Make no mistake - Blackwater / Xe - is a MERCENARY army. They are not security guards / contractors or whatever title thier emplyers wish to give them, they are mercenaries. Merceneries are people who carry out millitary opperations - which often means killing people - for money. Note 'for money' not for their country, not for their faith, not for a cause, but FOR MONEY. This is why mercenaries have been called the dogs of war and are traditionally dispised. The US are now the worlds largest employer of mercenaries - sorry private security contractors - in the world. They do this for may reasons including 'deniability', 'creative accounting' to hide the real costs of some of their wars, and to boost the boots on the ground numbers without having to introduce conscription (the draft in US terms). The US is more likely than ever to use a mercenary army to destabalise either Pakistan or Iran as they will avoid a direct confrontation yet still damage the other side. How many people in the US realise their masters are using dogs of war to conduct the dirty aspects of US geopolitics?

Mainstream news here in the USA has for years admitted that we are using mercenary contractors in Iraq, but we have been told it is "all right" because they are "helping" our GIs over there. However, there was a bit of a scandal when it first came out that they were doing the same thing the GIs did but getting paid over $100,000 a year to act as "security guards". Those 100-large salaries were paid for by taxpayers, of course. That is why news stories now talk about how it costs us over $1 million per GI per year over in Iraq - we are counting just the GIs as soldiers but comparing them to the total cost of all those "security guards", which also comes out of the war budget, paid through labor contractors like Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, MPRI, Brown and Root, etc. Outsourcing our soldiers has been a wonderful thing for Halliburton. They were about to go bankrupt until Bush/Cheney declared war on Iraq. Oh, to be a Halliburton stockholder who bought at the low, then!