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Kerry: Dump Blackwater

The incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is urging the State Department to fire Blackwater Worldwide, State’s private security contractor in Iraq.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who will become committee chairman in January, said Wednesday that “the era of Blackwater must finally end.”

Kerry’s comments came after the release of an internal State Department report that said Blackwater might lose its license to operate in Iraq.

Blackwater has been under fire for several years for the abuses committed by some of its employees in Iraq. In the most egregious case, five Blackwater security guards have been indicted for the deaths of 17 Iraqis, who were killed in 2007 by gunshots fired into their cars in a busy traffic circle in Baghdad. Blackwater guards were escorting State Department officials at the time. A sixth Blackwater guard has pleaded guilty in the case.

Kerry and Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last summer to search for an alternative to Blackwater, in part because if Blackwater is evicted from Iraq, the State Department would lack protection for its personnel in Iraq.

In a statement issued by his Senate office, Kerry said that “even the Bush Administration acknowledges that outsourcing overseas security to private firms like Blackwater is a mistake.

“It will benefit the incoming [Barack Obama] administration to have reassurance from the State Department that Blackwater’s contract should not be renewed,” Kerry said.

Should Rice not move against Blackwater, the matter will be left to her likely successor, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who in February cosponsored legislation to ban the use of private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.