the blackwater/xe thing is one of the several waronterror nightmares unleashed in the cheney administration. my feeling is that the whole reason for getting them on the case was deniability, and everyone knew they consisted of special-ops nuts etc who were enabled by their connections to the admin to obtain state-of-the-art weaponry and indulge their sadistic fantasies without limitation. no admin people will ever be held responsible for blackwater's actions, though i think the murders and so on were precisely what the admin wanted and expected. you have our heroes serving their country. then you have our nuts shooting and torturing whomever they please in a vague strategy to intimidate the whole country. there is less distinction between these two approaches/armies than the pr machine would like you to believe. the idea was to hire an independent organization to commit the necessary war crimes. that they're being prosecuted is more or less what the admin had in mind when they made the hire. what we need is the shredded/trashed memos in which cheney's office directed blackwater about general comportment or specific actions.