Back in September Amentum acquired DynCorp (Defense News). DynCorp is one of the oldest American defense contractor companies. Last year it made over $6 billion from it’s services including major government contracts in Afghanistan. You may remember the embarrassing sex slave scandal involving former US Army Maj General James Graziopene as Vice President of DynCorp.
Back in February the UN announced and investigation into everybody’s favorite contractor Erik Prince. Prince is accused by the UN of bypassing sanctions in Libya in support of warlord Khalifa Haftar (Reuters). Haftar was trying to wrest control of Tripoli from the elected government. You probably remember Prince from Blackwater whose contractors killed civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Since then, he changed the name of the company to Academi and then sold it. He now has a company called Frontier Services Group that trains Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps employees. Those are the guys who run the Uighur concentration camps (article from Reuters). Prince also likes to spy on teachers. Here’s a previous blog post on Prince.
According to The Dispatch, social media posts of uniformed men deployed during the protests in Portland with a patch that says ZTI could not possibly be contractors from ZTI Solutions. That’s just an insane claim, sheez. ZTI Solutions is a company that provides “consulting and staffing solutions for federal, DoD and commercial organizations with engineers providing expertise in security infrastructure, network architecture, cloud and hybrid networks, and penetration testing.” So basically they are a contractor that can supply security force personnel. There is a list of those they provide services to on their homepage, it includes the US Special Operations Command. We know the government used Blackwater operatives for security in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In related news, still trying to figure out where this whole thing came from.
Will the restrictions on weapons, magazine capacities and etc proposed by the current administration apply to private military contractors do ya think?