While President Bush refuses to let U.S. dollars fund health care facilities whose staff are guilty of breathing the word “abortion” (whether or not they actually provide the service), here is something Bush and the Republican Party are quite happy to bankroll:

Founded in 1996 by Erik Prince, a former Navy Seal, multimillionaire and conservative Republican donor, Blackwater began as a training facility for police and the military but began offering security services after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Like the overeager assassin, Blackwater operatives are not content to train their guns on those they deem threats, but must get in a little extra target practice once in awhile on innocent bystanders:

On Sept. 9, the day before Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that things were getting better, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein came to Baghdad for the day.

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad.

As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

…

“They killed her in cold blood,” Hussein Jumaa Hassan, 30, a parking lot attendant, said of Hussein.

—”Blackwater guards killed 16 as U.S. touted progress,” Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers, September 27, 2007

And earlier this year:

Habib Sadr, [Iraqi Media Network]’s director general, said the three guards, members of Iraq’s Facilities Protection Service, were at their post at the back of the complex. A towering blast wall was a short distance in front of them to protect the compound from Haifa Street, which is notorious for car bombings and drive-by shootings.

According to Sadr and Interior Ministry officials, the three were picked off one by one by Blackwater snipers stationed on the roof of the 10-story Justice Ministry about 220 yards away on the opposite side of the street.

…

“The investigation showed that they were killed in cold blood and in an aggressive and unjustified way,” Sadr said. “I believe that if this happened in any state in the United States and they killed an animal, it would be condemned by all.

“They were target practice,” Sadr said.

—”Blackwater blamed for deaths of reporter, 3 guards,” ibid.

Using innocent reporters, guards, and clerks as target practice–oh, and spraying bullets into crowded intersections, wounding 15, blowing up a mother and child and their driver, and killing a woman on a bus as she held her daughter and prayed–this, apparently, is flush enough with Republican morality for U.S. funding.

How does our government represent these incidents?

Many in Iraq have witnessed security contractors operating in a questionable fashion, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief of staff for the Multi-National Corps in Iraq.

“I can certainly say I’ve seen them do some tactics that I thought were over the top. But that’s something we’ve got to keep working out,” Anderson said in a briefing to Pentagon reporters via teleconference from Iraq.

—”U.S. general: Security contractors use ‘over-the-top’ tactics in Iraq“, CNN.

“Operating in a questionable fashion.” “Over the top.” These are what you might call criminal understatements.

Over at Making Light, where I found these incidents being discussed, some were speculating as to what use Blackwater might be put to after they’re brought home from Iraq. Some might laughingly characterize these speculations as tin-foil hat territory, but why is the idea that they might become a paramilitary force enacting martial law in the U.S. any more outrageous than the idea that they might use ordinary civilians for target practice? What’s so hard about understanding that abuses abroad will become abuses at home?

What makes your life, or mine, or that of any U.S. citizen, so much more holy than that of customs clerk Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein, that it’s unthinkable that her fate would be visited upon us?

Do what you can. This has to stop.