Blackwater
is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Cofer Black is Romney's senior adviser on counterterrorism.
At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call
waterboarding torture, he said, "I'm not going to specify
the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that
the people that we capture will know what things we're able
to do and what things we're not able to do. And I get that advice
from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism
in the CIA for some thirty-five years." That was an exaggeration
of Black's career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years
and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency
could make Blackwater's business under Bush look like a church
bake sale.
In
short, Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual
scandals clearly aren't enough to slow it down. The company's
critics in the Democratic-controlled Congress must confront
the root of the problem: the government is in the midst of its
most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater
are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus.
Until this system is brought down, the world's the limit for
Blackwater Worldwide--and as its rebranding campaign shows,
Blackwater knows it.
