Private U.S. Guards Take Big Risks for Right Price
By JAMES DAO
New York Times

Published: April 2, 2004



OYOCK, N.C., April 1 — Nestled inconspicuously amid the pinelands and horse farms of northeastern North Carolina lies a small but increasingly important part of the nation's campaign to stabilize Iraq.
Here, at the 6,000-acre training ground of Blackwater U.S.A., scores of former military commandos, police officers and civilians are prepared each month to join the lucrative but often deadly work of providing security for corporations and governments in the toughest corners of the globe.
On Wednesday, four employees of a Blackwater unit — most of them former American military Special Operations personnel — were killed in an ambush in the central Iraqi city of Falluja, their bodies mutilated and dragged through the streets by chanting crowds……


 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/national/02SECU.html