Waxman to Hold Blackwater Hearings

Right off the heels of Iraq’s intended expulsion of private-security giant Blackwater, House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman vows — what else? — to investigate:

“The controversy over Blackwater is an unfortunate demonstration of the perils of excessive reliance on private security contractors. The Oversight Committee will be holding hearings to understand what has happened and the extent of the damage to U.S. security interests.”

For more on Blackwater, see the Brookings Institution’s P.W. Singer, one of the foremost scholars of the private-military revolution, blogging over at TPMm pal Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room.

Of all the private security personnel in Iraq — Singer pegs it at 160,000, way above my earlier estimate today of 20,000-30,000 — Blackwater may be the most buck-wild, in the eyes of the Iraqis:

Singer writes:

More importantly, there is perhaps greater tension between Blackwater and the Iraqi government than others. This is not just because armed Blackwater guards are the contractors that most often senior Iraqi government officials would run into in their daily dealings with their U.S. counterparts, but because a more recent incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater employee allegedly got drunk while inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and got in an argument with a guard of the Iraqi Vice President. He then shot the Iraqi dead. The employee was quickly flown out of the country and, 9 months later, has not been charged with any crime. Imagine the same thing happening in the US, an Iraqi embassy guard, drunk at a a Christmas party, shooting a Secret Service agent guarding Vice President Cheney, and you can see some potential for underlying tension there.