Pratap Chatterjee on Democracy Now! talks about the Wild West of military contracting in Iraq:
Custer Battles had a man whose job it was was to buy guns on the black market. And he explained to me how he would go outside, you know, dressed in local clothes, buy black market guns and supply them. We have now discovered that other companies, like Blackwater, have done the same thing. So there were no rules. There was—you bought guns from the militants. You paid them off. And then you used them against civilians. It was chaos, to say the least. And I think the Bush administration has to take a lot of responsibility for what it did. And I would hope that, like Nick Clegg, the Obama administration would start to investigate these clear violations of international law and Iraqi law and US law.