Breed, Blackwater
November 1st, 2007You’re aware, Dear Reader, that Washington D.C. is an incestuous place, right? You think you know, anyway. But if you’ve never even considered it, never heard of the Iron Triangle, then check this out and have yourself a nice day.
Blackwater Worldwide, its reputation in tatters and its lucrative government contracts in jeopardy, is mounting an aggressive legal, political and public relations counterstrike. It has hired a bipartisan stable of big-name Washington lawyers, lobbyists and press advisers, including the public relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller, which was brought in briefly, but at a critical moment, to help Blackwater’s chairman, Erik D. Prince, prepare for his first Congressional hearing.
Blackwater for a time retained Kenneth D. Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, and Fred F. Fielding, who is now the White House counsel, to help handle suits filed by the families of slain Blackwater employees. Another outside public relations specialist, Mark Corallo, former chief spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, quit working for Blackwater late last year because he said he was uncomfortable with what he termed some executives’ cowboy mentality.
Blackwater is pursuing a bold legal strategy, going so far in a North Carolina case as to seek a gag order on the lawyers for the families of four Blackwater employees killed in an ambush in Falluja in 2004. The company argues that the dead men had signed contracts that prohibited them from talking to the press about Blackwater and that this restriction extended to their lawyers and their estates even after death. One of Blackwater’s Washington lawyers is Beth Nolan, who served as White House counsel for the last two years of the Clinton administration. (Ms. Nolan is leaving private practice at the end of November to become general counsel at George Washington University.) Another is Stephen M. Ryan, a top white-collar defense lawyer and former general counsel of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
The company’s chief Washington lobbyist is Paul Behrends, who worked at the now-defunct Alexander Strategy Group, a Republican firm with close ties to the jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Mr. Behrends, who now works at C & M Capitolink, a Washington lobbying firm, declined to discuss his work for Blackwater, which has paid his company $300,000 since last year.
Lots of Republicans but even one Democrat, who worked for Clinton, is hanging around the man who impeached him! I’m sure there are many more Democrats. Then you’ve got Fred Fielding, who was around during Watergate; Prince, who is big on the Christian Right and funds Republican causes all the time with his own money; Jack Abramoff’s ghost. It’s kind of funny, in a way.
I don’t think I’ve ever commented on Blackwater before. I’m not sure I have a problem with their existence, even though they are mercenaries. It keeps us from having a draft, but I do think they should be reined in by the government and regulated during war to keep them from overstepping their bounds. Blackwater itself, however, seems incompetent and bumbling but not unforgivably evil. Except their Incest is going to get them a ticket to hell.