Make $$$ with Blackwater USA?

From San Diego City Beat:

Good neighbor?
Blackwater keeps its eye on a tiny East County enclave.
By Pat Sherman 10/09/2007

Blackwater USA Vice President Brian Bonfiglio flashed a self-satisfied smile, gazing east across Round Potrero Road where, on Sunday, more than 200 Potrero residents and antiwar activists streamed onto an adjacent parcel of land. They had come-some from as far as Ventura-to protest the 824-acre paramilitary training facility the company hopes to open a mile down the snaky dirt road.
"I don't think the war profiteering signs are appropriate, quite frankly," Bonfiglio said. "At the end of the day, this will be determined as a land-use project by the [San Diego County] Board of Supervisors."

As the public face of the project-dubbed Blackwater West-it's Bonfiglio's job to sell the facility as a non-invasive windfall to the residents of Potrero, a rural hamlet 45 miles east of San Diego. Given his employer's image as a supplier of trigger-happy mercenary armies, unaccountable to neither the Iraqi nor American governments, wooing Potrero's 850 residents has been a dicey game. Five members of the Potrero Planning Board who voted in December to support the project are facing a recall election. Some 320 residents signed a petition opposing the project that was sent to the county Board of Supervisors and Congressman Bob Filner, the Democrat whose district includes Potrero.

Blackwater, whose private security guards are under fire for allegedly gunning down as many as 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last month, has raked in more than $1 billion for its services in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of the war.

Yet, the company maintains it's not a mercenary outfit. The Potrero facility, which will include 15 shooting ranges, an ammunition-storage armory, helicopter pad, 2.5-mile driving track and other military trappings, would be used only to train law enforcement and military personnel, Bonfiglio said.

"We will not train Blackwater independent contractors going to places like Iraq and Afghanistan," he said. "It's not in our proposal. We will not have facilities capable of training those people here in San Diego.... We have already discussed it and have made it known [to Filner], although we haven't submitted the letter yet."

Filner, who has introduced legislation requiring that mercenary training facilities be established only on military bases, told CityBeat he doesn't buy it.
"I don't trust whatever they say," Filner said. "I mean, they can be training cops who then become mercenaries.... They're not a good company. They've lied to the American people, they've lied to the state department, lied to the families of people who work for them. Unless it's ironclad, they'll change it the next day."

Communications consultant Terry Stephens, a Potrero resident of 22 years, is running for a seat on the planning board. Stephens said she is less concerned about Blackwater's alleged abuses than she is about the threat to her family's rural lifestyle.

"What we've come out here for is peace and quiet, the midnight skies and just less traffic and a place where you can raise your kids-and Blackwater doesn't fit any of that criteria," Stephens said.

"War from the beginning of time has always been about making money," she added. "Somebody's going to make money off of whatever war they're in. That's not my concern. My concern is my family and my community, and having a training camp, mercenary, pay-for-hire, whatever you want to call it, [in my backyard]."

Though Blackwater has been careful not to make concrete promises, it has intimated that the company would share its copious wealth with the community, as it has done for residents near its Moyock, N.C., training facility. Bonfiglio said Blackwater has provided "millions of dollars" in computers, recycling services, youth sports equipment, college scholarships and rental facilities there.

"We had a young child in Potrero whose mother works two or three jobs," Bonfiglio said. "This girl wrote a wonderful, wonderful essay, but her mother was afraid to take a donation from us, not because of Potrero residents, but outside groups potentially causing her unhappiness."


http://ww2.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id=6234

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