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Monday, February 01, 2010 WASHINGTON: The US Justice Department is investigating whether officials of security firm Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining the firm’s work in Iraq, The New York Times reported late Sunday. Citing unnamed current and former government officials, the newspaper said that the department’s fraud section opened the inquiry late last year to determine whether Blackwater employees violated a federal law banning US corporations from paying bribes to foreign officials. The inquiry is the latest fallout from the 2007 shooting in Nisour Square in Baghdad, which involved Backwater security guards and left 17 Iraqis dead, the report said. A federal judge in December dismissed criminal charges against five former Blackwater guards implicated in the episode, but Vice President Joseph Biden recently announced that the administration of President Barack Obama would appeal that decision. The investigation was confirme...

Sunday, January 24, 2010 BAGHDAD: Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised Iraqi leaders on Saturday that the United States would appeal the dismissal of manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security contractors involved in a deadly shooting here that has inflamed anti-American tensions. Biden, tasked by the Obama administration to oversee policy in Iraq, made the statement after a day of meetings with Iraqi leaders that dealt, in part, with a political crisis that has erupted over the March 7 parliamentary elections. American officials view the vote, a barometer of the durability of Iraq’s political system, as a crucial date in American plans to withdraw tens of thousands of combat troops from Iraq by the end of August. The vice president expressed his “personal regret” for the Blackwater shooting in 2007, in which contractors guarding American diplomats opened fire in a crowded Baghdad traffic circle, killing 17 people, including women and children. “A ...

Saturday, December 12, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US Central Intelligence Agency has cancelled a contract with a security company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide that allowed the company to load bombs on CIA drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, The New York Times reported late Friday. Citing intelligence officials, the newspaper said the contract gave Blackwater employees an operational role in one of the CIA's most significant covert programs, which has killed dozens of militants with Predator and Reaper drones. The contract with the company, now called Xe Services, was canceled this year by CIA Director Leon Panetta, the report said. CIA spokesman George Little said Panetta had ordered that the agency's employees take over the jobs from Xe employees at the remote drone bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the paper noted.Panetta had also ordered a review of all contracts with the company, according to the report.