Written by Eric Stoner - 02 July 2008
 
Source: NACLA Report on the Americas

In October, Erik Prince, the 39-year-old CEO of Blackwater Worldwide, a leading private security company operating in Iraq, went into damage-control mode. Blackwater employees in Baghdad’s Nisour Square had killed 17 Iraqi civilians the previous month, causing an uproar and the suspension of official diplomatic convoys throughout the country for four days. Making the rounds with the media and testifying before Congress, Prince repeatedly said that his employees are not mercenaries, as critics contend. Citing the definition of a mercenary as “a professional soldier working for a foreign government,” Prince told the House Oversight Committee that in contrast, Blackwater’s employees are “Americans working for America, protecting Americans.”

July 01, 2008

FOUR Iraqis are suing two US firms and their employees for allegedly torturing them at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad five years ago.
Their lawsuit is against private security contractor CACI International and two of its interrogators, Daniel Johnson and Tim Dugan, and the translation agency L-3 (formerly Titan Corp) and its interpreter, Abel Nakhla, lawyer William Gould said.

By Alexandra Zavis - Los Angeles Times

June 24, 2008

BAGHDAD — An Iraqi Canadian working as an interpreter for the U.S. Army was sentenced at a court-martial to five months' confinement in the stabbing of a colleague, the military said Monday.

It was the first time that a civilian contractor was tried by a military court since a change was made in U.S. law in 2006 to make this possible.

June 26, 2008 CBS News Investigative producer Laura Strickler wrote this story for CBS

Few people know the Afghanistan poppy war like Eric Sherepita.

After a career in the military, Sherepita, 36, signed up with a private security company to eradicate opium fields in Afghanistan for a US State Department contract. He quickly found it was one of the most dangerous jobs he’s ever had, “I’ve been in more firefights doing poppy eradication than I have been in the whole nine years I was in the U.S. Marines.”

June 18, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C.
President Bush yesterday signed a bill preventing defense contractors from avoiding the payment of Social Security and Medicare taxes by hiring American workers through offshore subsidiaries. The tax provision was introduced by Democratic Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barack Obama of Illinois and Representatives Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana

17.6.2008

MALABO (AFP) — Prosecutors called Tuesday for a 30-year prison sentence for British mercenary Simon Mann as he went on trial in Equatorial Guinea for plotting to oust the president in a 2004 coup attempt.

The chief prosecutor told the court said Mann was the mastermind of a group of people who "wanted to topple the legal government" of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

 

Although the charge carries a possible death sentence, Attorney General Jose Olo Obono said waiving the death penalty had been a pre-condition of Mann's extradition from Zimbabwe, where he was arrested in 2004.

But he added: "Simon Francis Mann remains the main accused in this trial because he is at the centre of this attempted coup d'etat."