1115.org

(1)
Yesterday, the Prince of Blackness revealed some numbers to Waxman’s committee:

Prince sought to portray the 195 shooting incidents the company has been involved in since 2005 as rare occurrences. He said that so far this year, Blackwater has guarded 1,873 convoys, out of which there were 56 shootings, or less than 3% of all assignments. Last year, the company had 6,254 missions and 38 incidents.

So last year, before the surge, Blackwater’s shooting rate was 0.6%, or one shooting every 165 missions.

And this year, Blackwater’s shooting rate has jumped to 3%, or one shooting every 33 missions. (Only a very deceptive man would describe 2.99% as “less than 3%”.)

And everyone knows that The Surge has reduced violence and sectarian attacks. The president told us so. Gen. Petraeus told us so. And they are both honorable men.

So the inescapable conclusion is: Blackwater USA’s guards have become a lot more trigger-happy since last year. By a factor of more than five.

(2)
WaPo reported yesterday that the vast majority of shootings by contractors simply go unreported:

Most of the more than 100 private security companies in Iraq open fire far more frequently than has been publicly acknowledged and rarely report such incidents to U.S. or Iraqi authorities, according to U.S. officials and current and former private security company employees.

… The company’s chairman, Erik Prince, told a congressional committee Tuesday that Blackwater guards opened fire on 195 occasions during more than 16,000 missions in Iraq since 2005.

However, two former Blackwater security guards said they believed employees fired more often than the company has disclosed. One, a former Blackwater guard who spent nearly three years in Iraq, said his 20-man team averaged “four or five” shootings a week, or several times the rate of 1.4 incidents a week reported by the company. The underreporting of shooting incidents was routine in Iraq, according to this former guard.

If one team of twenty people averaged “four or five” shootings a week and Blackwater reports 1.4 incidents per week for the company as a whole, the water is very murky indeed. There is some very serious under-reporting going on. (For example, 4 shootings a week for 3 years translates into a total of 624 shootings. And that’s just one 20-man team. Blackwater USA has 1000 employees in Iraq. Of course, all of them may not be licensed to kill….)

Under the circumstances, WaPo throws out a very conservative estimate of under-reporting:

Two company officials familiar with the system estimated that as few as 15 percent of all shooting incidents are reported, although both cautioned that it was impossible to know exactly how many incidents go unreported.

If we accept WaPo’s conservative estimate, and apply it to Prince’s current year statistics, a reported shooting rate of 3% or once every 33 missions, translates into a probable occurrence rate of 20% or once every 5 missions. Trigger-happy hardly seems strong enough. Trigger-ecstatic maybe? Or trigger-delirious?

See, numbers can be fun.