Ernesto Haibi is a medic in the US army. He has worked alongside Backwater contractors in Iraq.

It makes me sick that my army is broke when these contractors are making an excess of millions each year. I believe — and every military personnel I know shares this view — that civilians have no business in the war zone. If you want to fight for your country, sign up for the army or the navy or whatever. But whoring yourself out for 100,000 dollars a year is not fighting for your country, it's just despicable.

Some Blackwater employees are genuine professionals who actually help out in important missions. But many act like cowboys and get themselves into trouble. I've personally been sent on a mission in which we had to save the butts of Blackwater guys who weren't careful and got into trouble.

I've heard that we spend more in three weeks in Iraq that in one year in Afghanistan. And I've also heard, but this is just a rumour, that there are more contractors in Iraq in combat than there are military personnel in combat. That makes me so angry. I want to see army guards at checkpoints, not private security. I want to see US Black Hawk helicopters flying over combat zones, not Blackwater planes.

There are two schools of thought as to why the administration has chosen to hire the services of private security contractors. The first is a fact: the army is low on personnel; it's not meeting recruiting goals. The second is speculation: Blackwater was a tiny security company who out of nowhere grew into a gargantuan private army. Its founder, millionaire Erik Prince, also happens to be a major Bush donor. It's not hard to connect the dots."

Blackwater is also present in Afghanistan, on a lesser scale than in Iraq. One of its regular activities there is to shuttle troops and materiel back and forth by air between Kabul and outer provinces that are hard to reach. On November 27, 2004, one of the company's double-turboprop transport planes set off for its early-morning taxi toward the runway at Bagram Air Base. Only that day, the plane's six passengers, including one high-ranking military officer, never made it to their destination: 20 minutes into the trip, the aircraft crashed in a canyon over the Bamian Valley.

Extracts of an edited transcript from the cockpit voice recorder, first published in the Seattle Weekly, clearly show that the crew's poor knowledge of the mountainous Afghan landscape, as well as their obvious recklessness, were probably responsible for the crash:

Capt. Joel English: I hope I'm goin' in the right valley.

First Officer Lauren Hammer: That one or this one?

English: I'm just gonna go up this one... We'll just see where this leads.

The fun continued as the plane swung through a canyon. English fiddled with his MP3 player to get appropriate mood music.

English: I swear to God they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun this was.

But within minutes, the happy chatter turned to urgent pleas. They suddenly realized they were boxed into the canyon and the plane was dangerously low. The pilots began an emergency climb.

English: Come on baby, come on baby, you can make it.

Mechanic Mel Rowe: Okay, you guys are gonna make this, right?

English: Yeah-h-h, I'm hopin'.

(...)

Hammer: Yeah, let's turn around.

Hammer: You got ninety-five. Ninety-five.

English: Oh God!

English: Oh (expletive)!

Rowe: We're goin' down."