen. David Petraeus, who has honored Blackwater security men for their work in Iraq, say something? Stay tuned.

New Video Shows How Blackwater Supports the Troops

A new video on YouTube shows one of the ways Blackwater Worldwide supports the troops.

No, it's not about putting little yellow ribbon magnets on the back of your cars, or grandstanding in front of television cameras. It's the real thing - parachuting ammunition to the US Army Special Forces to resupply our warfighters in hot combat areas. It's really helping the troops fight terrorists.

The remarkable video was just posted. It shows two Blackwater C-212 planes on resupply missions to Army forward operating bases in Afghanistan. The video does not give locations.

One of the neat things about this video is that, unlike other videos of Blackwater on the Internet, this one is annotated so that the viewer knows what's going on and in what context.

Credits at the end of the video say it was shot by Dr. Michael Waller of the Institute of World Politics. A check of the IWP website shows that Waller is also editor of Serviam, a magazine about the global stability industry. (For a higher resolution of the video, go to this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQyl_WnaJ1I and click the "Watch In High Quality" icon just below the right lower corner of the image box.) When visiting YouTube, be sure to give the video a great rating!

Did Blackwater Protect Obama? Slate Reports No

Did Blackwater protect Senator Barack Obama during his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq? I don't see why anyone would have a problem with it if they wanted to protect the life of a US senator and top presidential candidate. Blackwater has a PERFECT track record protecting American government officials in the world's nastiest war zones.

And Blackwater has protected almost every single US senator and congressman who has visited Afghanistan and Iraq over the past few years - even when Obama visited Iraq in 2006.

Neither the Obama campaign nor Blackwater is saying anything, though, and the Secret Service is implying strongly that the answer is no.

Blogger Christopher Beam saw my question on July 19 and, without attribution, reported on Slate:

But Obama isn't just any globetrotting senator. He's a presidential nominee, which means all his security arrangements at home and abroad are made not by the State Department but by the Secret Service. The Obama campaign refused to discuss his security detail, but a spokesman for the Secret Service told me that private contractors were not accompanying Obama in Iraq or Afghanistan. "We don't utilize contractors," said spokesman Ed Donovan. "We use military law enforcement and Secret Service."

Guess Who Protected Obama in Afghanistan?

It's funny how, with all the press coverage of Senator Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan, nobody has mentioned who's working overtime to protect the presidential candidate and his Secret Service guards from harm.

Especially because he has been such a critic of private security contractors.

Who were all those armed civilians keeping a discreet distance from the politician and running the diplomatic security convoy that picked him up at Kabul airport? They weren't Secret Service!

News reports say that Obama's trip is being treated as a congressional delegation or codel. Standard practice for codels visiting Afghanistan and Iraq calls for the lawmakers to be protected under the Worldwide Personal Protection Services (WPPS) program of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. That program is carried out by private security contractors, of which Blackwater is the most important in both Kabul and Baghdad.

Obama has been such a critic of Blackwater (though he recognizes the need for the company's services) that it would be news for him to accept the company's protection in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the other hand, if someone broke with standard practice and had a private security contractor other than Blackwater guard the senator and his Secret Service detail, that would be news too.

So far, nobody's saying anything. And reporters aren't asking.

The Associated Press featured Afghan police wielding battered Kalashnikovs and frisking the locals, but had nothing to say about who was providing the unusually tight security for Obama and the Secret Service agents.

Let's see how long it takes the press to report this one.

Gadfly Author Admits an Obama Administration Would Need Blackwater

Even a standard-bearer of the kook fringe admits that an Obama Administration would need Blackwater Worldwide and its services.

The admission from writer Jeremy Scahill comes as somewhat of a surprise. Scahill made a name for himself, as well as a tidy bit of cash, in his partially-true book on Blackwater, and his fans seemed to think of him as a latter-day David against the security provider. But as the most prolific of an embarrassingly tiny and ineffective group of anti-Blackwater protesters in San Diego recently, Scahill seems to have seen reality.

"Here is the cold, hard fact," he writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Blackwater knows its future is bright no matter who next takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

It gets better. Scahill notes Blackwater President Gary Jackson's recent observation that despite all the controversy, the company has had its two best consecutive quarters in a row. The US has renewed its big diplomatic security contract with Blackwater in Iraq, despite the Iraqi government's objections after the Nisoor Square shootout last fall.

"Blackwater is also winning at home," writes Scahill. "The company recently fought back widespread local opposition to its plans for a new warfare training center in San Diego."

But wait - there's more: "Obama may want to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, for instance, but 'diplomatic security' is where Blackwater's bread is lathered with golden butter. Obama has pledged to increase diplomatic activity in Iraq and to keep in place the Green Zone and the monstrous U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Despite his criticism, Obama may have no choice but to use these private forces. His top advisors have painfully acknowledged Obama 'cannot rule [it] out.'

"Consider the numbers: At present, Blackwater has about two-thirds as many operatives in Baghdad as the US State Department has diplomatic security agents in the entire world, including Iraq. Although Obama has said he wants diplomatic security to be done by U.S. government employees, accountable under US law, the State Department estimates that it could take years to recruit, vet and train a force to take over Blackwater's work.

"In addition, Obama's rhetoric on Latin America strikes familiar 'drug war' chords, which bodes well for Blackwater, and he plans to send 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan, where the company is already firmly entrenched. . . .

"There is no question that a McCain White House would be preferred by Blackwater and its allies. The question is: Would a Democratic victory really be bad for business?"

Guess Who Trained the Afghans Who Just Made the World's Largest Drug Bust!

See those two big trenches full of burning hashish? They're part of what NATO says may be the world's biggest drug bust. Afghan counternarcotics commandos, working with the elite British Special Boat Service (SBS), made the bust this week, but not a word is in the press about who trained the local anti-drug forces.

The haul of hashish was so huge - 236.8 metric tons, or triple the previous world record for volume - that the SBS called in Harrier jump jets from Kandahar to bomb the cache, which was buried in huge covered trenches, the Associated Press reports (see photo). The hashish was worth an estimated $400 million on the wholesale world market. About $14 million of that would have gone to the Taliban.

We don't have any definitive knowledge of this case, but we do know that Blackwater runs a major program for the US Department of Defense (D0D) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Afghanistan to eradicate opium poppies and other narcotics. The Afghan national police entity under Blackwater's assistance is called the Narcotics Interdiction Unit (NIU). The approach is not to eradicate crops and thereby harm local farmers and force them into the arms of the Taliban, but to wait until the farmers are paid and the raw materials are initially processed for smuggling abroad, and then destroy the processed drugs.

Did Blackwater train the Afghan special police members behind the world record-setting raid? An enterprising journalist or congressman could find out easily if they wanted to.

Video Shows Blackwater's Pinpoint Air Drops in Afghanistan

Want to see one of the ways Blackwater is supporting the troops? Watch this video. As a temporary service to fill the Air Force's lack of small fixed-wing aircraft, Blackwater Worldwide has beeen providing front-line air drop services in Afghanistan. Its fleet of twin-engine C-212 cargo aircraft has been a vital resupply link for US and Coalition forces in remote areas of the country.

A recently posted video, apparently shot last winter at a US forward operating base (FOB) in Afghanistan, shows the precision of the Blackwater drops. To avoid enemy antiaircraft fire, the small unarmed planes fly in, nap-of-the-earth about 35-50 feet off the ground at about 160 knots, pop up high enough over the drop zone to release pallets of supplies by parachute, and escape before the Taliban can shoot them.

Each highly skilled contractor pilot performs these missions several times daily, delivering everything from mail, food and water to spare parts and ammunition. Our Special Forces could not function without them.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince told Congress last fall that the military at present cannot perform the mission because Air Force fixed-wing aircraft cannot land on the short, unimproved, high-altitude airstrips in remote parts of Afghanistan, and that the planes are too large to carry out small missions.

In the above video, someone is heard saying that a Blackwater pilots are flying in the wrong way, but he soon eats his words. Two Blackwater planes then zoom in and drop the pallets exactly on-target. It's an instructive little video.

A unit of the 82nd Airborne based at the Salerno FOB in Khost made a video of similar Blackwater missions and put it to music. To view it, click here: http://blackblawg.blogspot.com/2007/10/video.html.

Rocker Tells of Air Force, USO and Blackwater Tour with Troops

Members of the Boston punk rock band Lansdowne talk about playing for American troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia. The emerging band won an audition last year with Armed Forces Network and recently signed an arrangement with USO to tour the war theater in support of military personnel.

Blackwater - recently a USO partner - flew the rockers to forward operating bases in Afghanistan to entertain the troops.

"It's kind of a blur now," lead singer Jon Ricci tells the Boston Herald. "Being flown around on C-17s, which are like the biggest planes you can think of, and by Blackwater to and from bases, it was all pretty amazing."

Entrepreneurial Culture Keeps Blackwater Growing

TradingMarkets.Com carried a very balanced and interesting article on Blackwater, discussing the company's history and ethos. “Blackwater is thriving because of its aggressive and entrepreneurial business culture and a strong network of… connections,” they write. “The company has hired extensively from the top levels of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department, and named the former No. 2 official at the CIA to its Board of Advisors.” Looking back to the early days of the company, they explain:

Blackwater Lodge and Training Center was the brainchild of Al Clark, a Navy SEAL and instructor. Dissatisfied with the Navy's rented training grounds, Clark told colleagues he would open his own when he left the service. Clark hooked up with Erik Prince, a young Navy SEAL who shared his interest in training.... When the two broke ground on Blackwater Lodge and Training Center in Currituck and Camden counties in northeast North Carolina in 1997, the timing was good. The military had closed and consolidated bases after the Cold War and neglected training facilities. Blackwater built the largest shooting facility in the country, with indoor ranges, mock urban landscapes, a 1,200-yard firing range, driving tracks and a lake for naval training. Blackwater boasted it could design any sort of training a client might want. The location was excellent, within four hours of the Pentagon in Washington, and Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. The country's biggest naval base in Norfolk, Va., was less than an hour away.

But Blackwater's service really began after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the launching of the Global War on Terror:

The CIA was stretched thin in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Blackwater landed a… contract to provide security at CIA stations in Afghanistan…. The contract was not a big one; it called for 16 Blackwater security personnel, plus dozens of Afghan guards hired locally.... In August 2003, Blackwater won a… contract to guard Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority and probably the top assassination target of insurgents. The contract called for helicopters to fly Bremer around Iraq. Blackwater was well positioned for that; the company had bought a Florida aviation company four months earlier.

Blackwater's patriotism and business acumen converge when it comes to identifying new threats to the United States and pouncing on them. “They are very good and very savvy at identifying market needs and pushing hard to enter into those markets, even before clients have recognized the need,” Peter Singer, an expert on private military contractors said.

For all the controversy, Blackwater has an unblemished record on its main task in Iraq: None of the diplomats in the company's care have been killed or wounded. Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy recently told The New York Times that the diplomats could not function in Iraq without Blackwater: “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.”

Blackwater Evacuates US Ambassador from Assassination Attempt

Blackwater guards evacuated US Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood to safety after Sunday's assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

News reports cited “security guards” as protecting the envoy, but not a single news organization identified the guards. Blackwater has the sole contract to guard the American ambassador in Afghanistan.

Wood and other dignitaries joined Afghan leaders in celebrating the 16th anniversary of the Afghan victory over the Soviet Union when Taliban terrorists opened fire with automatic weapons, rockets and mortars. Several people were killed.

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince told Congress last fall that the company's State Department diplomatic security job under the Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) program is to get their protectees "off the X," meaning to rush them from an attack site to safety.

Mag Describes Blackwater's Fight Against Heroin Trafficking

With so much attention focused on Blackwater's private security contracting work for the State Department, it's understandable that few people know about the company's other activity - including its leading role in fighting heroin and opium production and trafficking in Afghanistan.

Faced with out-of-control narcotics production in Afghanistan, NATO and the United States have relied on several contractors - especially DynCorp, Lockheed Martin and Blackwater - to make the fight more effective. The US Army photo above illustrates how civilian contractors work directly with the military and with Afghan civilians. Blackwater is working for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the US military, according to a cover story in the March-April issue of the industry magazine Serviam.

The magazine describes a "five-pillar" counternarcotics strategy for the country, and shows how Blackwater helped set up Afghanistan's elite Narcotics Interdiction Unit (NIU).

“We’re involved on DoD side,” Jeff Gibson, vice president for international training at Blackwater, tells Serviam. “We interdict. The NIU surgically goes after shipments going to Iran or Pakistan. We provide training to set up roadblocks, identify where drug lords are, and act so as not to impact the community.”

The article is long and contains several sidebars, so it's worth visiting the original piece for the full story. Here's a representative snippet:

NIU police cover a cross-section of Afghan society. Their faces reflect the diverse racial and cultural makeup of the country. About 10 to 15 percent of NIU personnel are women: a cultural step forward in local terms, as the women work side-by-side with the men. While the women wear traditional scarves to cover their heads, they do not cover their faces unless wearing black balaclava masks to shield their identities while on an operation, or voluntarily wearing burqas to go undercover.

Once out in the field, the NIU graduates show the same determination they displayed in their training.

“About a year and a half ago they lost two officers in an ambush,” Gibson says. “They got intelligence on a drug lab outside of Kabul. Two officers went out to verify the source, but it was a setup and they were ambushed and killed.

“We believed that this unit was becoming more effective and that the ambush was a backlash. We were concerned that the Afghans would say, ‘Screw this, we’re not going to do it any more.’ But they got energized and they became stronger, and much more proud of what they were doing. It steeled their determination,” the Blackwater
international training chief says. “I thought guys would quit or not show up, but instead they put more purpose behind it.”

Pentagon praises Blackwater for anti-narcotics work in Afghanistan

The Department of Defense is "very happy" with Blackwater's work in Afghanistan to train local anti-narcotics forces.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Richard Douglas, deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics, counterproliferation and global threats, as saying that Blackwater's training of the Afghans made them more effective in fighting illegal drug production. "We've been very happy with the results of our association with them in Afghanistan," Douglas said.

Rare video shows Blackwater supplying troops in Afghanistan

Here's a rare video of Blackwater in action on the warfront. This one is about how Blackwater teams with the US Army's elite 82nd Airborne to deliver supplies to the troops in remote parts of Afghanistan.

In the video, two Blackwater C-212 light cargo planes fly extremely close to the ground - about 35 feet up - to avoid Taliban gunfire. They fly up to about 150 feet to drop pallets of ammunition and water to American soldiers. US military crews are aboard.

Because the military lacks the type of planes needed to supply the area, the 782nd Brigade Support Battalion contracted Blackwater to fly the aircraft for remote deliveries. The 782nd is responsible for supplying 22 paratrooper bases across 19,000 square miles of some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world.

Kevin Maurer of the Fayetteville Observer, the hometown newspaper of the 82nd Airborne, is presently in Afghanistan. Soldiers from the 782nd produced the video and posted it on YouTube in July, 2007. This video and Maurer's report come to our attention courtesy of the blogger White Rabbit.