Because the name "Blackwater" has such a bad reputation, due to all the killing, they've embarked upon a series of cosmetic reforms: Changing their name to "Xe," bidding for contracts under the names of their dozens of fictitious front companies, and now starting up this ethics committee.

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U.S. District Judge James C. Fox said court-ordered arbitration fell apart because neither side was paying the costs of that process, so he decided to shut the case nearly seven years after the killings. Katy Helvenston, the mother of contractor Scott Helvenston, said Tuesday the families couldn't afford the costs, and she fears the case is over. The lawsuit was filed about a year after the men's deaths.

"It's pretty much destroyed my life," Helvenston said. "I haven't known one moment of joy since Scotty was slaughtered. I think the worst party is the betrayal from my country. I feel so betrayed."

Insurgents killed the four contractors, then mutilated the bodies, dragged the charred remains through the streets and hung two of the corpses from a bridge. Images from the scene were relayed around the world, and the event triggered a massive U.S. military siege known as the Battle of Fallujah.

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Prince is involved in a multimillion-dollar program financed by several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, to mobilize some 2,000 Somali recruits to fight pirates who are terrorizing the African coast, according to a person familiar with the project and an intelligence report seen by The Associated Press. 

Prince's name has surfaced in the Somalia conflict amid the debate over how private security forces should be used in some of the world's most dangerous spots. Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, became a symbol in Washington of contractors run amok after a series of incidents, including one in 2007 in which its guards were charged with killing 14 civilians in the Iraqi capital.

Though Somali pirates have seized ships flying under various flags, most governments are reluctant to send ground troops to wipe out pirate havens in a nation that has been in near-anarchy for two decades and whose weak U.N.-backed administration is confined to a few neighborhoods of the capital. The forces now being trained are intended to help fill that void. They will also go after a warlord linked to Islamist insurgents, one official said.

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Never mind the dead civilians. Forget about the stolen guns. Get over the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned.

The company won the contract under one of its many alternate names, "International Development Solutions." The contract is to protect embassies around the world.

It's worth repeating that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her presidential campaign, promised to ban Blackwater from Iraq, going so far as to say:

For five years their behavior and lack of supervision and accountability have often eroded our credibility, endangered U.S. and Iraqi lives and undermined our mission.

Obama never made a similar promise.

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WAVY-TV of Norfolk reported Monday that the jury came up deadlocked after several days of deliberations. A new trial date was set for March 1.

Justin H. Cannon and Christopher Drotleff face life in prison for the shootings on May 5, 2009, when they were in the country to train the Afghan National Army. They were working for North Carolina-based Blackwater Worldwide, which changed its name to Xe (zee) Services.

Cannon, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Drotleff, of Virginia Beach, face murder, assault and weapons charges.

Neither testified in the trial.

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Information from: WAVY-TV, http://www.wavy.com/

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The disagreement foreshadowed problems that in December led a judge to dismiss manslaughter charges against five contractors who fired machine guns and grenades into a busy intersection. The dismissal outraged Iraqis and sent the Obama administration scrambling to repair a case that is all but in ruins.

In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said prosecutors ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials and built their case on sworn statements that had been given under a promise of immunity. Documents unsealed Tuesday in response to a request by The Associated Press and The Washington Post paint the clearest picture yet of how the case prosecution went awry.

Immediately after the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting, Blackwater contractors told State Department investigators what happened. Two days later, the security gave written statements under a promise that nothing they said could be used against them in a criminal case.

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Citing repeated government missteps, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed a case that had been steeped in international politics. The shooting in busy Nisoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad. The Iraqi government wanted the guards to face trial in Iraq and officials there said they would closely watch how the U.S. judicial system handled the case.

Urbina said the prosecutors ignored the advice of senior Justice Department officials and improperly built their case on sworn statements that had been given under a promise of immunity. Urbina said the government's explanations were "contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility."

"We're obviously disappointed by the decision," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. "We're still in the process of reviewing the opinion and considering our options."

Prosecutors can appeal the ruling.

Blackwater contractors had been hired to guard U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The guards said insurgents ambushed them in a traffic circle. Prosecutors said the men unleashed an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.

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I won't have much time to write until later today or tomorrow, but I did want to note this one point:   Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation that "a former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company" alleged in a sworn statement:

that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

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If Barack Obama takes the Rhino Runner armor-plated bus from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone, or travels by Catfish Air's Blackhawk helicopters (the way mere mortals like diplomats and journalists do), instead of by presidential chopper, he will be assigned a seat by U.S. civilian workers easily identified by the red KBR lanyards they wear around their necks.

Even if Obama gets the ultra-red carpet treatment, he will still tread on walkways and enter buildings that have been constructed over the last six years by an army of some 50,000 workers in the employ of KBR. And should Obama chose to order the troops in Iraq home tomorrow, he will effectively sign a blank check for billions of dollars in withdrawal logistics contracts that will largely be carried out by a company once overseen by Dick Cheney.

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Now would be a good time for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to begin to reclaim that military for its proper purpose: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for whom, our troops are currently fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and the hostile hills of Afghanistan.

A few fortnights and forever ago, in the Bush years, our "expeditionary" military came remarkably close to resembling an updated version of the French Foreign Legion in the ways it was conceived and used by those in power -- and even, to some extent, in its makeup.

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The Associated Press reports that defense attorneys are already "filing court documents challenging the Justice Department's authority to prosecute the case." This isn't surprising. In a 2007 article, Salon's Mark Benjamin and I explored the legal limbo that was created in Iraq for private security guards like the ones charged Monday. "We've painted ourselves in a corner," Peter W. Singer, an expert on private security contractors who is a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institute explained at the time. Many questions remain about who -- if anyone -- has jurisdiction over these guards, and whether they can legally be prosecuted at all. This case may end up as an important test, and could have larger implications for contractors in Iraq and elsewhere.

The five guards are each charged with 14 counts of manslaughter and 20 counts of attempted manslaughter, as well as with using a machine gun to commit a crime of violence. According to the AP, that last charge carries a 30-year minimum prison sentence.

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The most important things in life are simple, at least in the world of Erik Prince. A square-jawed American with closely cropped hair, Prince served as an elite soldier in the U.S. Marines in Bosnia, Haiti and the Middle East. Given his experience, he believes that it will be relatively easy for him to distinguish between good and evil on the new battlefield, the high seas.

"If a couple of guys are sitting in a six-meter (20-foot) fishing boat, in the middle of the Gulf of Aden, and if they've got bazookas in their hands, they're clearly not out there for the fishing," says Prince, 39, the CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, the world's largest and most infamous private security firm. "You have a pretty good idea of what they're up to."

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It's a Tuesday morning in late May when we touch down at LZ (Landing Zone) Washington, the Zone's helicopter port. (One day later than planned, after a sandstorm had kept all chopper traffic on the ground.) This is only my second time in a Black Hawk, but I'm already getting used to the troop-carrier as flying taxi.

Inside the little building that comprises the terminal at LZ Washington, I take off my flak jacket and helmet. So this is Baghdad. Let the decadence begin. Berlin-born essayist and philosopher Walter Benjamin may have denied the very existence of periods of cultural decline ("Es gibt kein Verfallszeiten"), but we'll see.

I need a Baghdad press center pass in order to move freely in the Green Zone, so the first thing I have to do is get to the Combined Press Information Center. But when I try to leave the terminal to look around outside, a guard turns me around and points me back to the waiting room.

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As Salon's Mark Benjamin and I detailed in an article we wrote last September, the Bush administration has created a system in which security contractors are essentially immune from prosecution both in Iraq and in the U.S. This has angered Iraqis, especially after incidents in which contractors killed apparently unarmed civilians.

The military has become dependent on contractors during the occupation of Iraq, and a continued presence there would be very difficult to maintain without them.

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At first, this seemed completely normal for the totally abnormal world of Baghdad in September 2007. "Convoys are common," explained Khalaf. But this convoy made an unexpected U-turn, drove the wrong way around the one-way square, stopped in the middle of it and started shooting. Fifteen minutes later, 17 Iraqi civilians were dead, dozens more wounded, and a white sedan that had been engulfed in flames contained two bodies charred beyond recognition.

"It was a horror movie," said Khalaf, describing the aftermath of the now notorious Blackwater shootings.

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What Rice didn't say: State Department officials investigating the Sept. 16 incident in which Blackwater employees allegedly shot 17 Iraqi civilians had already granted a form of immunity to the Blackwater employees involved.

In the 1967 case of Garrity v. New Jersey, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government can't extract a statement out of an employee -- say, a police officer involved in a shooting -- on the threat of losing his job, then turn around and use that statement against the employee in a criminal trial. In a subsequent decision, the court made it clear that Garrity's protection applies to independent contractors working for the government. State Department investigators looking into the Sept. 16 incident apparently offered Garrity deals to Blackwater guards: Tell us everything you know about what happened, but rest assured that your statements won't be used against you in court.

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