Blackwater and Cia Collaberated on Raids

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
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Re-Growing Body Parts

So far, 5,000 men and women gave their lives while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are nearly 1,000 thousand more soldiers who are coming home with devastating injuries. Amputations, skin grafts and plastic surgeries are the painful battles these wounded warriors face on the home front. Now, science has a way to re-grow body parts, turning what was once science fiction into fact.

They are forever changed by war.

“An IED went off underneath our vehicle,” Scott Blaine, who was wounded while serving in Afghanistan, recalled to Ivanhoe. “Next thing you know, we’re on fire.”

“They found me 20 feet away from the truck engulfed in flames,” Joseph Paulk, also wounded in Afghanistan, said. “My family was informed they had to come to Germany to basically come say goodbye.”

Before Afghanistan, Paulk looked like the boy next door. When he came home, he learned his battle against the mirror was only beginning.

“Forty percent burns to the face, the shoulder down to my hands, and my hip down to my ankles, then amputations to all 10 fingers because of how severe the burns were,” he said.

Soon, amputations could be a thing of the past as doctors grow new body parts.

“We obviously have the potential to create a whole human in nine months,” Steve Badylak, M.D., D.V.M., Ph.D., director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, Penn., declared.
At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers are using powder made from a pig’s bladder to re-grow fingers. In soldiers with more serious injuries, the goal is to at least create fingertips.

“Stimulating the growth of 10 to 11 mm of length allows them to make change at a grocery store, turn the key in the car, hold a fork,” Dr. Badylak said.

Other researchers are working to reconstruct faces damaged by war. Joseph Vacanti, M.D., a pediatric surgeon at Mass General Hospital for Children, is engineering ears in his lab.

“Ideally, it would be indistinguishable from a normal ear,” Dr. Vacanti said.

Already successful in mice, Dr. Vacanti says he plans to implant the first ear on a human within a year.
“We can now envision that some day we can give somebody back their own face,” Dr. Vacanti said.

At Brown university, scientists are working to bring feeling back to injured bodies.

“We’re trying to help nerves that are injured grow back in a directed way,” Diane Hoffman-Kim, Ph.D., Associate Professor Medical Science and Engineering at Brown, told Ivanhoe.

Researchers pour liquid plastic over surrounding cells. The hope is to form a mold that guides severed nerves back together.

“Those live nerves will follow exactly along the tracks where the plastic is that looks just like cells,” Dr. Hoffman-Kim explained.

From growing new feeling to new faces, other doctors focus on eliminating the need for skin grafts. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., takes a piece of skin from a soldier and cooks it in an oven-like device.

“This is basically the same conditions as our body in a box,” said Dr. Atala.

Racks stretch the skin until it covers the size of the wound.

From civilians out of options, to soldiers whose sacrifice is measured in scars, science is growing new possibilities for healing the body and the human spirit.

“You don’t want to be looked at for your loss,” Scott Blaine said. “You want to be just like any other person around.”

The Department of Defense is providing Wake Forest, the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic $85 million over the next five years to perfect organ and tissue-growing techniques.

Large Increase in Private Contracted Soldiers

If you thought the end of American intervention in foreign wars was nearing, think again. President Obama has been replacing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with private contractors—some 250,000 are currently deployed overseas—including Blackwater (operating under another alias.)

Contractors are not subject to the same guidelines as our soldiers, and thus, have not been held accountable for the misdeeds they have afflicted upon civilian populations in the past.

This story has largely flown under the radar of the mainstream media, but will surely induce outrage at some uncertain point in the future.
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$6 billion Worth of Weapons Approved for Iraqi Government

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Defense Department on Wednesday said it had approved the sale to Iraq of weapons valued at up to $6 billion, including 400 Stryker wheeled vehicles, military radios, training aircraft, 20 coastal patrol boats and 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks.

The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees major foreign arms sales, said it had notified Congress this week about eight separate arms sales agreements with the Iraqi government.

Lawmakers now have 30 days to block the sales, although such action is rare since such large agreements are usually vetted well ahead of time.

The largest of the agreements, valued at up to $2.16 billion, is for 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 8 M88A2 tank recovery vehicles, 64 armored Humvees, shelter carriers and other military vehicles.

The prime contractors for the vehicle sales would be General Dynamics Corp, Honeywell International, and General Motors Corp.

The Iraqi government also requested the sale of 400 M1126 Stryker infantry carrier vehicles and associated equipment valued at up to $1.11 billion, the agency said. General Dynamics is the main contractor for that deal as well.

Another big-ticket arms sale involves 20 30-35-meter coastal patrol boats and 3 55-60 meter offshore support vessels, a deal valued at up to $1.01 billion, if all options are exercised, the Pentagon agency said.

It said no principal contractor had been identified yet for the patrol boats and support vessels, but the acquisition would be subject to U.S. defense sourcing requirements.

Iraq also asked to buy 26 Bell Armed 407 Helicopters with engines built by Rolls-Royce. DSCA said the principal contractors also had not been identified. The helicopters are built by Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc.
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Blackwater Operatives Charged With Murder

WASHINGTON– Blackwater Worldwide security guards opened machine gun fire on innocent, surrendering Iraqis and launched a grenade into a girls’ school during a gruesome Baghdad shooting last year, prosecutors said Monday in announcing manslaughter charges against five guards.

See Video Below Detailing This Case

A sixth guard involved in the attack cut a plea deal with prosecutors, turned on his former colleagues, and admitting killing at least one Iraqi in the 2007 shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. Seventeen Iraqis were killed in the assault, which roiled U.S. diplomacy with Iraq and fueled anti-American sentiment abroad.

The five guards surrendered Monday and were due to ask a federal judge in Utah for bail.

”None of the victims of this shooting was armed. None of them was an insurgent,” U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said. ”Many were shot while inside civilian vehicles that were attempting the flee from the convoy. One victim was shot in the chest while standing in the street with his hands up. Another was injured from a grenade fired into a nearby girls’ school.”

The guards were charged with 14 counts of manslaughter and 20 counts of attempted manslaughter. They are also charged with using a machine gun to commit a crime of violence, a charge that carries a 30-year minimum prison sentence.

The shootings happened in a crowded square where prosecutors say civilians were going about their lives, running errands. Following a car bombing elsewhere in the city, the heavily armed Blackwater convoy sought to shut down the intersection. Prosecutors said the convoy, known by the call sign Raven 23, violated an order not to leave the U.S.-controlled Green Zone.

”The tragic events in Nisoor Square on Sept. 16 of last year were shocking and a violation of basic human rights,” FBI Assistant Director Joseph Persichini said.

Witnesses said the contractors opened fire unprovoked. Women and children were among the victims and the shooting left the square littered with blown-out cars. Blackwater, the largest security contractor in Iraq, says its guards were ambushed and believed a slowly moving white Kia sedan might have been a car bomb.

”We think it’s pure and simple a case of self-defense,” defense attorney Paul Cassell said Monday as the guards were being booked. ”Tragically people did die.”

Prosecutors said the Blackwater guards never even ordered the car to stop before opening fire. In his plea agreement with prosecutors, former guard Jeremy Ridgeway, of California, admitted there was no indication the Kia was a car bomb.

Though the case has already been assigned to U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in Washington, the guards surrendered in Utah. They want the case moved there, where they would presumably find a more conservative jury pool and one more likely to support the Iraq war.

The indicted guards are Donald Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tenn.; Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, N.H.; Nick Slatten, a former Army sergeant from Sparta, Tenn.; and Paul Slough, an Army veteran from Keller, Texas.

Ridgeway’s sentencing on manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and aiding and abetting has not yet been scheduled.

An afternoon court hearing was scheduled on whether to release the guards. Defense attorneys were filing court documents challenging the Justice Department’s authority to prosecute the case. The law is murky on whether contractors can be charged in U.S. courts for crimes committed overseas.

The shootings caused an uproar, and the fledgling Iraqi government in Baghdad wanted Blackwater, which protects U.S. State Department personnel, expelled from the country. It also sought the right to prosecute the men in Iraqi courts.

”The killers must pay for their crime against innocent civilians. Justice must be achieved so that we can have rest from the agony we are living in,” said Khalid Ibrahim, a 40-year-old electrician who said his 78-year-old father, Ibrahim Abid, died in the shooting. ”We know that the conviction of the people behind the shooting will not bring my father to life, but we will have peace in our minds and hearts.”

Defense attorneys accused the Justice Department of bowing to Iraqi pressure .

”We are confident that any jury will see this for what it is: a politically motivated prosecution to appease the Iraqi government,” said defense attorney Steven McCool, who represents Ball.

Based in Moyock, N.C., Blackwater is the largest security contractor in Iraq and provides heavily armed guards for diplomats. Since last year’s shooting, the company has been a flash point in the debate over how heavily the U.S. relies on contractors in war zones

The company itself was not charged in the case. In a lengthy statement, Blackwater stood behind the guards and said it was ”extremely disappointed and surprised” that one of the guards had pleaded guilty.

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