WSJ: GOP losing its “brand” as the party of business.

The Clinton campaign just sent out a campaign email saying that the campaign raised $27 million this last quarter. No word on the breakdown between primaries and the general.

Late Update: The AP reports that $22 million of HRC’s total 3rd quarter haul was for the primary.–DK

A few weeks ago Dr. Barnett Rubin, one of the world’s premier Afghanistan experts at NYU, created a stir with a series of blog posts about signs the Bush administration might be gearing up for a military campaign against Iran. Last week I interviewed Rubin about the Bush administration’s war talk against Iran and I asked him, Is there really any evidence that Iran is helping arm the Taliban, as the Bush administration keeps claiming?

In tomorrow’s episode, Dr. Rubin discusses the United States’ strategic alliance with Gen. Musharraf in Pakistan and whether Iraq is really the central front in the battle against al Qaeda and international terrorism.

This morning Rep. Waxman’s (D-CA) committee is taking testimony from Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and others about the private military contracting in Iraq. TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman is in the committee room and he’ll be providing live coverage through the day at TPMmuckraker.com. For more on Prince’s extensive background in Republican politics click here.

Late Update: Okay, it seems Mr. Prince has served up his first of what will likely be an endless bevy of bamboozlement. He says …

“Since the Revolutionary War, private contractors have supported our military by providing training, equipment, logistical support, and security. Some private contractors, such as the “Flying Tigers” of World War II, are iconic American success stories.”

Let me start by saying that this is definitely not my area of expertise. And we’ll be looking for more information, and bringing it to you. But calling the Flying Tigers private contractors is at best a severe distortion of history. The head of the group, Claire Chennault, was a military advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek before the US entry into WWII. President Roosevelt secretly authorized Chennault to recruit retired US military aviators to create a unit that would harry the Japanese from the rear. The reason this was done clandestinely was because the US was not yet at war with the Japanese and thus couldn’t act openly. I believe they were eventually folded into the Army. It’s a complex topic. But whatever else Chennault was, he wasn’t a precursor of Erik Prince.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI): No withdrawal timetable equals no war funding.

That was an interesting exchange between Rep. Maloney and Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. This regarded the incident in which a drunken Blackwater contractor shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi — the case in which the State Department decided to give $15,000 in compensation to the family of the dead man instead of $100,000 to $250,000 so as not provide an incentive “try to get killed to set up their family financially.”

Prince said the guy was fired because he “violated our policies.” (I guess that’s a for-profit military way of putting it.) But he added that “”We can fire, we can fine, but we cannot detain.” When asked if Blackwater had then helped the guy flee the country, Prince said “It could easily be.”

So the contractor gets drunk and kills a guy. He gets fired. But there’s apparently no operative law he has to answer to. And Blackwater helps him flee the jurisdiction, apparently in the face of a DOJ investigation.

Late Update: TPM Reader TF follows up …

You are certainly right that the exchange with Mahoney was interesting, but it was not as good as it should have been. Congressional investigations get mired in bad questioning. My guess is that members spend too much time listening to lawyer-staffers who have never questioned a witness. But that does not excuse non-lawyer members: lawyers are too trained in courtroom questioning; an honest curiosity should drive investigative questioning. It is not an issue of finely-honed cross examination technique, but instead of listening to the answers and not pontificating. Maybe the lot of them have spent too much time watching hearings run by Biden.

Mahoney’s questioning is a classic example. She did not need to repeat her concerns about accountability—for crying out loud: A Blackwater employee got drunk and killed the Vice-President’s guard. You don’t need to sanctimoniously ponder these facts. What she should have done is:

(1) Not let Prince weasel—when he said that prosecution was up to the justice department, she should have followed up and asked for an answer to her question. Her question was whether the guy had been prosecuted. The answer should have been, “I don’t know.” It is not an acceptable answer that the decision was up to Justice. Important? Of course, because the follow up question should have been, “Don’t you care whether a former employee who got drunk and killed the Vie-President’s guard was prosecuted?” Either Prince cares, in which case you ask him what Blackwater did to make sure its “rogue” employee was punished or he doesn’t care, in which case you let him say it himself. No pontification needed if he doesn’t care. (His smirking does not matter much at that point either.)

(2) Ask him the question every one else wants the answer to: “WHY did you ship the guy out of the country?” Blackwater may not have the ability to detain its employees on foreign soil (though does anyone really think that is true?), but they have no obligation to ship him back to safety.

This is an investigation, not a court-case. Members can, and should, ask questions they don’t know the answer to. What they should do, though, is listen to the answers.

Turns out the key language the administration used to define ‘torture’ is language they found in a health care statute designed for figuring emergency health care benefits.

Blackwater CEO Prince on whether Blackwater is covered by the Uniform Code of Military Justice: Think so. But not sure.

The very cynical TPM Reader SJ dials in on Prince and ‘iconic private contractors’ …

Admittedly, I don’t have a PHD in History — but I like to think I’ve been interested in it long enough know more than the average American.

When I think of “iconic private contractors” through the course of American history, “Hessians” is the first instance that comes to my mind. Perhaps Mr. Prince forgot about them because of the allusion of the drunken Blackwater contractor to the Hessian performance at the Battle of Trenton? Or – maybe it’s the uncomfortable juxtaposition of stories of Hessian atrocities in the Irish rebellion of 1798 with Blackwater’s reputation in Iraq?

If I dig deeper into my recollection of books, documentaries, and lectures — the next instances of ‘private military contractors’ would probably be instances I wouldn’t be too quick to tout…

First would be the Pinkertons – Lincoln’s original ‘Secret Service’ – that morphed into strike-breaking, union infiltrators, culminating in 11 deaths during the Homestead Strike (which subsequently led to the Anti-Pinkerton Act that barred the government from hiring Pinkertons or employees of “similar organizations”… whatever became of that?).

Next, I would probably think of the private security forces that were raised during the building the of the transcontinental rail in response to Native American attacks on the Union Pacific. They certainly protected the progress of the railway… but also nearly wiped out buffalo herds and the Natives who technically still owned the land via treaties with the federal government. Of course, there was no TPMMuckraker in the 1860s — so we won’t even get into the corruption and graft that was rampant during that project.

I can’t think of any more prominent examples of military contractors in American history — but little wonder Mr. Prince failed to cite them (though — from what I know of the Princes, I suspect he’d just love to proudly compare Blackwater to the late 1800, union skull-cracking iteration of the Pinkerton Agency).

CNN reports on the Blackwater hearing: “The testimony took a partisan tone at times with Republicans defending Blackwater’s service and Democrats questioning Prince’s political contributions in the past.”

But as our Spencer Ackerman reports, the only person to question Blackwater’s political contributions was Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican, in a move that clearly backfired. Watch the video.

[Thanks to TPM Reader MF for the catch.]