Back in 1989, in his smash hit Say Anything, John Cusack famously stood with a boom box above his head outside the home of the woman he loved blasting Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." With his latest films on the Iraq war, Cusack is standing outside Hollywood with a...

Last week, I spoke at a conference organized by NYU's Center on Law and Security called "Privatizing Defense: Blackwater, Contractors, and American Security." Also present at the conference were Blackwater Worldwide vice president Martin Strong and a lawyer for Blackwater, David Hammond. At the conference, I confronted Strong on...

For the first time since 1968, the Pentagon has charged a civilian contractor under military law. But the individual in question is not one of the Blackwater "shooters" alleged to have gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square last September, nor is it the Blackwater contractor accused...

Hillary Clinton has just become the most significant US political figure to come out in favor of banning Blackwater and other armed private security contractors from operating in Iraq. "When I am president I will ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors...

UPDATE: What interesting timing! A day after this story went live on TheNation.com, Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose staff refused for a week to answer my questions about her position on private security forces, released a statement announcing that Clinton is now co-sponsoring legislation to "ban the use of...

News Flash: The Bush administration acknowledges there is a such thing as international law.

But, predictably, it is not being invoked to address the US prison camps at Guantanamo, the wide use of torture, the invasion and occupation of sovereign countries, the extraordinary rendition program. No, it is being thrown...

Erik Prince: We saw a need for the community to receive more blood.

Originally posted at AlterNet

If there's one thing that can be said about Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company, it is no stranger to blood -- its operatives have caused a lot of...

Last week in Currituck County, N.C., Superior Court Judge Russell Duke presided over the final step in securing the first criminal conviction stemming from the deadly actions of Blackwater Worldwide, the Bush administration's favorite mercenary company. Lest you think you missed some earth-shifting, breaking news, hold on a moment. The...

While Mitt Romney launched a major defensive today over the "controversy" surrounding his Mormon faith, a much more relevant issue that would define a potential Romney presidency has taken a back seat to his attempt to shore up the radical Christian right wing of the Republican party: Romney's torture policy.

Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: "You have the right...

If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.

With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies.

There are now almost 200,000 private "contractors"...

Blackwater USA, the secretive mercenary firm based in the wilderness of North Carolina is back in the news again, providing a bloody reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, hours before President Bush's State of the Union address, one of the company's helicopters was brought down...

Blackwater USA, the mercenary company servicing the Bush Administration's "war on terror," has a new lawyer working to defend it against a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit brought by the families of four of its contractors killed in Iraq. The new "counsel of record" for the North Carolina-based company is none...

Slobodan Milosevic is characterized in the obituaries as the "Butcher of the Balkans." If that is the story you want to read about, please go to almost any other media outlet and read it again and again. Some are now suggesting that death is Milosevic's final revenge, that he "ended...

CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr should be given some kind of award for the most outrageously off-target reporting on the newly released photos and videos of US torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In her numerous appearances during the morning news cycle on CNN after...

While Cindy Sheehan was being dragged from the House gallery moments before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address for wearing a t-shirt honoring her son and the other 2,244 US soldiers killed in Iraq, Turki al-Faisal was settling into his seat inside the gallery. Faisal, a Saudi,...

If reports circulating in the British press today turn out to be true, there could be another smoking gun memo floating around across the Atlantic. The Daily Mirror reports that, during a White House meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair last April, President Bush proposed bombing the Qatar-based international...

The refrain of the Democrats about being misled into supporting the invasion of Iraq has become really tired. And someone other than the White House smearmongers needs to say it: The Democrats cannot be allowed to use faulty intelligence as a crutch to hold up their unforgivable support for the...