The private security company formerly called Blackwater Worldwide, long plagued by accusations of impropriety, has reached an agreement with the State Department for the company to pay $42 million in fines for hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations.

The violations included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, according to company and government officials familiar with the deal.

The settlement, which has not yet been publicly announced, follows lengthy talks between Blackwater, now called Xe Services, and the State Department that dealt with the violations as an administrative matter, allowing the firm to avoid criminal charges. A company spokeswoman confirmed Friday that a settlement had been reached. The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said he could not immediately comment.

The settlement with the State Department does not resolve other legal troubles still facing Blackwater and its former executives and other personnel. Those include the indictments of five former executives, including Blackwater’s former president, on weapons and obstruction charges; a federal investigation into evidence that Blackwater officials sought to bribe Iraqi government officials; and the arrest of two former Blackwater guards on federal murder charges stemming from the killing of two Afghans last year.

But by paying fines rather than facing criminal charges on the export violations, Blackwater will be able to continue to obtain government contracts. While the company lost its largest federal contract last year to provide diplomatic security for United States Embassy personnel in Baghdad, where the Iraqi government was incensed by killings of Iraqis in one highly publicized case, it still has contracts to provide security for the State Department and the C.I.A. in Afghanistan.

Blackwater, its reputation tainted in part because of the excessive use of force by some of its personnel in Baghdad, sought for years to extend its reach far beyond the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For a time, the company’s founder, Erik Prince, had ambitions to turn Blackwater into an informal arm of the American foreign policy and national security apparatus, and proposed to the C.I.A. to create a “quick reaction force” that could handle paramilitary operations for the spy agency around the world. He had hopes that Blackwater’s military prowess could be an influential force in regional conflicts around the world.

Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seals member and the heir to an auto parts fortune, took an interest in Africa, particularly Sudan, and he is said to have wanted Blackwater to step in to help the rebels in southern Sudan, which is predominantly Christian and animist, fight the Sudanese government and the Muslim north, despite United States economic sanctions.

Blackwater’s ambitions in Sudan were described in detail by McClatchy newspapers in June.

The settlement with the State Department, involving practices from the days before Blackwater was rebranded as Xe Services, comes as Mr. Prince is trying to shed his ties to Blackwater and its past activities.

He overhauled the company’s management in 2009, changed its name, and has now put the privately held company up for sale. He has just moved with his family to Abu Dhabi from the United States, a move that colleagues say was a result of his deep anger and frustration over the intense scrutiny he and his firm have received in recent years.

The State Department export controls require government approval for the transfer of certain types of military technology or knowledge from the United States to other countries. But Blackwater began to seek training contracts from foreign governments and other foreign organizations without adhering closely to American regulations.

The company also shipped automatic weapons and other military equipment for use by its personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan in violation of export controls, and in some cases sought to hide its actions, according to the government. In one incident, Blackwater shipped weapons to Iraq hidden inside containers of dog food.

A federal investigation into the company’s weapons shipments to Iraq led to guilty pleas on criminal charges by two former Blackwater employees who are believed to have cooperated with a broader federal inquiry.

Investigators reportedly looked into whether some of the weapons that were shipped to Iraq were sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a Kurdish rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Turkish officials reportedly complained to the United States about American weapons seized from the group.

In 2008, after a federal investigation of Blackwater’s actions was begun, the company admitted “numerous mistakes” in its adherence to export laws and created an outside board of experts to supervise the firm’s compliance.

Current and former government officials say that the government’s inquiry into some of Blackwater’s export control violations began as part of a federal grand jury investigation in North Carolina, where Blackwater is based. But the matter was apparently shifted to the State Department when the criminal investigation in North Carolina narrowed its focus.

That grand jury handed down the indictments of the five former Blackwater executives earlier this year. That indictment includes charges that Blackwater executives sought to hide evidence that they had given weapons as gifts to King Abdullah of Jordan.

Despite the fines and investigations that have plagued Blackwater, the firm has continued to win contracts from the State Department and the C.I.A.

In June, the State Department awarded Blackwater a $120 million contract to provide security at its regional offices in Afghanistan, while the C.I.A. renewed the firm’s $100 million security contract for its station in Kabul. At the time, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, defended the decision, saying that the company had offered the lowest bid and had “cleaned up its act.”

Not just right wingers, but right wingers of the extreme, right wingers on the fringe.

I had been disinvited from appearing on the WORL-FM radio program of Orlando Magic Vice President Pat Williams to discuss my new book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love. In the book, I write about how Orlando Magic owner Dick DeVos, has for forty years  been the fundraiser-in-chief for the right-wing edge of the Republican Party. I write about how his nonprofit, the DeVos Foundation, has pumped millions into groups that support radical reparative gay therapy, anti-evolution politics and other “traditional” family values. The organizations they support include Focus on the Family, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Media Research Center among many others.

I write about DeVos’s own history as a founding member of an organization called the Council for National Policy (CNP). The CNP is a secret organization that makes the Masons look like paparazzi-hungry starlets. Formed and launched by the elite of the John Birch society, Dick DeVos is a two-time CNP President. Another leading member of the CNP was a fellow Michigan-based billionaire by the name of Edgar Prince. In what can only be described as a royal coupling, Edgar Prince’s daughter, Betsy, married Dick’s son, Dick Jr. Edgar Prince’s son, Erik Prince, would become CEO of the infamous Blackwater corporation. Blackwater is the company of private mercenaries, hired to help occupy Iraq, Afghanistan, and even post-Katrina New Orleans. Famous for rolling through Baghdad in black SUVs, rock music blaring, and making 100 times the pay of a US soldier, they are the outsourced army as rampaging fraternity. Since 2000, Blackwater had received $505 million in government contracts, two-thirds of which came in no-bid contracts. This isn’t a vast right-wing conspiracy: it’s been an openly incestuous and highly beneficial coupling between the DeVos/Prince clan and the Republican Party.

Of course, DeVos has every right to support whatever organizations he wishes. But maybe we should be concerned that DeVos is also receiving hundreds of millions in corporate welfare to open a new $480 million home for the Orlando Magic that will be at the heart of a $1.1 billion Orlando mega-entertainment complex. Maybe we should be concerned that millions of our public tax dollars go into Dick DeVos’s hands, and that money is then used to underwrite organizations many taxpayers, not to mention sports fans, would find noxious.

I was excited to go on Pat Williams’s show and discuss these issues. Honestly, I was shocked—and impressed—that they asked me on in the first place. But alas that will never be. Instead, a critique of DeVos I made on the radio and television program Democracy Now!, was seized upon by DeVos’s media gutter fighters at Newsbusters and Red State.

These radical-right websites bravely stepped forward to protect the integrity and good name of pro sports owners. Yes, billionaires getting billions more in public subsidies are the real victims in twenty-first-century America. I thought this crowd was against pork projects and bloated deficits. But when the “welfare queens” in question are their billion-dollar sugar daddies, they courageously rise in anger.

The post titled “NBA Fans Shouldn’t Back the Blackwater Magic? Zany Zirin’s Sports Analogies” reads, “Do the Orlando Magic, support war in Iraq? That’s what MSNBC’s favorite leftist sports guru, Dave Zirin of The Nation magazine, argued on taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now on Friday. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is the brother-in-law of Magic owner (and conservative funder) Dick DeVos. So Zirin thought NBA fans ought to think twice.… His Pacifica interviewers weren’t going to ask about leftist sports team owners using publicly funded stadiums for fundraisers. Does Zirin really believe that’s never happened?” This is stupidity masquerading as journalism. Forget that Price isn’t DeVos’s brother-in-law. In the book I go through chapter and verse, the political contributions of owners. And no, there is no billion dollar sugar daddy in an owner’s box funding The Nation the way Lakers minority owner Phil Anschutz underwrites his money-hemorrhaging operation at The Weekly Standard.

So to sum up: I thought I was going to appear on Pat Williams show to have an honest debate about the ethics of Dick DeVos’s operation. Instead I was “breitbarted” by his apparatchiks on the radical right. I am still open to having that discussion with Pat Williams at the time and place of his choosing. Until that time, you’ll forgive me for assuming that Dick DeVos is far comfortable doing his business in the shadows of American politics than exposing them to the light of day. Sports fans of the Orlando Magic and taxpayers in the state of Florida deserve far better.

Source: The Nation – Dave Zirin

MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — For months, reports have abounded here that the Afghan mercenaries who escort American and other NATO convoys through the badlands have been bribing Taliban insurgents to let them pass.

Then came a series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents.

After a pair of bloody confrontations with Afghan civilians, two of the biggest private security companies — Watan Risk Management and Compass Security — were banned from escorting NATO convoys on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.

The ban took effect on May 14. At 10:30 a.m. that day, a NATO supply convoy rolling through the area came under attack. An Afghan driver and a soldier were killed, and a truck was overturned and burned. Within two weeks, with more than 1,000 trucks sitting stalled on the highway, the Afghan government granted Watan and Compass permission to resume.

Watan’s president, Rashid Popal, strongly denied any suggestion that his men either colluded with insurgents or orchestrated attacks to emphasize the need for their services. Executives with Compass Security did not respond to questions.

But the episode, and others like it, has raised the suspicions of investigators here and in Washington, who are trying to track the tens of millions in taxpayer dollars paid to private security companies to move supplies to American and other NATO bases.

Although the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies — many of which have ties to top Afghan officials — are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors.

The suspicions raise fundamental questions about the conduct of operations here, since the convoys, and the supplies they deliver, are the lifeblood of the war effort.

“We’re funding both sides of the war,” a NATO official in Kabul said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was incomplete, said he believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban.

Firms Tied to Officials

The investigation is complicated by, among other things, the fact that some of the private security companies are owned by relatives of President Hamid Karzai and other senior Afghan officials. Mr. Popal, for instance, is a cousin of Mr. Karzai, and Western officials say that Watan Risk Management’s largest shareholder is Mr. Karzai’s brother Qayum.

The principal goal of the American-led campaign here is to prepare an Afghan state and army to fight the Taliban themselves. The possibility of collusion between the Taliban and Afghan officials suggests that, rather than fighting each another, the two Afghan sides may often cooperate under the noses of their wealthy benefactors.

“People think the insurgency and the government are separate, and that is just not always the case,” another NATO official in Kabul said. “What we are finding is that they are often bound up together.”

The security companies, which appear to operate under little supervision, have sometimes wreaked havoc on Afghan civilians. Some of the private security companies have been known to attack villages on routes where convoys have come under fire, Western officials here say.

Records show there are 52 government-registered security companies, with 24,000 gunmen, most of them Afghans. But many, if not most, of the security companies are not registered at all, do not advertise themselves and do not necessarily restrain their gunmen with training or rules of engagement. Some appear to be little more than gangs with guns.

In the city of Kandahar alone, at least 23 armed groups — ostensibly security companies not registered with the government — are operating under virtually no government control, Western and Afghan officials said. On Kandahar’s chaotic streets, armed men can often be seen roaming about without any uniforms or identification.

“There are thousands of people that have been paid by both civilian and military organizations to escort their convoys, and they all pose a problem,” said Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister. (Mr. Atmar resigned under pressure from President Karzai on Sunday.) “The Afghan people are not ready to accept the private companies’ providing public security.”

[More to Read: NYT]

At least 18 people have been killed in clashes between rival factions in southern and central Somalia, and there are reports that Blackwater/Xe mercenaries have entered the country.

A battle broke out between the pro-government Ahlu Sunnah militia and Hizbul Islam fighters in the town of Baladwayne on Sunday and went well into Monday, during which at least 13 people lost their lives, witnesses said.

In addition, five people were killed when Hizbul Islam fighters engaged Al-Shabab fighters in the town of Dhobley near the Kenyan border, Reuters reported.

There are also allegations of US-sponsored bomb plots in the capital.

The bombings will be carried out in order to create a pretext to launch a campaign against Al-Shabab, a spokesman of the group, Sheikh Ali Mohammed Rage, told Reuters.

“We have discovered that US agencies are going to launch suicide bombings in public places in Mogadishu,” he told reporters. “They have tried it in Algeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan… We warn of these disasters. They want to target Bakara Market and mosques, then use that to malign us.”

At a meeting with tribal elders in Mogadishu on Monday, the Al-Shabab spokesman said that mercenaries of the Xe private security firm — formerly known as Blackwater — have arrived in the Somali capital, the Press TV correspondent in Mogadishu reported on Monday.

Blackwater/Xe mercenaries plan to carry out bombings in Mogadishu in order to accuse Al-Shabab of being the culprits in the attacks, the Al-Shabab spokesman added.

He went on to say that the Blackwater/Xe mercenaries have already recruited many lackeys to help them carry out bombings targeting prominent individuals and innocent civilians.

The Al-Shabab spokesman also told the tribal elders that a system based on Islam should be established in Somalia.

In 2004, the CIA sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe, to Hamburg to kill an alleged al Qaeda financier who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda, according to a little-highlighted element in a Vanity Fair article to be published this month.

The report cited a source familiar with the program as saying the mission had been kept secret from the German government.

“Among the team’s targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency’s radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa,” writes Vanity Fair’s Adam Ciralsky.

“The CIA team supposedly went in ‘dark,” meaning they did not notify their own station — much less the German government — of their presence; they then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down,” reports the magazine.

Washington authorities, however, “chose not to pull the trigger,” it said.

Vanity Fair has reemerged as a powerful journalistic force in recent years, outing the long-secret “Deep Throat” source of The Washington Post‘s Watergate reporting.

Earlier reports revealed that the Bush Administration was considering a “targeted assassination” program — in apparent breach of international treaties — which would have put lethal targets on the backs of terror suspects beyond the reach of US law. The article adds that the CIA also considering taking out Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan (at left), believed to be the mastermind behind Pakistan’s development of a nuclear bomb.

“Khan’s inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged,” Ciralsky writes.

A source purportedly said: “They say the program didn’t move forward because [they] didn’t have the right skill set or because of inadequate cover. That’s untrue. [The operation continued] for a very long time in some places without ever being discovered. This program died because of a lack of political will.”

Berlin today denies any knowledge of the CIA operation, according to a German media outlet.

Green party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Stroebele told a local paper that it was the government’s job to monitor foreign intelligence agencies operating in Germany.

“It can’t be true that they knew nothing,” Stroebele told the daily Hamburger Abendblatt.

Deutsche Welle, the German news source, further reports today that Federal prosecutors in Hamburg are conducting an investigation into the magazine’s CIA assassination plot claims.

German authorities have previously investigated Darkazanli but never charged him; he was arrested in 2004 on a Spanish extradition request but released nine months later.