September 30, 2007 (LPAC)--More has come out about the Sept. 16 Blackwater incident (in which security guards killed 8 to 20 Iraqis in Baghdad). The New York Times reported from sources on Sept. 28, that the incident began when the Blackwater guards decided to evacuate their charges from a secure compound after a bomb exploded on a road a few hundred meters from the compound, a decision already being questioned by some officials. They say it would have been safer to stay in the compound until after the smoke cleared. Investigators also reportedly were told that at least one guard kept firing his weapon even after being told by colleagues to cease fire, and there are indications that, indeed, the first shots fired were by a guard, which killed a woman and her child in their car.

The Washington Post reported on Sept. 29 that five eyewitnesses to the incident all insisted that the Blackwater guards fired first, without provocation and that Iraqi police did not return fire. These eyewitness accounts contradict the accounts provided by the State Department and Blackwater who insisted that the convoy was attacked.

Peter Singer, whose report on private military companies LPAC reported on yesterday, says this is the way to lose an insurgency:

If, in the course of a day, one Iraqi man on his way to work tells X number of people how "The Americans almost killed me today" because a convoy of black SUVs ran him off the road, Y is the number of people who had the same experience from that convoy and Z is the number of convoys that day. "Multiply X times Y times Z and you have the mathematical equation of how to lose an insurgency," Singer writes, and that assumes only incidents in which no one is hurt.

Of course, Blackwater is not the only reason we are losing in Iraq, but Singer provides clear evidence that the privatization of war is doing great damage to the U.S. military.

In 2006, LPAC reported that Singer was a participant in the conference on military privatization organized by fascist financiers, Felix Rohatyn and George P. Shultz. The LPAC report exposed that using un-qualified, un-supervised private mercenaries was the intent of the Iraq war-planners led by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their neo-con Chickenhawks at the Pentagon. See here.