Sensible thing to say when your founder is implicated in murder: you’d like to re-up your contract with the State Department to protect diplomats, please. My new piece, about Xe’s attempts to take further bites of State’s apple, is out now from the Washington Independent:

“We welcome the chance to bid on any program,” said Stacy DeLuke, a spokeswoman for the private security company Xe, which changed its name from Blackwater earlier this year, using an acronym for the Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract. Asked if the company was under any restrictions from the State Department following its September 2007 shootout in Baghdad’s Nisour Square — in which its employees shot a family in a car approaching their guards and then opened fire on other cars attempting to flee the scene — DeLuke replied, “I don’t think there have been any restrictions.”

In 2005, the State Department issued a four-year contract, valued at $560 million per year, to provide on-the-ground security for its diplomats in dangerous areas around the world with three leading private security companies: Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp. The U.S. military does not consider the provision of security for diplomats in war zones to be its job. The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which controls the WPPS contract, possesses a workforce of about 1450 special agents, leading it to rely on contractors for security, according to a 2007 investigation by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

Additionally disturbing: I couldn’t get an answer to how the U.S. military command in Afghanistan plans on integrating operations with State’s diplomatic-protection contractors. The problem here is obvious, particularly after Nisour Square. Gen. McChrystal has prioritized population protection out of a belief that the loyalties of the Afghan people will be "strategically decisive" in the war. The private security companies don’t have to give a shit. Their job is to protect their diplomats, and if that means shooting up a car that comes too close, that’s the way it goes. 

I’m told I’ll get more information on this later in the week, but we’ll see.