Wednesday, December 2, 2009

A Fine Royal Whine

From Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, who feels that his company has been "thrown under the bus."

Yeah, that can happen when you richly earn a reputation for running a pack of trigger-happy goons. This quote in the story, reprised from 2008, was classic Blackwater arrogance:
"The experience we've had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk."
It's more of a disincentive to run people off the road and shoot into crowds of fleeing civilians. Blackwater's offenses ran from major homicides committed by its employees to stupidly offensive stunts such as freezing up plastic bottles of water and then throwing them at pedestrians.

Blackwater's problems were of their own making.
Another young Marine major referred to Blackwater’s conduct on September 16 [2007] as another demonstration of their practice of “spray and pray.” “Lighting up an entire city block because a car engine backfires,” he said, “doesn’t protect lives; it endangers the lives of American soldiers performing a mission in Iraq.”
$2 million in legal bills each month sounds low, considering all the crimes and misdeeds that Blackwater has alleged to have been behind. Death by litigation: Cry me a river.

3 comments:

  1. Interesting bit of timely trivia for you. Another company from West Michigan has hit the international security scene recently: CSS Global. They made the local news (http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2009/10/ada_company_wins_contract_to_p.html) when they won a contract for security in Somalia.

    Hopefully they won't make the same mistakes Blackwater did. Still think it's a little odd that two security firms would pop up in this little area though. Go figure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting. Mercs from Michigan.

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  3. 'Thrown under the bus'? More like his political patrons got voted out of office. What the hell did he expect?

    ReplyDelete

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