The emerging evidence of private involvement in theatres of war increasingly shows how unsafe and uncontrolled this is, but it is a feature that has emerged during the Bush administration in the US and widely copied.
Now an individual is charged with the murder of two security colleagues. Many security guards are ex-soldiers. While the security firms may view this as a good reason to employ such people, here we see someone who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences. Giving him a gun is the last thing anyone should have even considered.

The firm Blackwater was in Iraq with a mission. It’s founder, Erik Prince, a fundamentalist Christian, saw that mission to eliminate Muslims. The combination of this with trigger happy mercenaries is something that civilians in places like Iraq, now Afghanistan must endure. The press will happily repeat the menace of the so-called “Taliban” (we are learning this is a very inexact term and covers a range of individuals and groups).