After its involvement in the shooting of 17 Iraqi citizens last year, a criminal investigation by the FBI, internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings, the people at Blackwater walk free with reports that it won't face criminal charges.

And just to fill it out, the State Department has just renewed its contract with Blackwater to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for another year, reports the Seattle Times.

The sad truth is that Blackwater has been cleared because the US Government can't afford not to have it providing services when it is hell-bent on staying in Iraq. So much for ethics at government level.

"We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq," Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management told the New York Times. "If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq."

Tribune Media Services writer Bob Koehler accuses the media of colluding with the Bush administration's greatest evil.

"It's hard for me to read anything about Iraq in the mainstream media without being tormented by the way it's written: especially by what I would call the requisite spin and omission. Thus every travesty of our occupation, every hellish mishap, every stealth brutality that somehow finds its way into the spotlight, is presented to us context-free. This is the media's ongoing gift to George Bush (and john mccain),'' writes Koehler. "The Los Angeles Times, for instance, in its May 4 story about the investigation of the Nisoor Square massacre, doesn't trouble us with references to other Blackwater shooting sprees; much less the larger context of invasion, mission accomplished, and five years of occupation in which more than a million Iraqis have died; much less the ample testimony of returning vets that "the hadjis" of occupied Iraq are routinely belittled, mistreated and dehumanized. If it had done so, the massacre in question would suddenly be a piece in a far larger picture that would make almost all Americans recoil in shame."