Okay, I couldn't keep quiet...

My hiatus lasted all of twenty minutes. I couldn't help but reply to this piece from Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent. It's got most of my favorite elements: Blackwater behaving unethically (again), drinking, shooting things, drinking and shooting things...

You also have this gem:

The committee’s investigation points to the contrary. Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police. According to the committee, at the behest of the company’s Afghanistan country manager, Ricky Chambers, Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers.”

On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company. Eric Cartman is the name of an obnoxious character from Comedy Central’s popular “South Park” cartoon.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. You mean that a congressional committee actually had to ask Blackwater if they really did, in fact, have an employee by the name of Eric Cartman? (Or maybe, as the article notes, Eric Carjman?) Seriously, these guys ought to sign for their next shipment with the name "Rick James" just because, well, it will make their next indictment that much more amusing:

"We have a signed document that says one of your employees used government funds to solicit a prostitute. Is there a 'Rick James' in your organization?"

"I'm Rick James, bitch!"

I also dig the sanitized description of Eric Cartman. Referring to Cartman as "obnoxious" is putting it, well, quite succinctly to say the least.

Bonus: Check out Wired.com, which covered the same story, albeit with a more amusing photograph: